Introduction
Sunayani Bhattacharya; Gina Kessler Lee; Meghan A Sweeney; and Yin Yuan
Writing Our Bodies takes an embodied approach to the practice of reading and writing. Our aim is to place the body and its lived experiences at the center of the first-year writing classroom. While the book is organized around seemingly traditional modes of writing–writing to share an experience; writing to rhetorically analyze; writing to synthesize; writing to argue; writing to remediate, revise, and reflect–each chapter invites instructors and students to consider how those modes of knowledge construction are upended when we take our physical bodies into account.
In their introduction to Bodies of Knowledge: Embodied Rhetorics in Theory and Practice, A. Abby Knoblauch and Marie E. Moeller note that “knowledge and meaning are never disembodied—they are always made by somebody—and yet, as a field, we’ve often ignored the role of the body in knowledge production” (8). The consequence of such abstraction is not that the body ceases to exist but that we come to accept the white, cisgendered, male, able-bodied point of view as the neutral, objective, and therefore authoritative one. Informed by the theoretical framework of Bodies of Knowledge, our first-year writing textbook seeks to demystify this view and to interrogate how all knowledge, even knowledge that passes itself off as “objective,” emerges out of and is shaped by a particular social location.
Attending to the body not only deconstructs white male discourse but also makes space for the experiences and insights that are borne by marginalized bodies. This is particularly crucial for empowering student voices, as our students come from a variety of backgrounds and occupy diverse positions of class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on. We invite students to pay attention to their particular ways of inhabiting and moving through the world, and to consider how those lived realities not only shape how they read and write but also serve as powerful tools for analysis and argumentation.
In a moment when the use of Generative AI has become widespread, it is more important than ever to insist on the power and integrity of human cognition—human precisely because it is situated within a particular body. By generating content through identifying patterns across large sets of data—data that is accessed frequently without consent—Gen AI not only dislocates knowledge from knowledge producers but also elevates normative ways of knowing. As teachers of writing, we want to do the opposite and affirm students’ own lived experiences as vital ingredients for deeper reflection and analysis.
Structure of Book
Writing Our Bodies is organized around major genres and modes of writing, and instructors are invited to assign the ones that align with their writing assignments.
Each section that covers a major genre or mode of writing (for instance, “Writing to Share An Experience” focuses on the literacy narrative) begins with an introductory chapter that provides theoretical overview and discusses the role of the body in that context. It also provides sample student essays and ideas for summative assignments.
The remaining chapters in the section focus on particular skills and habits associated with that mode of writing, and will thus contain more formative writing prompts. Some of these prompts are titled “Write to Learn,” which refers to exercises that use the writing process to help students generate or work through ideas. Others are titled “Your Turn Now,” which are exercises designed to help students practice specific skills. Throughout, we maintain the importance of attending to the body in the development of these skills and habits.