JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001 Page: 778
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778
I, too, must be transformed. As a bodysign among bodysigns, I can no
longer teach safe in the assumption that my identity stops at the end of a
text or at the boundaries ofmy skin. A biorhetorical identity exceeds both
bodies and sentences. As Haraway so wisely asks, "Why should our
bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by
skin?" (Simians 178).
My student Eileen and I offer an illustration of a biorhetoric that blurs
the comfortable divisions among who, what, and how. I chose to focus the
readings of a first-semester composition course on the problematics of
gender. That topic also served as the starting point for students' writing.
On the first day of class, Eileen, a poised eighteen-year-old, asked if she
could select another topic because gender just did not interest her. When
I refused her request, she acquiesced gracefully. The first draft of her first
paper was built on her experiences babysitting children in two families.
In both families, mother and father pursued active and demanding
careers. Concerned about the welfare of the children, Eileen argued that
the mothers in both situations needed to reorder their priorities because
they were jeopardizing their "womanhood" in their efforts to prove their
equality to men. My comments on her first draft focused on the need to
balance her representation of family responsibilities; otherwise, Iwarned,
she risked alienating the very audience she was addressing: career
women. Eileen responded in a detailed e-mail, concluding with a single
paragraph set off from the rest of her response: "First, I don't want to write
what you want to hear. My audience is not you. I'm not about to turn this
into a totally feminist paper."
It would be easy (temptingly so) to interpret this conflict as a problem
ofrhetorical perspective: Eileen's problem, Eileen's perspective, Eileen's
rhetoric. My role, then, would be heroic: to leap into the gaps created by
the paradoxes rife in her message and use that position to leverage open-
to transform-Eileen's thinking. I would rescue her from her own lack of
critical sensitivity. This patriarchal figuration of teacher as heroic rescuer
is the dominant stance, the dominant way of being, in composition
studies. Kirk Branch claims that the central metaphor framing literacy
efforts, including those predicated on narrow interpretations of Paulo
Freire's work, is that of the hero. The literacy worker is cast in the role of
one who "knows what students need, gives it to them, and thus enables
their transformation," but the worker remains unaffected by that transfor-
mation (207). Quoting Lyotard, Beth Daniell calls this the "emancipation
narrative" in which we assume the role of "heroes of liberty" (401).
Within the context of the patriarchal hero narrative, the unit of power isjac
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Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition (U.S.). JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory, Volume 21, Number 4, Spring 2001, periodical, 2001; (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc28634/m1/54/: accessed April 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .