Zona rosa la Badea

This material feminist look at languaging will extract the body languaging and the meaning held therein from the shadows of a FYC classroom. We will dive inward to find in/sight on body. However, it must be acknowledged that as a researcher I cannot access and document the body-based meaning-making resources and the expressions of another; rather, I rely on and trust students, teachers, and my own articulations and interpretations of the body-based meaning-making resources as they re/viewed and re/membered

moments in the writing course. Again, enlightenment and its lingering imprint has primed us to treat the body as suspect. However, as the material feminists, critical space theory,

and trauma studies taught us, the body not only has agentic force, our ability to rely upon it, to treat body languaging as reliable, is vital to our safe navigation of hostile terrain—of which the writing classroom qualifies. To begin to reckon with the histories of violence un/en/folding within the standardization of language variety, I ask us to resist the invitation to invalidate the meaning held in and made by the body.

Again, we have learned, we have been primed to see language as linguistic form. To imagine it as static and unyeilding in its correct use. We have been trained to believe that this compartmentalized and standardized language is given its texture by our bodies, in that it’s heard because our mouths give it shape, it’s read because our fingers push into a page, seen in/on our aesthetic, and the auditory and gestural choreographies of meaning. Discourse in and of itself does not have an ontological status, as they are merely ideas, belief systems, moral, and/or ethical codes. Beyond that, how we come to know a particular discourse is through abjection and imposition—both initiated when one body, already schooled in the discourse, demands of another body to account for itself

according to the ethics purported by the discourse. The shape of a discourse is revealed in the ways in which our sense of self, the world, and our position within the world is sculpted by the reward and punishment offered through recognition or its refusal.

Discourse is able to have power precisely because it can alter our body, yet as a bodiless entity it is immune to alteration because it is not exposed in a bodily way. Authority is the consequence of being disembodied, a voice detached from a body. However, this does not mean that the body does not have author/ity when we langauge; rather, that the body is not one of the intra-acting forces co-constituting languaging.

of how/what has structured belief in the Western world. Turning to the representations of God and man within the Judeo-Christian bibles, Scarry details the ways in which belief in god is structured by his status as a bodiless entity—God is represented as word, while man is represented as flesh. According to Scarry what differentiates God and Man is “the immunity of the one and the woundablity of the other” (183). The body itself stands as an artifact of God’s omnipotence. Each instance in which God alters the human body (i.e., instantly changes Rebekah from barren to being with child or the flooding of the earth to obliterate all human bodies not on the ark) serves as evidence of the susceptibility of man, because of their flesh, and the unassailable nature of God due to his freedom from the flesh. As a mere voice God is untouchable and invulnerable. As flesh and blood humanity is endlessly alterable, and therefore also suspect. Scarry writes, “Everything is at stake in the alterability of the body, for this attribute is at once intensified and lifted away from the body and attributed to God” (194). To ensure God’s supremacy each of the stories offered up in the bible, the word of God, keep separate “the categories of material and verbal, or body and voice, or sentience and self-extension” (194). God’s voice when heard, or the consequences of his speech as felt, is always disembodied, whereas the voice of man is only heard in the form of moaning or dissention. Man’s voice is characterized as “devoid of content other than complaint, their utterances are self-trivializing and dissolute, a form of inarticulate pre-language that carries no power to legitimize their suffering, their hunger, their fear, their doubt, their exhaustion, or to legitimize our notice of these things” (201). Even though we have been indoctrinated to distrust our flesh, to disregard and dismiss the meaning held in our bodily memory, this text will resist. It will unrelentingly place faith in the body-based meaning re/membered

in the beings that compose this multivocal text.

I make space for this faith through also acknowledging that this is a qualitative study focused not on numbers and generalizability, but on the rich detail offered in a case study. This rich detail enlivens language theory and can expand our understandings of languaging, but it does not stand as an empirical examination of sensations that come when we utilize language. The same forces that portray language as static and unyeilding linguistic form, standardize a particular language variety and the weaponize this

standardized language variety, work to de/author/ize body languaging and explorations into languaging that disrupt a monolithic and omnipotent re/presentation of language. While this study is singularly focused on languaging in, for, and with schools, the same intra-acting forces co-constituting assemblages are at play when languaging in other spaces, such as digital exchanges across social media platforms, a town hall meeting, or when gardening with neighbors. While I hope to challenge the tendencies to

compartmentalize and standardize languaging throughout the study, the study will remain focused on a singular context to step into the complexity of intra-action co-constituting forces entangled in learning to language and languaging in schools.