Recovering What’s “Swept Under the Rug”: Embodied Academic Experiences as Cultural Rhetorics

Jo Hsu (they/them), University of Texas at Austin

Alexandria Lockett (she/her), Independent Scholar

Sophia Angela Maier (she/her), The Pennsylvania State University

Bernice Olivas (she/her), Salt Lake City Community College

Moderated by Alex Jennings (she/they), University of Pittsburgh and Ada Hubrig (they/them), Sam Houston State University 

 

Introduction

We, Alex and Ada, begin with words penned by Vyshali Manivanan:

“The merit badges we award in academia are these: Burned out. Exhausted. OverCaffeinated. No time. Haven’t eaten. Last-minute deadlines. But I have to eat. I can’t last-minute. I can’t opt out of enervation. I feel scrutinized and vulnerable writing about how forbidden it feels to embody in our genres.” (196)

We sit with forbidden feelings, about what it means to embody genre and write in, with, and through embodiment. 

We don’t just write about our embodied experiences, we try to reclaim our experiences and our lives as sites where we might make meaning, where we might speak back to official narratives that may otherwise speak for us, speak over us, or omit us entirely. We resist the rhetorical framing that Christina Cedillo rightfully critiques where people are presented as “mere bodies, objects on which meaning can be imposed,” where institutions tell our stories for us. Cedillo discusses how embodiment is often swept under the rug in academia, how the lived, embodied experiences that make academia possible are often erased or ignored. 

Rather than impose meanings on bodies and just write about them, we draw on the possibilities of embodiment as cultural rhetorics to understand our experiences to write with and through embodiment. We write and labor to make sense of ourselves and our worlds through embodied experiences. While academia often downplays material conditions and the very real, lived, embodied experiences, we envision a cultural rhetorics that embraces embodiment as a methodology, drawing on embodied knowledge to recover the very stories that powerful institutions—including academic institutions—sweep under the rug. 

In attempting to reclaim, recover, and embrace embodied knowledge, Alex and Ada are grateful to be in conversation with rhetorical scholars across embodied and professional positionalities:

• Jo Hsu (they/them), University of Texas at Austin
• Alexandria Lockett (she/her), Independent Scholar
• Sophia Angela Maier (she/her), The Pennsylvania State University 
• Bernice Olivas (she/her), Salt Lake City Community College

Alongside our contributors, we imagine embodiment as a methodology, as a pathway into cultural rhetorics, as a way to reclaim and recenter experiences that are often at odds with institutional, official narratives and accounts. We look to the possibilities of embodiment in cultural rhetorics to resist especially those paradigms that disavow and devalue marginalized people and their/our embodied experiences. At the same time, embodiment as cultural rhetorics helps us rewrite ourselves. It allows us to understand the events of our lives by searching our feelings, by doing the complicated, messy work of making sense of embodied experiences on our own terms. For us, it was understanding what and how our own personal and community experiences might mean apart from the purposes and narrativization of institutions, and we invite you as the reader to hold space and consider how your embodiments and essences are entangled across the ever-changing landscapes of our environments, homes, and the institutions we are contained in. 

 

Can you speak briefly to how your own embodiment shapes/guides your orientation to rhetoric and writing?

Jo Hsu: I guess I’ll start with a story. In my first semester of teaching as a graduate student, one of my students submitted an essay about the dangers of immigrants and how the United States should reinstate the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was the second major assignment of the semester. The student never responded to my invitation for a meeting and never returned to class. I can only guess that the essay was a final expression of outrage (an impressively labor-intensive one!) at my role as her teacher before she moved into another class. 

All this is to say, I don’t get to leave my body at home when I enter this profession. I’d argue (as many others already have) that everyone makes meaning from a body (see: Gloria Anzaldúa, bell hooks, Margaret Price, Alison Kafer). It’s just that some bodies get to disappear as the universal norm. I had a senior colleague who treated everything to do with trans rights as niche, but also declared that “Beowulf is universal.” We’re all bound to and limited by our bodies, which also afford perspectives and insights that are not readily accessible to others. I think it’s more dangerous not to acknowledge the situatedness and limitations of our embodiments.

Alexandria Lockett: I’m more comfortable with virtual embodiment than physical embodiment. I began exploring digital worlds around age 15. I was also an avid gamer as a little girl with a popular big brother that loved to tease me for being fat. I learned how to disappear and hide in his clothes. Tomboying from ages 11–14 kept me feeling more at ease in a body that was frequently the site of ridicule, shame, and targeted humiliation. Kids are mean. Adults are meaner. I don’t recall ever feeling “home” anywhere. Most of my immediate family is dead now (including my brother), homes have burned up and gotten sold. There is no place to go back to. 

Belonging, however, involves embodying a certain consciousness about the value of our bodies in any social context. Belonging requires shared meaning-making and understanding. It is often what bodies in motion pursue when we seek educational opportunities. Learning felt essential to pursuing any sort of freedom of expression, especially coming from a military childhood and a civilian adolescence that unfolded in a mostly analog Northeast Texas town. 

When you are on the margins, you have to utilize wit or physical violence to respond to the constant disrespect. Studying the Arts of Composition, Rhetoric, and the social phenomenon of Literacy offered the kind of meta-inquiry that satisfied my desire to understand how people learn and act. I wanted to know more about what counts as persuasion, whether the Truth can be told, given all the millions of ways people front, scam, and deceive each other. The field’s focus on language and texts provided me an entry to theorizing the power of representation. Embodiment affects how I approach making knowledge “as a person in the field” because the entire epistemological framework for these arts depends on the interpretation and production of signs and symbols. Although hermeneutics can get taken for granted in the process of a young and ancient field of study when housed in institutions with long histories of exclusion, the field does take seriously that we have an experience with persuasion, logic, emotions, and dialectic that moves us towards the pursuit of knowledge as a matter of socialization. All communications have in common the characteristics of a discourse, history, location, a pressing desire to know something, to find knowledge somewhere, to know what “it” is, who “they” are that are for or against “it,” articulate facts, and gain recognition by a community with others’ seeking to also be recognized and believed. Embodiment just is what it is, and it affects what we mean and what we make.

Sophia Angela Maier: How could embodiment not guide my orientation? This morning I ate an apple and checked my email. I talked to my parents. I remembered my name. I turned on the lights. I played on the piano. I drank water with my meds. This is the context that makes my ability to participate in the conversation today possible. Embodiment is a critical component of the material contexts by which any action can be accomplished.

However, “action” might be the wrong word to describe what we do. Professional writing, for example, is not precisely an “action,” in my opinion. Rather, I consider it closer to a “condition.” My emotional, sociological, historical, material, discursive contexts produce my writing, my thinking. How could my embodiment—from the food I eat to the trauma in my fingers—fail to affect everything I produce? 

I worry I might have misunderstood the question, however. If the question were an opportunity for me to share my specific disabilities and identities that I personally navigate, I would prefer not to disclose—at least, not by listing them. Rather, I would prefer to discuss those features of my life only as they become relevant to the specifics of the conversation. 

Bernice Olivas: I am never not my body in the same way I am never not a parent. Even when it is not at the front of my mind, it’s part of my inner dialogue and constantly connected to the decisions I make. That constant awareness works much like hypervigilance and so I am always aware when someone is interacting with my body first in some way instead of interacting with the full individual. Writing allows me more control over these interactions as does scholarship. This became the lens I use in the academic world—I try to communicate with the whole individual but also be aware of the body. It’s an interesting balance to find and I don’t always manage it or I do it badly, but it’s always a part of the way I make meaning.

Ada Hubrig: I have found writing and rhetoric helpful tools in making sense of embodiment, of trying to understand what is going on. I feel foolish, in a way: my own autism diagnosis means I don’t have the same level of interoception as my peers do, being able to tell what is physically going on in my body. I feel like writing and rhetoric have helped me know myself, have helped me put language—even imperfect language—to my feelings and thoughts. It has helped me better understand myself as a disabled, Mad, trans person—and find community with others. 

Jo Hsu: Ada, I just wanna underscore that part about writing as a journey toward understanding. I’ve spent so much of my life (as a chronically ill trans person) trying not to have a body. And for so long the body was only called into being when I saw myself through how other people saw me (which was not at all helpful). So rhetoric, with its analytical methods, and writing as a form of knowledge-making helped me situate those experiences within the broader histories and (messed up) value systems that shaped them. 

Ada Hubrig: Absolutely. And I think this is how I start making sense of myself—and why I care so much about embodied rhetorics—I want others to have access to their communities, to understanding their own embodied experiences. 

Alex Jennings: Thank you all for sharing your experiences here. I relate in a lot of ways too. As a person with more than one invisible disability, I’m constantly thinking about the dichotomy of the visible and invisible, and how I exist in the spaces I occupy versus how others might expect me to exist in those particular spaces. Writing and being immersed in the field of Rhetoric and Composition has allowed me to navigate the way I exist as a scholar and as an instructor, by forging space (especially within classrooms and curriculum) that hasn’t historically been held for disabled and nonwhite bodies, minds, and processes. I think you’re all giving us really powerful examples of how our experiences inform our relationships to rhetoric and writing.

 

In “What Does it Mean to Move?”, Christina V. Cedillo writes that institutions rely on “rendering real people and real needs invisible.” Does the academy sweep embodiment under the rug, invisibilizing your own embodied experiences and labor? And if so, how? What are the hidden costs of such invisibilization? 

Sophia Angela Maier: A recent (nerdy) experience comes to mind that I think, in a roundabout way, might help me to answer. 

A few weeks ago, I played chess with an undergraduate chess club at Penn State. At that particular meeting, every attendant presented as male. (Except for me.) During one of my matches, my opponent scolded me for my spoken ambivalence about winning.

 “You need to be ruthless,” he informed me. 

Since then, I’ve frequently thought back to the wisdom of this Solemn Man. I genuinely wonder what it would be like to “just win,” to “be ruthless.” It seems that when he plays chess, he worries about losing; whereas for me, losing is the least of my worries. I have a hard time even imagining just playing chess—while not also strategizing how to protect my opponents’ feelings. 

Truth be told, I doubt my opponent even remembers this conversation.

If I had shared my experiences with the Solemn Man, I wonder how he might have reacted. What would he have said, if I told him the complete truth: that when I win, I win as a woman. That when I lose, I lose as a woman. That I haven’t feared losing in years. That I haven’t been free of fear in years. That I do not move to win, but to survive masculinity.

For a woman in chess, winning is not an action, but a condition. In order to win, she is silently asked to either find a way to repair her opponent’s sense of dignity, or else risk the consequences of “his” emotional backlash. (I have yet to hear an anonymous opponent referred to as anything but “he” by a chess player.)

For a trans woman in chess, the conditions of a true win are made nearly impossible. To win may be taken as an act of violence, regardless of her opponent. Even to play can be construed—within the scrutiny of bigoted ideology—as a kind of t(u/e)rf invasion. 

Would my opponent have taken my perspective with grace? I cannot say. However, I am compelled to remind myself that even within this hypothetical, I would not be able to simply speak—rather, I speak as the %&#*$(@& Who Won.

 

Such is, from my perspective, life in the university. Academic success is not something that a person can do. Rather, it is something that they may get to experience, if they’re lucky. When we recognize that success is an experience rather than an achievement, we can more accurately contextualize the role of one’s conditions of success.

In the same way that one experiences—rather than creates—a warm summer afternoon, so one experiences—rather than creates—the writing of a successful publication. It is not just that academic progress is affected by privilege. Academic progress is, more accurately, a description of privilege.

Jo Hsu: Since Sophia provided such a powerful personal example, I’ll go broad. Colonial conquest requires the (ongoing, attempted) removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples and knowledges. In the United States, white settlers seized Indigenous land through the enslavement of West and Central African people and the exploitation of Asian indentured laborers. This legacy of violence is imprinted in our bodies and in our environments—at times at the cellular level. The “academy,” which historically trained and certified generations of white elites, ignores embodiment by design. To take embodied knowledge seriously would require confronting the colonial destruction behind high rates of diabetes among the Akimel O’odham. It would require reckoning with the impact of US nuclear weapons testing on the Marshall Islands, and the ways that racism, transphobia, and ableism feed inflammatory disorders. It would require recognizing the violence that entrenched white, heteropatriarchal worldviews as the “Canon”—and it would require knowing that we must change.

Ada Hubrig: I often find myself reflecting on the ways embodied experiences of marginalized people are dismissed when they are at odds with institutional narratives and agendas. I think about how universities are responding to student protests right now, and how it is an extreme example of academia’s more hidden and tidy violences—how embodied experiences and perspectives that counter official narratives, that resist the various canons and agendas are made quiet by various mechanisms, like making spaces inaccessible or hostile or denying resources. 

Bernice Olivas: Academia is still very much designed to serve the young, white, non-parent, abled body in terms of new hires and folks we bring into the faculty. Hiring practices favor younger, able-bodied people. All other bodies exist in constant tension and conflict with academia. For me the most conflict happens when I speak or act as a woman/parent. I get plenty of conflict as fat, as of color, as disabled, but only as a parent do I assert myself extremely aggressively and that costs academia time, labor, and money. I have never started a single semester without the typical argument about schedule, on campus projects and meetings, and “social/work” events. It’s here that all my allies vanish, here where my super supportive admin changes, here where even my closest peers step back. To demand the right to parent my children rather than parenting the many young white men I teach, is seen as an aggressive and selfish and unwomanly and unscholarly demand. As I watch more and more parents enter college as staff, new hires, and students I find myself more and more frustrated with academia. Even young white men are discouraged from bringing children into the conversation. Some community colleges even ban small children in the work offices. 

Jo Hsu: YES to how much academia ignores and actively discourages any sort of caregiving. I’m hearing in your response one of the major ways that this professional structure is anti-relational—actively working to curtail intimacies outside of its purview. 

Bernice Olivas: Yes! One of Academia’s best tricks is to promise our students that it is the path to supportive community, work, and financial success and then to tell us that the only way to get those things is to stop caring for our loved ones for the duration of our careers. This connects directly to racism for me—I am often seen as almost animal like in my demands to mother my own children—I once had a white woman say, “You’re allowed to ask for those kind of accommodations because you’re Mexican—we know how seriously you take reproduction.” This in a conversation about how she could ask for more accommodations to care for her newborn.

Alexandria Lockett: This question is simple for me. I was fired—excuse me, forced to resign, during the worst tragedy of my entire life. To be sure, I have spent my entire teenage and early adult years caregiving and being responsible for family finances beyond my own household. However, when my mother had a stroke in 2018, moved in with me when her house burned down in 2019, and passed away in January 2021, I found myself falling further and deeper into debt, burnout, and a sense of failure that words cannot describe. 

Her death was followed by a chain of other deaths marked by circumstances that came with their own complex unfolding—my older brother died on April 1, 2021 from what the state claimed was an overdose. Daddy died on April 14–15, time is uncertain, but it would have been my brother’s 42nd birthday. Both of my parents’ respective partners passed away shortly after they did. Both my paternal grandparents also died that year, along with two aunts, an uncle, and a few other extended family members. If the pandemic weren’t happening, I do not think I could have physically gone back to work. Therefore, I just kept working. Grateful for virtual access to be able to work through the insomnia, vomiting, and night terrors that looped my body into a significant weight loss, I finally decided that I needed to take leave. I had hoped that Spelman would grant me personal leave for one year, even if some of it had to be unpaid. 

Recalling this story briefly here is exhausting, so you can imagine how tiring it was to go through it over and over with HR and a Provost’s Office that refused to respond with a viable course of action for my situation. After they ghosted me for months, refused to meet, offer any kind of solutions to help me financially or healthwise, I realized that I was being edged out of my institution. My department chair excluded me from communications and I received zero communication from admin. It was my worst nightmare. 

In the thick of my need, Spelman refused to adjust my tenure timeline, which justified their move to force me to resign. Obviously, no one is going back to an institution failing to do their tenure review when they know they will just be fired about a year later anyway. I resisted going back to a place that clearly has no regard for my body other than for its use and discardment.

I thought for a split second that the relationship between my embodiment and a place like Spelman would mean finding other “bodies” like mine and seeking out their companionship and professional expertise. Joining an HBCU for women in a big Southern city felt like a dream to me. I grew up in a military family, working-class, and am the first person in my family to acquire a bachelor’s degree. Spelman wasn’t in my sights as a place to go to college, let alone my first academic job, so—I felt that the “system” however broken it was, might actually work. And it does. It is not broken at all. It cruelly functions even in a pandemic when the tides of loss require much bolder radical solutions for keeping people safe. 

At Spelman, where educated and aspiring professional black women are the majority in a space, I experienced the question from a non-white cultural perspective. Things that I could do at a predominantly white institution (PWI)—like wear chucks or jeans everyday—were frowned upon. However, natural hair wasn’t an issue, and I could move through my environment without people touching my hair. But I could not move through the environment without people touching ME. Hugs, hugs, and more hugs are just a frequent occurrence at a women’s college. I had to get used to people hugging me, similar to the way they felt free to do in writing centers, which I discuss in A Touching Place. 

I had to resist being “mammified” by students and fellow faculty. The expectations of my body belonging to everyone else were as clear as they were when I was a child. I needed to make sure that my body would wear Sunday best, hair done, nails done, respond in docile tones, question nothing but what you can do to make it better, and always be available for someone’s problems. Serve. Serve. Serve. If this was my experience in an “inclusive” Black Women’s space, imagine the stories I could tell you about my PWI experiences. Not better. The issue of how we move lies in how we find “our people” and whether we even know how to. 

Sophia Angela Maier: I really appreciate y’all’s responses. I relate to a lot of it. My day-to-day experience for the past several years has largely been defined in relation to the logistics fear. I’m saddened to learn I’m not the only one.

Alex Jennings: Thank you for sharing and for your vulnerability. I’m struck by what you share, and by what Sophia so eloquently referred to as the “conditions” of embodiment. Each story reminds us of those systemic and institutional consequences that exist. The ones the academy was designed to embody. The ones we can’t out-plan. 

Where might your embodied needs and desires be at odds with institutional agendas and state legislative mandates? 

Sophia Angela Maier: The emotional toll of the recurrent anti-trans legislation makes it—and it might seem petty under the circumstances—difficult to write. Having to pass by anti-trans posters on my way to class makes it—and again, it sounds odd to say—difficult to teach. A lack of a comfortable space away from hypervigilance makes me, well, a slower emailer. 

Part of the planning of my day involves evaluating whether going to the grocery store is worth the risk of exposure, whether visiting this or that coffee shop will involve fewer hostile encounters, or whether or not I have the emotional capacity to take a walk on campus. (I am alert to the faces of every person in my visual range.)

 

Ada Hubrig: Oh kind human, I don’t think it is odd at all, and this alertness seems both immensely warranted and directly tied to the work we do as teachers. I am exhausted. In Texas, our governor recently spoke about the need to “end” trans teachers in our state, and it makes it so hard to write, to teach—and the work we’re asked to do on top of it all in mentoring and supporting marginalized students who are also exhausted and on high alert. The hypervigilance is exhausting. 

Alex Jennings: It is so important to acknowledge the additional emotional labor that is layered within all of these other things! Especially with the infiltration of outside stakeholders pushing very real and very harmful legislation that only continues to amplify this reality.

Bernice Olivas: Everywhere and all the time. I have given up on the idea that there are spaces that exist where our bodies, stories, needs, or scholarship is welcome. Instead I carry those spaces with me. Like an aura, or a hamster in a hamster ball. I bring that space into meetings, into leadership positions, into the classroom, and into positions that intersect with the legislation we are dealing with. I make that space and then every moment I fight to maintain it—it constantly shrinks or grows depending on the situation. I used to believe there were already spaces like that in academia and I just needed to find them and push them open, but I’m 20 years in academia and I know that those spaces are connected to the bodies around me, they are fragile, breakable, and under relentless pressure. The exhaustion that I feel in what should be my day-to-day normalized world is ridiculous, but it’s just part of my reality all the time. 

Jo Hsu: I was actually just discussing with a colleague how completely fucked up it is that we were shopping for ice packs and first aid kits for when the university inevitably invites back the militarized police that keep hurting our students. I don’t understand how anyone is supposed to work in this environment—which, of course, is also the point. There’s no scary “diversity work” happening when all the people doing that work are managing the fallout of police violence or protesting suppressive laws and even more suppressive policies interpreted from those laws.

So I guess to return to the question: We were already in a position where our basic needs (like being able to fit into a room or find a restroom) were at odds with existing structures, but current aggressive state and institutional agendas are creating even more problems that are depleting our already-scarce energy and time. 

Alexandria Lockett: No long comment here. Everyone else has articulated the mismatch well. If you’d like to know the anecdote that comes to mind it is my former institutions’ bereavement policy: 3 days of “paid leave” for every dead immediate family member. They were generous enough to round mine up to amount to one full month’s pay. My response to Q2 touches on how institutions fail us, even when they claim to be for us. 

Related to the previous question, what mechanisms do institutions use to center their agendas? How can you/we create space to center our own embodied needs/desires?

Jo Hsu: Well, in addition to inventing more problems (I think I recently said something at a conference about how conservatives’ current strategy is to set everything on fire?), institutions really thrive on manufactured scarcity. UT Austin is one of the wealthiest universities in the country and yet many basic accessibility measures are “too expensive” (and our grad students, of course, are not paid a living wage). Universities also often combine that manufactured scarcity with contrived divisions, pitting marginalized communities against one another, and ignoring intersectionality altogether. For example: Many buildings on UT Austin’s campus do not have gender-inclusive restrooms or restrooms that meet the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements (many were built before the ADA and therefore exempt). The university set aside a good chunk of money to update the bathrooms in several buildings to meet ADA guidelines, but when I and several colleagues asked about designating some of those bathrooms as gender-inclusive, we learned that the funds had only been set aside for disability and supposedly not gender-inclusivity. As if trans people were not disproportionately disabled. As if disabled people might not have caregivers of a different gender, and as if we weren’t actual disabled genderqueer people asking them, directly, for this inclusion.

 

Bernice Olivas: I’m going to focus on one specific way institutions center their agendas. Adjuncts. They use adjuncts the same way the southern politicians used the southern strategy—they use it to create a divide in groups of workers. This starts early in grad school where we are taught to be afraid to become adjuncts. It’s the stick they use to get us to take jobs where we can already see that we’ll be at a disadvantage, it’s the key they use to wind us up as we fight for tenure. And when we get there, it is the flattery that makes us stupid. The institution depends on us all feeling that we are different and more than just “labor” so that we won’t start thinking, working, and organizing in the same ways that labor does. Everyone from top to bottom in the institution is aware that adjunct labor is exploitative, everyone just clutches their pearls and insists that this is how the world works. This is part of the manufactured scarcity, it’s part of the culture of fear that the institution uses to keep us all in a state of continued panic, and it includes using our genuine desire to help, to build community, to make a better world. Adjunct labor is the machine that runs our system. 

Ada Hubrig: I find, lately, my willingness to do labor/respond is largely rooted in positionality. There are so many people pushing themselves, non tenure track instructors teaching 5/4 loads for too little pay and the other very inequitable material realities academia relies on (but ignores) to keep going. When my NTT colleagues ask for help I make the time. But I also worry that the institutions really leverage our willingness to help, our wanting to look after others against us—that they can squeeze a bit more labor out of us (almost always unpaid) “for the students.” And if my own embodied needs at all conflict with institutional pressures to do unpaid labor (forever and ever), then there is a level of guilt applied—I somehow just don’t care enough about my students, my colleagues, etc. 

Jo Hsu: Oh, they absolutely weaponize care—coercing labor out of people because we care and also enveloping harmful policies in the language of care.

Ada Hubrig: And that leveraging, that weaponizing of care, is so destructive and extractive. It pulls us away from our loved ones and caregiving, from the ways we might contribute to not cishet, not white, non western and otherwise non normative family structures. It is an attempt to push our bodies and energies toward institutional agendas. 

Jo Hsu: Yes. And also how care is racialized and gendered in ways so that labor is always foisted onto particular bodyminds. 

Alex Jennings: 100%. This is really important, and I notice that I’m feeling these pressures early as a grad student. Like Bernice was saying, because this is normalized early on, free labor fuels the system. At times, we sort of just accept it as a trade off for getting to do this work. It’s easy to feel like you’re at odds with what you’re willing to endure because it’s grad school and it’s supposed to be hard. Even if you try to resist it, the guilt that comes from trying to set boundaries and care for yourself/your family while there is work to be done that affects other people, always seems to weasel its way back in by design. 

Alexandria Lockett: In my case, I am no longer part of an institution precisely because of the mechanisms of HR, poor oversight of leadership, dysfunctional department and chair, among several other socioeconomic and cultural issues that would have eventually forced me out anyway. Being a legal recruiter is pretty interesting, as I have the privilege of remote work and choosing who I want to work with. Unfortunately, it’s a 1099 job based entirely on the placements you make. It takes time to build a pipeline. 

I also had a learning curve coming out of academia into the big wide world of big law hiring. This is the ultimate fear of most academics: they do not want to lose the “security” of a paltry salary and the resources of their institutions. They do not want to fail. Well, guess what folks, this is why those community spaces don’t get created and people can’t move beyond the contact they have at their institutions. We don’t really support each other in the ways that a “real” community should, but I recognize that our cultural backgrounds affect how we show up for people. Asking for help is something that continues to be taboo, even to the people who are most aggressive about posting memes about it or telling their colleagues and loved ones to reach out. 

The reality is that when you do ask for help, most people act like they don’t know what to do. Working-class folks tend to help out working-class folks whereas middle-class folks don’t ever want to talk about money outside of their marriages or parents. If someone says they are going broke due to bereavement, I don’t ask them how I can help. I ask for their CashApp because everyone needs money. I never sit around going, oh man…I feel so bad for so and so because I can’t do more. No. I support where I can in the best way that I know how, which is money or opportunity. We cannot claim to care about anyone that we know is possibly facing eviction, homelessness, and having their bills cut off. 

I’d like to see more informal networks of “care communities” that resemble grow channels on sites like YouTube. Everyone supports each other for growth, and that means donations and offering opportunities to learn and destigmatize the notion of help. If I had enough people in my network that could help me out when I need it and I return the favor when I have it, I wouldn’t be stressed out and wondering what will happen next month. This return to precarity isn’t a new experience, but it makes me recall the scarcity of graduate school and undergrad, as well as wonder how current grad students are surviving all these crazy crises. 

These networks could start small too—five to ten folks dedicated to promoting each other and donating knowledge or funds when they can if necessary. We do this everyday on social media automatically, but imagine if just a few people were consistent and organized in their support networks—could lead to something bigger and more sustainable. Personally, my ultimate goal is to become wealthy enough to be able to contribute funds to any knowledge pursuer in need, regardless of their age, status, institutional affiliation, etc. I also want to build a tiny homes community, or contribute to the design of one.

 

Certain rhetorical scholars have dismissed embodiment and cultural rhetorics as less-than, as not credible or serious or rigorous scholarship. How might using embodiment as a way to engage cultural rhetorics shift conversations and mindsets in the field, in our pedagogy, and in our lives?

Sophia Angela Maier: To be honest, I care very little about what folks in the field find important. I think it’s important to remember that the payoff of our work has nothing to do with making future publications better, or making the academic field more marketable. I think that the work we do is important because it is necessary for the maintenance and sustenance of our collective well-being. The profession is too difficult for one to spend one’s efforts on anything other than what fills the lungs so that the soul may sing.

Alex Jennings: I love this perspective!

Bernice Olivas: I don’t think there are ways to create a shift in the field. Let’s be honest, people like us have been trying to create that shift since the days when we were becoming a field. The bodies, the resources, the information—it’s all right there in front of them. Spending time on enlightening these folks is just more draining labor that keeps me from doing more useful work. So my focus is always, alway, always going to be in the classroom. This is where I might plant seeds (lol or maybe potatoes) that will grow into something later. This is where I can find the data that shows compassionate teaching or anti-racist teaching means more student success. That data can be used to force the change I want to see. And at this point I am okay acknowledging that making any change is going to be about force and fight. 

I used to think that I would be working with super smart people and all I had to do was show them the good argument and they would embrace the new information. I was wrong. So I build sticks out of data and anything else that will work and use them to force people to make the changes we need. And those changes are always about how we welcome and include people. It’s in our work in teaching that there is still some space to make change. And in our communities.

I support in all the ways possible the work of others who are doing cultural rhetoric and embodied rhetoric. I save what little extra money I have for members of my community. I am always willing to help if I can. And I’m quick to defend anyone in my community. It’s a good thing my community college doesn’t care about what the field thinks and only really cares that I do my teaching and service work or I probably wouldn’t have a job. 

Jo Hsu: Along the lines of what other folks are saying, I’m not interested in appealing to the people who’ve already made up their minds about my worth and the (non)value of my work. There are too many important things to worry about. The work of rhetoric doesn’t matter as abstract hypotheticals. It matters when we consider how communicative patterns, stories, and knowledge-making processes affect the lives and life chances of those around us. I’m interested in what rhetorics channel pollutants into poor neighborhoods and countries and what stories perpetuate—and/or prevent–sickness and suffering. One of the exciting things about working in cultural rhetorics is that there are many (brilliant, good) folks here who care deeply about doing meaningful work, building thoughtful relations, and pursuing more just futures.

 

I also want to add that…this focus on embodiment is also necessary because we, too, are not outside the institution. The institution can contain plenty of well-meaning, compassionate people, but our policies, our norms, and our habits of siphoning every bit of labor from people prevent many folks from having the resources and capacity to pursue more impactful change. So part of this turn toward embodiment, for me, is also a call for further engagement—for all of us—with our situatedness in these inescapably damaging systems. It seems to me that so many things do not change because we are all overstretched and exhausted. What are our bodies telling us about the sustainability of the way we’re living? And, how can we respond? 

Ada Hubrig: I want to echo that I’m less concerned about persuading people who’ve made up their minds, and more concerned about “how do we navigate a field where so many in the field see us as not part of it?” I think I’m concerned about this question because I want us to find each other, to be able to build community. I think, for many of us, we are one or one of a few multiply-marginalized people at our institutions, and building these communities, finding one another, has been so healing and helpful. It’s what has made this work possible—and I want that for others, I want them to feel invited in. What we spoke about earlier, about how rhetoric and writing has given many of us space to understand ourselves—I want that to be here and even more accessible. 

Jo Hsu: I hear you, Ada. And to that end, I think a lot of what you’ve modeled in the field is really important—working to create more spaces that people can find and engage in. In my ideal world, the writing I put out is not a “finished” product but an invitation. My biggest dream for it is that someone else uses it to open a conversation they want to join. 

Sophia Angela Maier: I like what you said, Jo, about an unfinished product. I think it is the vulnerable, unfinished, incorrect nature of our labors that generates community. As I tell my students, I do not feel qualified to provide guidance for their futures. Instead, I feel our primary qualification must always be the ability to fail (productively) by example.

 

Bernice Olivas: Yes, I also like what Jo said about an unfinished product, an ongoing conversation. I think it’s the foundation of building anything that will last. 

Alex Jennings: This is wonderful. I think framing this as an unfinished product is a really helpful way to think about our own labor and the ways our experiences inform our evolution. 

Ada Hubrig: I think, often, about how our bodies are also unfinished, how we are always revising ourselves—growing, seeing, and understanding in new ways. I embrace cultural rhetorics and embodiment because they help me to do that, to read myself and others in new, kinder, gentler (and hopefully more ethical) ways—a way of unlearning the colonialist and cisheteropatriarchial ways of reading myself and each other that were so deeply ingrained. Embodiment as cultural rhetorics helps me be more patient and gentler with myself. 

Alexandria Lockett: Please see Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods, which I co-wrote with Iris D. Ruiz, James Chase Sanchez, and Christopher Carter. Chapter 1 claims that attempts to erase the body’s role in perception, action, and language simply reflect a position in which that person does not want to have to systematically reflect on all the ways that they may be advantaged through other people’s suffering. This doesn’t make someone a “bad person” nor is it a positionality that should be shamed automatically. Anyone can become disabled. Anyone can become part of a scandal. These facts mean that embodiment may not seem important until it’s “happening to you.” Everyone ages. Everyone has needs. I could care less about what “certain rhetorical scholars” say until they say it publicly and on a platform that allows for Q&A.

So to circle back, to the second half of the question, what does cultural rhetorics offer us? 

Bernice Olivas: Cultural rhetorics gives us the critical inbetween, the connective tissue that links us to “our people.” One way I have learned to survive and even thrive in academia is to build community outside of the field, of the department, of the college or university and more often than not it’s cultural rhetorics and shared experiences in our unique bodies that help me find and connect to the people who are part of that community. Those connections are strong and authentic. And frankly, cultural rhetorics is my litmus test for people I will expend time and energy on. If a project doesn’t in some way acknowledge or support the importance of cultural rhetorics—I don’t serve. If a person dismisses cultural rhetorics, we’re acquaintances and I probably won’t be open to doing work with them. Cultural rhetorics and language justice are core to who I am and what I do—if we don’t see eye to eye on those things, I’m not going to spend my limited resources on their work. That is the one power I have in academia—I get to choose how I use my energy. I try to wield it with great care, but I will never pretend that I don’t see it as power. 

Jo Hsu: (This is perhaps the idealized answer rather than the pragmatic one). At its heart, cultural rhetorics offers an orientation to rhetoric and writing that is deeply invested in mutual accountability, in amplifying embodied and suppressed knowledges, and in building lasting relations. 

Sophia Angela Maier: I think Audre Lorde nicely describes the high sociological stakes of the kind of labor we are considering in the opening of her “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” I wonder if what she says here of poetry might also be true of rhetoric:

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless [….] (“Poetry Is Not a Luxury”)

Alexandria Lockett: This question is difficult for me to answer as a transitioning academic. If studying a certain branch of knowledge and committing to that work is not enough to be granted the grace of time off or remote work during bereavement, I can’t be sure that I’m confident in a field offering anything but a false sense of security to those who do things the way they “ought to be done.” Perhaps the answer lies in the question. If cultural rhetorics, as a field, takes embodiment as seriously as its very real relationship to the kind of knowledge that people produce, then it is already doing more than many academic fields that train researchers to make their bodies invisible in their writing and professional communication. Unfortunately, reflexivity and self-criticism is only useful if it lends itself to certain kinds of growth potential. 

 

Researchers must recognize that knowledge making is an entire lifestyle, it isn’t just a profession or pedagogical activity. Here’s a quick example of what I mean. Wikipedia is a global open educational resource. It is one of the few platforms that does not advertise to me other than for donations to the foundation that keeps it alive. I am still able to edit the resource and access it as a member of the public. Despite Wikipedia’s powerful presence, and my contributions to it, I understand that producing public knowledge was always risky. Until the process is treated as such, some people will remain isolated and super competitive to the point where ideas are taken, destroyed, and compromised. 

The best offering cultural rhetorics can make is to ensure that its scholars’ contributions become woven into other entries available on a site like Wikipedia. The field validates a number of recover efforts (e.g. see Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens and the field’s very own Jacqueline Jones Royster’s Traces of a Stream) that enabled enough published work to be discovered to sustain efforts to study (Black) Women’s Intellectual History in the U.S. and beyond for centuries to come. Historical knowledge-making efforts, and their documentation, is a critical part of cultural rhetorics that makes it possible to learn powerful legacies worth remembering.

Coda

We had the conversation in May of 2024. When later we—Alex J and Ada—returned to our conversation to wrap up final editorial tasks on the day a fascist is inaugurated as president, a day when he’s promised to pass a flurry of executive orders that will deny the existence of trans people, launch mass deportations, end birthright citizenship, dismantle “DEI” policies, and a number of other inhumane and cruel policies that simultaneously deny, censor, and punish embodied experiences, particularly those of marginalized people.

This is happening on a day set aside to revere Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights activist who labored for a more just and equitable nation. We turn our attention to embodiment and imagine how we might make coalitions across impacted groups, how we might support one another and affirm and support one another in the very forms of embodiment that the executive orders are set to erase, control, or otherwise contain. 

Alex J’s Final Reflections

This conversation has been particularly formative for me as I continue to navigate the everyday happenings of life as a PhD student, and as I try to make sense of what that even means altogether. As I think about the scholar I’m growing into, I often think about embodiment. How do you work in a world that denies the existence of our trans students and colleagues? How do you think about the way you’ll plan to embody your own class space when your country is actively funding and somehow simultaneously denying the genocide of Palestinians? How do you advocate for yourself when you’re not protected by a union?

 

I try to untangle the differences between performance and embodiment because as we navigate spaces where we try to combat racism and inequity, it still seems like we are barely outrunning the bureaucratic puppetmaster. Are we not performing for someone, or under some circumstance at any given time? But even as a new scholar, I surely have some experience trying to avoid such nonautonomous performative acts of embodiment, right? I’ve worked in various fields. I’ve managed a bar, waited tables, worked in a scrapyard breaking down aluminum sheet metal, and even worked on hundreds of cases as a pre-litigation paralegal. Hell, I’ve even survived (and utterly failed) in the very academic system that was ill-equipped at best to accommodate my disabilities, neurodivergence, and queerness. Of course I know how to perform. Except just when I think I have it figured out, I realize I don’t. I’m still masking or embodying in some way that only seems to reinforce survival, which is what I hear other folks describing here in this conversation in one way or another. For me, a harsh realization was that despite my best efforts to look to cultural rhetorics as methodology for change—to challenge privilege and whiteness and ableism, I instead ended up embodying the academy itself. I fought so hard to be accepted by what rejected me in the first place.

The academy didn’t see my disabilities. It didn’t see my queerness. It didn’t see my exhaustion or my grief. Just when I thought I was comfortable with the way I tried to carefully balance my queerness, gender-identity, disabilities, political agenda, relationships to labor and to other people, I realized this was still some single-dimensional act of manufactured masking. How do you embody something that fails to recognize yourself? I asked myself this after learning I was sick last semester in the fall of 2024. I received a shocking diagnosis that would be followed by surgeries and anxious periods of heavy and lingering uncertainty. During that time, I needed rest and help that quite frankly, I didn’t know how to ask for despite trying to embody the type of friend, colleague, and instructor that would know how to extend it to anyone who needed it. I didn’t know how to navigate the system I was performing in. I am deeply lucky and grateful beyond words to be surrounded by friends, mentors, and colleagues who have shown me unconditional kindness, love, and support, but even so, I still felt like a puppet on a stage that needed to perform for the next show despite my strings needing repair. So, as I’m reminded in this conversation, maybe it is precisely the times we don’t plan for that truly provide a glimpse into the embodied rhetorics we so carefully spend much of our time thinking about. Maybe it is the times we embody uncertainty that really help us make sense of ourselves and those around us in the most compassionate and human ways possible.

Ada’s Final Reflections

As I reflect on the months between our conversation and revising it for publication, my own autoimmune condition, since starting this project, has worsened. There are days I find it impossible to get out of bed, as I try to manage the chronic pain and fatigue. My ulcerated intestines bleed and the inflammation is severe. I try to be gentle with myself, but I feel a sense of guilt—of outstanding projects and emails I owe people, of loved ones I haven’t checked in with for longer than I meant to. I feel as if my relationships with people I love are disintegrating and I’m unable to tend to their upkeep, and often to my own upkeep. I see the text chain and try to contribute as my communities try to resist upcoming legislation targeting them/us. I feel urgency and guilt, and yet I try to relearn gentleness, to be kind to myself even at a time where there seems to be so much unkindness and cruelty. I revel in small delights, a letter from a friend or a cup of tea with Kafka and Lucy—my elder house cats—curled in my lap. I write and labor in the pockets of time and energy I can, and work to understand the changing conditions of my own embodiment.

We sit with this conversation and all that’s happened in the months since. We process this national push against minoritized people and look toward the work of embodiment in cultural rhetorics as a place where we might better understand ourselves, our communities, and work those that seek to erase us. Even during this authoritative sweeping of marginalized people under the rug, an attempt to label us as dirt to be done away with, we draw on and reclaim our stories, we recognize that life springs from dirt, that soil is where new life is planted. 

Works Cited

Cedillo, Christina. “What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy.” Composition Forum, vol. 39, Summer 2018, https://compositionforum.com/issue/39/to-move.php.

Manivannan, Vyshali. “The Successful Text Is Not Always the One That Murders Me to Protect You.” Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, edited by A. Abby Knoblauch and Marie E. Moeller, University Press of Colorado, 2022, p. 196.

About the Authors

Jo Hsu (they/them) is an Assistant Professor of Rhetoric & Writing and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Their work considers the role of narrative in fostering –or foreclosing –meaningful relations across difference. They are the author of Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics, and their current projects examine far-right mythologies that endanger trans, queer, POC, and disabled folks. www,vjohsu.com

Dr. Alexandria Lockett is a Director of Lateral Recruiting and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) partner at eXacta Global—a woman-owned recruiting firm that specializes in legal and business crossover roles for attorneys. Prior to joining eXacta, Dr. Lockett served as a writing and rhetoric instructor at multiple institutions for almost 20 years. Dr. Lockett has worked in a variety of leadership roles in a range of educational spaces such as writing centers, career services, and hybrid + remote classrooms. Throughout her career, she has led numerous pedagogy workshops for thousands of instructors—of various rank—teaching across the disciplines. Dr. Lockett’s background includes publishing award-winning research about race, technology, literacy, and access. She co-authored Race, Rhetoric, and Research Methods and co-edited Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. She composed several articles and book chapters in publications such as MIT Press, Routledge, Composition Studies, Praxis, and Enculturation. Dr. Lockett continues to work as an independent scholar. She recently served as a Wikipedia Scholar-in-Residence for AfroCROWD—a community organization based in NYC (2023-4). She is also an advisory board member for Wiki Education’s Mellon Social Justice Initiative. 

Sophia Angela Maier is working toward her PhD in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State. She studies disability rhetorics, including especially the ways that disability rhetorics interact with feminist theory, queer theory, colonial theory, and rhetorics of science.

Dr. Bernice Olivas (she/her) is a First-Generation scholar, an indigenous Mexican American, member of the working poor, and the mother of two autistic children. These identities are her pedagogical center. Her academic career began as a high school dropout with a GED.  She received her B.A. in English with a creative writing emphasis at Boise State University,  her MA in the teaching of English and PhD in Composition and Rhetoric at University of Nebraska Lincoln. She is a tenured faculty member at Salt Lake Community College and her writing can be found scattered across composition and rhetoric. She finds it both wonderful and amusing that an article she wrote as an undergrad for Young Scholars in Writing is probably her most read work as other teachers often use it in their first-year writing courses. This seems fitting since all of her research and writing can be traced back to her, sitting in her own first-year writing class, wondering why so many of her first-gen peers were dropping out even though their writing was as good as anyone else’s in the room. She wanted to fix it then. She still wants to fix it now.

About the Moderators

Alex Jennings (she/they) is a third year rhetoric and composition PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh. Their research focuses on understanding and supporting the writing processes of neurodivergent student writers, and the centralization of accessibility within writing classrooms.  Particularly the affordances generative AI tools offer for ADHD student writers. Alex’s work has appeared in Mise-en-scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration, and they have forthcoming pieces that will appear in Xchanges, NCTE, and Writing Spaces.

Ada Hubrig (they/them; Twitter @AdaHubrig) is an autistic, genderqueer, disabled caretaker of cats. They live in Huntsville, Texas, where they labor as assistant professor and Director of Composition at Sam Houston State University as their day job. Their scholarship centers disabled and queer/trans communities, and is featured in College Composition and Communication, Community Literacy Journal, and The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics among others, and their words have also found homes in Brevity and Disability Visibility. Ada is managing editor of Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics.

Production Credits

Copy Editors: Natalie Cohen and Alexandra Hidalgo

Photo Research and Layout: Natalie Cohen and Alexandra Hidalgo

Posted by: Natalie Cohen

Editorial Assistants: Alex Jennings, Megan Simmermeyer, and Natalie Cohen

Social Media Manager: Evelynn Pugh

Editor-in-Chief: Alexandra Hidalgo