Composition Forum 39 - What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy

Oct 15, 2026

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The article argues for composition pedagogies that explicitly center students’ and audiences’ embodied perspectives, drawing on Stephanie Kerschbaum’s “anecdotal relations” to examine how disability orientations shape rhetorical transactions. Through personal stories as a Chicana student and instructor, it shows how race and disability are both highlighted and erased, often reduced to deficit impressions. The discussion proposes building critical embodiment in writing to compose more inclusively and better meet embodied needs.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLiterature

FormatPDF

Pages16

Reading Time25 min

AccessFree to download

Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018

What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy

Abstract

Embodied Deficit: Race, Disability, and Rhetoric’s In/visible Bodies

Current Issue From the Editors Weblog Editorial Board Editorial Policy Submissions Archives Accessibility Search Composition Forum 39, Summer 2018 What Does It Mean to Move?: Race, Disability, and Critical Embodiment Pedagogy Christina V. Cedillo Abstract: In this article, I argue for pedagogies that explicitly center the embodied perspectives of students and their audiences. Using Stephanie Kerschbaum’s concept of “anecdotal relations,” or orientations towards disability that inform rhetorical transactions, I analyze my academic experiences as a Chicana with “invisible”disabilities to highlight how race and disability are both highlighted and erased in pedagogical contexts. I present two personal stories from my time as a student and as an instructor, respectively, to show how instructors’orientations towards race and disability are typically based around impressions of deficit even as the importance of race and disability as critical heuristics are overlooked. Then I explain how my students and I attempt to build critical embodiment into our writing to compose more inclusively to suggest how we may all become more attuned to our audiences’ embodied needs. Rhetoric privileges movement—emotional, ethical, physical.{1} Hence, composition pedagogy aims to teach students to move others toward particular stances or courses of action. These goals often rely on normate standards of emotional engagement and activity, based in standards of white eurowestern ablebodiedness that associate certain kinds of movement with agency and expression. But, as Margaret Price asks,“How does one speak (either aloud or on the page) if one’s mind spins with anxiety, grapples with depression, freezes with panic, or is occluded by brain fog? What shall we do with notions of collaboration, activism, and community that presuppose all participants will arrive at the table ready and able to engage in ‘lively’ (and implicitly) logical conversations?”(“Her Pronouns Wax and Wane” 13) . Typically, conventional notions of communication go unchallenged until the presence of non-normativity disrupts the rhetorical landscape, demanding answers to questions like those that Price poses. For some of us, these questions do not signify hypothetical concerns or apparent nods to inclusivity but the very frameworks through which we compose our writing and our lives. Here, I approach composition as praxis and pedagogy from a very specific positionality, as someone whose roles as writer, researcher, and teacher are fundamentally informed by my intersecting identities, that of a Chicana living with several “invisible” disabilities. I consider how we might make room for bodily diversity in composition by highlighting race and disability as critical means of embodied invention that gainfully unsettle habituated expectations. From my intersectional positionality of racialized disability, I argue that we must strive for critical embodiment pedagogies, or approaches that recognize and foreground bodily diversity so that students learn to compose for accessibility and inclusivity. Below, I describe rhetoric’s problematic treatment of the body and how it fosters institutionalized oppression. Then, I explain how life writing about disability and race contests dominant narratives. To illustrate, I present two stories, from my time as a graduate student and as a professor of writing, respectively, to identify the salient “anecdotal relations”(Kerschbaum), or orientations to disability and race, present in the rhetorical and pedagogical interactions I depict. Based on my findings, I argue that we must move beyond recognition of audience diversity as an abstract concept to teach writing using approaches that engage critical embodiment to contest conditions that create exclusion. Embodied Deficit: Race, Disability, and Rhetoric’s In/visible Bodies Bodies allow us to perceive and inhabit the world around us; they are sites where the social and corporeal dimensions of

FAQs

What pedagogical approach does the author advocate?

The author advocates critical embodiment pedagogies that recognize and foreground bodily diversity so students can compose with accessibility and inclusivity in mind.

How does the author use “anecdotal relations” in the article?

She uses “anecdotal relations” to analyze orientations toward disability and race that appear in rhetorical and pedagogical interactions, showing how these orientations often rely on deficit impressions.

What problem does the article identify in conventional communication and composition?

Conventional composition privileges movement and normate emotional/logical engagement, while the presence of non-normativity exposes unchallenged frameworks that can sustain institutionalized oppression.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by jay