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Keywords in Writing Studies
By Paul Heilker, Peter Vandenberg University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-974-6
CHAPTER 1
AGENCY
STEVEN ACCARDI
The term agency is embedded in many discussions in writing studies, and, depending upon how it is used, reveals particular theoretical orientations. As a commonplace, agency signifies the ability or capacity to act, such as in the sentence, "The president has the agency to veto the bill." In Genre and the Invention of the Writer, Anis Bawarshi argues that in writing studies, the subject is often conceived as having agency, or being the sole possessor of agency, and thereby having the responsibility, in some cases, to take action (Bawarshi 2003, 53–5).
This conceptualization, for example, is seen in Agency in the Age of Peer-Production. Quentin Vieregge et al. (2012) study the transformative effect of digital peer-production tools on communication, collaboration, and the agency of teachers. Their use of agency connotes a force or power that can be owned or managed. They write, "[Teachers] want to play along without being pushed along. They want to assert their own agency without completely delegitimizing the agency of their programs, departments and colleges" (Vieregge et al. 2012, 4). Here individuals as well as collectives own agency.
Agency is similarly seen in discussions about writing program administration. While discussing the role of WPAs in the distribution process of composition textbooks, Libby Miles states, "Regardless, the voice of the consultant is the loudest and strongest in the textbook production process, and those of us who can should make more of that position of agency for the benefit of all" (Miles 2000, 37). Agency here inflects a power attributed to WPAs. Kelly Ritter, in her article, "Extra-Institutional Agency and the Public Value of the WPA," builds upon this notion of power: "[W]hat follows is rooted in a story about my own developing agency as an administrator, resulting from my negotiations with our state offices over common system rubrics for basic writers and basic writing placement" (Ritter 2006, 47). The term agency here resembles authority as well as power. This dual definition is rearticulated toward the end of her piece: "Rather than resist our power to influence these discussions and shape public perception, I submit that we do seize it and use it to help system offices help us to define and thus provide institutional agency for basic writers in the FYC curriculum" (Ritter 2006, 57).
In second language writing, notions of power and possession follow suit, as A. Suresh Canagarajah argues: "The value of the debate between LI [linguistic imperialism] and LH [linguistic hybridity] schools is that it expands our awareness of the complexities in the negotiation of power, developing the possibilities for teachers to exert their agency for simple but significant changes" (Canagarajah 1999, 213). Sandra McKay and Sau-Ling Wong employ the term similarly: "As subjects with agency and a need to exercise it, the [second language] learners, while positioned in power relations and subject to the influence of discourses, also resist positioning, attempt repositioning, and deploy discourses and counterdiscourses" (McKay and Wong 1996, 603).
In each of these cases, agency reflects an ability, power, or authority that can be possessed by a subject or subjects. This usage links with a humanist — modernist theoretical orientation, one that suggests a writer is a rational individual, capable of inventing ideas autonomously and pursuing an intention to engage or provoke an audience. In short, humanism implies that agency is something a writer can possess and use — as when Marilyn Cooper states that "agency is an emergent property of embodied individuals" (Cooper 2011, 421) — or something that can be taken away: "[T]hey realize that they are seen as native informants and that their agency is wrested from them" (Partnoy 2006, 1667). Sometimes scholars reveal this orientation by mentioning that agency is something "personal" or deriving from "personal experience," something coming from the self. Gail Hawisher et al. (2006, 633) state that the "theme of personal agency also played itself out in terms of gender expectations and computer use," while Alan France notes, "Composition studies ... is skewed toward agency, toward the personal experience of the world, including the experience of any structure that might determine or even constrain that experience" (France 2000, 148). France states further, "And the purpose of rhetorical education has been since antiquity, after all, learning the practices of personal agency in their relevant social context" (149).
A posthumanist or poststructuralist orientation, on the other hand, does not locate agency with the subject. According to this lens, agency is found circulating in discourse and dispersed into an ever-shifting field of power relations (Herndl and Licona 2007, 141). In other words, agency cannot be possessed. Christian Lundberg and Joshua Gunn explain that this posthumanist orientation reverses possession, from a subject possessing agency to agency possessing the subject. The reversal
refocuses our attention on the ways that the subject is an effect of structures, forces, and modes of enjoyment that might precede or produce it. This reversal of agent's relation to agency directs attention to quintessentially rhetorical concerns: to the constitutive function of trope, to modes of address, to the dialectics of identification and difference, and even to the power of concealing exercises of techne under the veil of the natural. (Lundberg and Gunn 2005, 97)
Helen Ewald and David Wallace inflect a posthumanist orientation when they state, "Although taking such a look might imply that agency is an attribute of classrooms rather than individuals and, as such, might seem a counterintuitive move, it is also a move consistent with the postmodern sense that the agent or subject is situationally constructed rather than autonomously present" (Ewald and Wallace 1994, 359). Here the term agency constitutes an attribute of the classroom rather than a possession of the subject — writer. Cheryl Geisler states that "Agency does not lie in the hands of any one person at the proposal writing table, but rather lies in the interaction among them" (Geisler 2005, 112). Agency, then, is not a possession but rather a construct of discourse.
These oppositional usages of the term can be conflated, as Carl Herndl and Adela Licona suggest, because "agency is still hampered by the vestiges of humanist models of action" (Herndl and Licona 2007, 139). A scholar writing from a posthumanist orientation might use a humanist construction of possession for the term agency. For example, Ewald and Wallace, who subscribe to and argue for a posthumanist theoretical lens, write, "Thus, within the parameters that [the instructor] has set, his students have agency in that they initiate topics for discussion, respond directly to each other, and influence what gets counted as knowledge in the discussion" (Ewald and Wallace 1994, 347). As Herndl explains elsewhere, in writing studies "theorists typically struggle with the dilemma of how to understand the postmodern subject's ability to take purposeful political action without merely recuperating the humanist individual" (Herndl qtd. in Geisler 2004, 10). Dorothy Winsor, in Technical Communication Quarterly, adds, "I confess that I have had trouble writing about [agency] in this article because I have found it very difficult to avoid language that reifies agency and treats it as something a person has rather than a situation of which the person takes advantage" (Winsor 2006, 412).
The term agency is not only used to discuss power and authority and to inflect a humanist or posthumanist orientation. It also is used in writing studies as an analytical tool to study power and social change. Jeffrey Grabill and Stacey Pigg, for example, undertake a project that examines agency in an online discussion forum and find that identity performances create movement that enables agency to move conversations (Grabill and Pigg 2012, 114–15). They argue that "[w]hen rhetors do not have access to each others' prior reputations, or clear pictures of their cultures, motivations, purposes, and reasons for communicating, identity building can become an important part of developing agency within a conversation" (116). As Grabill and Pigg use the term, agency is something outside of the individual, neither owned or housed in the subject's mind nor rescued from postmodernity. It is located within the rhetorical performance of identity building and the discourse of an online discussion blog. Such uses of agency, again, signify a posthumanist orientation.
Barbara Biesecker (1989) suggests that a subject cannot be taken as an origin or understood to be a static entity. A subject is continuously engaged in a process of alteration. And language is just as unstable as subjects, continuously changing and shifting in usage and meaning. The term agency follows suit.
CHAPTER 2
BODY
LORIN SHELLENBERGER
The keyword body or its related term, bodies, incorporates biological, cultural, physical, organizational, political, and rhetorical meanings. The term's complexity is illustrated through Susan Wells' frustration: there is "no 'natural' way of talking about the body, since the body always comes to us through multiple layers of cultural mediation" (Wells 2010, 144). Indeed, physical bodies are "sexed, raced, gendered, abled or disabled, whole or fragmented, aged or young, fat, thin, or anorexic" (Crowley 1999, 361), "a biology of hungers and pleasures, energy and fatigue, metabolic routine, disruption and repair" (Swan 2002, 286). Bodies are contradictory and unstable, "sites of both pleasure and pain" (Wells 2010, 145), "neither docile nor passive" (Lu 2006, 187), "everything and nothing" (Grigely 2002, 79), "mute" (Swan 2002, 286), and yet inextricably tied to voice (Mairs 1998, 61). The body is visible — "it is the body, not the soul, that sees and is seen" (Plato 1993, 83d) — and yet more than visible: "the body is not just what you see, but more especially what is unseen but known" (Wells 2010, 156).
Bodies are social constructions, symbols, and signifiers (Grigely 2002, 62), acted upon by other agents, and yet their reality is "incontestable" (Scarry 1985, 130). They are "constructions mediated by a range of cultural practices" (Wells 2010, 135), and "they include images and discourse, the tangible and the ephemeral, the literal and the figurative" (Grigely 2002, 62). According to Elizabeth Grosz, bodies are "inscribed, marked, engraved, by social pressures external to them," and "historical, social, and cultural exigencies ... actively produce the body as a determinate type" (Grosz 1994, x).
Writing has a special relationship with the body. Writing can be seen as "bodily work conducted by, through, and on material bodies" (Lu 2006, 183) and as "crafting a particular body" (Fleckenstein 2003, 48). Writing is "not only about the body but of and from the body too" (Swan 2002, 284, emphasis in original). Writing constrains "how students go about working their bodies" (Lu 2006, 184). But bodies also place limits on writing: texts must "merge with" the body (Casanave 1997, 198) and bodies "are not easily ousted" from personal and professional (writing) lives (Fleckenstein 2003, 46). According to Joseph Grigely, the textual products of writing can be themselves bodies and also "extensions of the bodies that create them" (Grigely 2002, 82), while those that work with texts are "creators of reconstituted bodies" (71). Tina Kazan contends the created texts represent "the embodiment of a writer's ideas" and also "the corporeal presence of the absent writer" (Kazan 2006, 260). According to Kazan, online writing allows an author to "re-code her culturally coded body" to "reveal chosen identities that the body does not" (257–58). Still, rather than creating a "disembodied user that can easily inhabit any position desired," new media scholars argue that "the body is not so easily left behind" (Consalvo 2006, 359).
For those on the margins, the body is particularly vexed. These bodies are "marked" (Crowley 1999, 361): there are "illiterate bodies" (Mortensen 1999, 143), "marginalized bodies," "a dominant body" (Fleckenstein 2003, 49), and bodies colored "with the 'dirt' of reproduction" or "working-class labor" (Hallet 2006, 85). Such divergent bodies are seen as "contaminants in the university classroom" (Hallet 2006, 86), the "direct record of oppression" (Wells 2010, 159), the "objectified domain of knowledge" (Wells 2010, 149), and "instruments used in an [sic] process of acculturation" (Cruz and McLaren 2002, 188). Bodies can even be "imposed" upon others: in order to produce "'good writing,'" students of marginalized backgrounds must take on the unwelcome bodies of "white, heterosexual, middle-class males" (Fleckenstein 2003, 49).
The intersections of disability studies and writing studies illuminate body in significant ways. According to Lennard Davis, we generally seek to neutralize bodies: "bodies and bodily practices had to be standardized, homogenized, and normalized" (Davis 2002, 101) so that bodies could be viewed as "interchangeable" and "conceptualized as identical" (105). The disabled body, then, is a "marker of rhetorical defect," and bodies that are different are "viewed as deficiencies, perversions, or deformities" (Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson 2010, 27–28). As a result, such bodies "can have only negative rhetorical value" (27). According to Peter Kuppers, "one's own body is the shifting place from which and with which one knows the world," and, therefore, for disabilities studies scholars, "a need to evade, play with, or subvert the meanings of bodies — whether gendered, disabled, racial, or class-based[ — is] paramount" (Kuppers 2004, 8, 122).
Bodies, and particularly female bodies, are things that can be used up or restructured. Bodies are commodities (Cruz and McLaren 2002, 204): for example, the bodies of teachers are "extractors and bearers of the commodity of labor power" (Lu 2006, 187), and the bodies of women are "capable of being owned, as 'their' or 'our' bodies" (Wells 2010, 134). The female body is viewed in opposition to or as deviant from the male body, and feminist bodies can be "refigured" and "reclaimed" (Dolmage and Lewiecki-Wilson 2010, 23, 28), and yet also "consumed" by or "erased" from the rhetorical tradition (28).
Moreover, Wells (2010) insists the body can be described spatially — "divided into zones of noncompliance, points of divergence from an ideal of beauty and charm" (148), "a discontinuous series of boundaries" (145), and "a negative space" (162) — while Grosz suggests the body cannot be "confined" by its "anatomical 'container,' the skin," and "the limits or borders of the body image are not fixed by nature" (Grosz 1994, 73). Elaine Scarry argues the body is both structural and permeable: "the body encloses and protects the individual within. ... [I]ts walls put boundaries around the self preventing undifferentiated contact with the world"; its senses "like windows or doors," the body "enables the self to move out into the world and allows that world to enter" (Scarry 1985, 38).
The body has positive and negative connotations all at once. The body is described positively for its identification as a site of knowledge production, representing the "presence of learned culture," one's political identity, and a site of memory production (Scarry 1985, 109). According to Debra Hawhee, "thought does not just happen within the body, it happens as the body," because knowledge making "cannot be extricated from the body" (Hawhee 2004, 58, 195). The body is thus both a sign of virtue associated with the "production of honor" (Hawhee 4, 13) and a judge of character (Aristotle 2007, 1128a13–15), and yet the body is also not to be trusted. It has the "capacity to slip past the categories and codes of social discourse or to infiltrate and transform them" (Swan 2002, 286). The body is a trickster, and one who is body-aware possesses the "capacity for bodily disguise" (Hawhee 2004, 50). Bodies are also a hindrance, a "site of epistemological limitation" (Shapiro and Shapiro 2002, 27), a constraint (Buckley 1997, 179), a distraction (185), a limiting factor that must be "banned" (Fleckenstein 2003, 46) or "overcome or transcended" (Shapiro and Shapiro 2002, 27). Indeed, writing bodies are potentially dangerous: "to write from the body, from lived experience, is a fearsome thing; it is a way of exposing oneself to knives" (Cubbison 1997).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Keywords in Writing Studies by Paul Heilker, Peter Vandenberg. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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