Interrelationships of Meanings and Bodies

As someone who is interested in the meanings that can be gathered/made from different music media, the readings for this week complicated a number of issues that I had (and I’m shameful to admit this) only superficially considered before. In both of the digital readings there was a sense of authorship that transcends, and even questions, perspectives around disability, and meaning making. Their rhetorical choices, or the designs they used, also reflected what Dolmage was arguing for in “Writing Against Normal: Navigating a Corporeal Turn,” that is, a sort of messiness in the writing/reading process for both authors and their audiences. While all of the authors portray an interest in the role of technology in composition/meaning making processes for “disabled” bodies, they all focused on different “conditions.”

In her description of “aut(hored)ism,” Yergeau encourages us to question our perspectives around Autism and Asperger’s, since she herself is both. In her discussion, she points us to a “dichotomous construction of neurotypicality and neurodivergency [which] lends autism to narratives of telepresence, especially within the composition classroom.” Citing Manovich, she explains that telepresence is a “virtual reality,” or fourth dimension; an imaginary space that digital narratives afford in a transparent level. Her account is both humorous and informative. I especially appreciate the notion that she has been ‘authored,’ in the sense that ‘others’ have written about, or informed her ideas about different degrees of autism and the “capacity” of writing.

This consideration of others is also present in Brueggermann’s piece, as her subjects described their literacy stories. She refers to this relationship as a betweenity, that is relational and exists in a rhetorical space, and that affects reciprocal education processes. In other words, while describing the use of the Internet (as a sister suggested), or constructing a “deaf theory” (inspired by other CODAs and their own parents), or utilizing closed captioning technologies (growing up as CODA), all take into account relationships between one and an(other). These were also very distinctive situations, and the perspectives of the subjects were diverse, as they had all experienced deafness differently.

Dolmage is able to provide an example of how interactive the revision process should be, especially if one is to consider the different embodied relationships that are suggested in the writing process itself. He suggests we take a ‘corporeal turn,’ “as we compose media and embodiment, we can refuse the forward march toward a perfectable text/body, and move instead through a recursive process via which gaps, erasures, mistakes and collaborations might be highlighted” (Dolmage 126).

All of the authors hinted at veering away from an exclusive, cognitive perception of writing, and encouraged their readers to consider the physicality, or embodiment of the ways we ‘speak’ about writing.