2 Embodied Rhetorics: A Deeper Literacy Narrative (Section Overview)

Before we begin, please reflect on your literacy history in 100 words or more.

Literacy narratives can prove useful for college students to write for several reasons. On a very practical level, narratives are a type of writing and speaking that are so human that they are used in almost every discipline or major on a campus. We speak in narratives when explaining ourselves, conducting work in a laboratory, completing projects, or sharing experiences in internships. It’s also integral to many disciplines like history, where narratives of past events are constructed through collections of primary sources.

Aside from the very practical, literacy narratives also offer college students the opportunity to reflect on and critically examine their past experiences with reading and writing so as to adjust their current identities and relationships to literacy. How we identify as readers and writers in the past affects us as readers and writers into the future. However, by critically examining how identities foisted upon us or embraced by us affect our relationships with literacy, we can adjust our literate identities.

Here we can deepen our understanding of our literacy experiences by also integrating embodiment into our consideration. As we remember from chapter 1, we are all embodied, as we have a body. And that body is connected to different places, times, and cultures. As a result, the process of orienting our bodies in space and among others creates our experiences and knowledge. How we make meaning of our worlds is embodied as it is based in the lived experiences of our past and present, of our body negotiating space among others (Moeller and Knoblauch).

So, how does the concept of intersectional identities and lived experiences from our embodiment connect to literacy narratives? A good example can be found in the literacy narrative by HP, published in Stylus.  In “Carrying the Weight of a Nation: The Story of a Guatemalan Boy,” HP tells the story of his experience. His story begins with difficulties in kindergarten with multilingualism, as he spoke Spanish at home with his family from Guatemala. A few years after challenging himself to learn English, his apartment was raided by police, and his father, who could not acquire legal paperwork to make his immigration legal, was deported. His dad was HP’s biggest supporter when it came to his education, so losing him at this young age affected HP and HP’s literacy education deeply.

This example provides a glimpse into how lived experiences, our embodied experiences, affect our literacies. HP’s body oriented in space and in relation to others: his dad, the officers, the teachers in school. And these relations intersect with race, gender, and class. Some students do not share the experience of losing a parent to immigration officers or have to worry about it. This is HP’s lived experience. Later in his literacy narrative, he begins to lose his identity as a Hispanic student, as his fluency in English begins to supplant his fluency in Spanish. As well, his education results in his being labeled as “white-washed” by his own family. These experiences are unique to HP and are also shared among other students moving through their own literate experiences.

In this introduction to the chapter on writing to share our experiences, we invite you to read some sample literacy narratives from other Saint Mary’s College students, reflect on your own experiences to begin your writing journey. We have also included some invitations to write shared by writing professors at Saint Mary’s College.