Christina Cedillo (2023) “Writing with Our Bodies: Recovering Pathos Through Critical Embodiment Pedagogy” In Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times. Eds. Rachel McCabe and Jennifer Juszkiewicz. Utah State University Press 50-67.

• Introduction
  • pathos vs logocentric
  • logocentrism: in favor of words and logic
  • storying (can be used in the GSC project)
  • the traditional view: the binary thinking. If one mentions feelings and bodies, it seems that they stand on the opposite side to logos.
    • or to frame emotions as illogical
    • indication: to disparage marginalized communities, since they use embodiment and pathos
  • “Normative rhetorical instruction… to save us”
    • It is more of a calling: call for normative pedagogy to include pathos to guide us.
  • Cedillo’s term: critical embodiment pedagogy
    • center body as source of knowledge
    • take pathos as valued rhetorics
    • recover body as affect as key elements in communication
• Reclaiming Body Knowledge
  • storying (can be used as evidence to support the GSC project)
  • literature review on “bodies matter i n meaning making” or the significance of “body” in rhetoric
    • Barbara Dickson: Rhetorical Bodies
    • Kristie Fleckenstein: “somatic mind”
    • Debra Hawhee: rhetoric is both about the brain and the corporeality
    • Abby Knoblauch: “embodied language,” “embodied knowledge,” “embodied rhetoric”
  • literature review in cultural rhetorics (body and stories)
    • bodies can not be erased from writing
    • BIPOC is depicted as physical and irrational
    • White is disembodied objectivity
    • Examples (54)
      • rhetorics affects real people: pay attention to the racialized tropes and their harm to marginalized communities
      • land-based rhetorics
      • West: writing courses treat writing as it happens in a vacuum
      • from body to affective rhetorics
        • e.g. Black women’s impatience, since it is a result of sediments from the suppressing history: impatience means they want actions and changes now.
      • Ersula Ore: “pushback”
        • “identity-avoidant racism” (for the GSC project)
• Critical Embodiment Pedagogies
  • whitestream standards of writing: one-size-fits-all model, as there is only one way to know
  • “critical embodiment pedagogies:” center body and respond to
    • (1) the mind-body divide
    • (2) invisibility and hyper-visibility of Othered bodies
    • (3) the phenomenological backgrounding of bodies in writing
    • (4) all of these erase the marginalized groups from dominant histories
• The problem: the relation between pathos, affect, emotion, feeling, and body. It seems that Cedillo equates the realm of pathos to emotion/feeling, and draws the direct connections between emotion/feeling and body. The whole essay focuses more on body and make a transition to emotion via one particular example: “impatient Black women.” I am fine with the first equation, but the second is problematic. We can put emotion and body at the opposite to logocentrism, since they are less materialized in text and words, but emotion/feeling and body are always discussed in another set of binary: such as in the mind/body. Emotion/feeling might be the opposite of reason or cognition, but a direct relation between emotion and body is in a rush.
• The reasoning sequence: the marginalized communities tell stories, stories are embodied. The connection between body and emotion is illustrated through one particular example, the impatient black women: the emotion “impatience” is caused by the embodied injustice history to black women communities. One example is weak.