Embodied Censorship: Academic Writing Rituals and the Production of Belief.

As compositionists have constructed a critical discourse on whiteness, they have tacitly theorized how students' bodies can stifle efforts to both reflect on unfamiliar beliefs and critique their own beliefs. While Composition's latent theories of "embodied censorship" challenge the notion that rationality or empathy can enable one to transcend one's own body and thereby fully engage Others' beliefs, they also divorce the body- belief dialectic from everyday social-material practices and conditions of production. Embodied censorship is represented not as a local process but as an abstracted product, with different forms of censorship tied to corresponding types of reified bodies. Pierre Bourdieu's and Jennifer Seibel Trainor's work, when synthesized, present an alternative theory. Bourdieu and Trainor illuminate how bodies, beliefs, and embodied censorship are dialectically, processually produced in everyday social-material practices, such as academic writing rituals. Their materialist social theory can help compositionists design pedagogies that approach academic writing rituals as a site for reworking embodied censorship and enabling students to understand unfamiliar beliefs. One could endlessly enumerate the values given body, made body, by the hidden persuasion of an implicit pedagogy which can instill a whole cosmology, through injunctions as insignificant as 'sit up straight' or 'don't hold your knife in your left hand', and inscribe the most fundamental principles of the arbitrary content of a culture in seemingly innocuous details of bearing or physical and verbal manners. —Pierre Bourdieu, "Belief and the Body," in The Logic of Practice Compositionists who swim in Michel Foucault's wake might have a difficult time taking Bourdieu on his own terms. Indeed, one popular Foucauldian maxim is that it is impossible to take a text on its own terms, because, despite your best intentions, you cannot not take the text on your own terms. There is no "primary" text to be had. Since knowledge is an expression of power, your knowledge of the text has more to do with your relation to power, your "subject position" and your cultural-political interests, than with the text itself. Your attempt to read the text on its own terms, like your attempt to know the truth of anything, is governed by current formations of power-knowledge and their discourses or "regimes" of truth, none of which are truer than the others. The one exception to the rule of power-knowledge is what Foucault calls "subjugated knowledges," those insurrectionary knowledges that have been elided or fragmented by normative epistemologies and the domination of power-knowledge. Spontaneous and fleeting, subjugated knowledges attest to past resistance against domination and enable future resistance insofar as they avoid the self-abolition that would come if they aspired to join or become a new regime of truth. Returning to the epigraph above, a Foucauldian might interpret Bourdieu as claiming that patterns of behavior like posture and table manners are outward manifestations of the discipline tacitly demanded by a regime of truth or a particular formation of power-knowledge. Producing subjects and suturing them into disciplined positions, power-knowledge manifests itself in the regulation of the body, and regulation of the body is a local symptom-cause of domination. Subjugated knowledges, tactically appropriated as a "technology of the self," might enable the individual subject to disrupt the operation of power-discipline and temporarily avert domination.{1} Bourdieu's insights into the dialectical relationship between the body, values, and beliefs are worth freeing from the discipline of a Foucauldian interpretation. To begin, Bourdieu never argues that regulation of the body is identical with domination. Unlike Foucault, Bourdieu argues that resistance to domination is often just as regulated and disciplined as complicity with the powers that be. Resistance emerges as people's beliefs and dispositions undergo