3.1. What on Earth Am I Even Doing Here? Notes from an Impossibly Queer Academic

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. CONTENTS vii
3. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
4. 1.1 Introduction: Institutional Embodiment and Our Body of Work 1
5. 1.2. Painting 26
6. DISCOMFORT AND PAIN
7. 2.1. Embracing Discomfort: Embodiment and Decolonial Writing Center Praxis 33
8. 2.2. An Embodied Life: My Postpartum Writing Story 43
9. SURVEILLANCE
10. 3.1. What on Earth Am I Even Doing Here? Notes from an Impossibly Queer Academic 49
11. 3.2. Nonlinear Transformations: Queer Bodies in Curriculum Redesign 59
12. 3.3. Embodying Structures and Feelings 65
13. LIMINAL SPACES
14. 4.1. Embodiment in the Writing Center: Storying Our Journey to Activism 71
15. 4.2. As Time Moves Forward 88
16. 4.3. An Academic Career Takes Flight, or the First Year on the Tenure Track, as Seen from Above 91
17. RESILIENCE
18. 5.1. Graduate Student Bodies on the Periphery 97
19. 5.2. Down the Rabbit Hole 110
20. 5.3. Writing in the Body 113
21. EMOTIONAL PAIN
22. 6.1. “Never Make Yourself Small to Make Them Feel Big”: A Black Graduate Student’s Struggle to Take Up Spaces and Navigate the Rhetoric of Microaggressions in a Writing Program 119
23. 6.2. Bodies in Conflict: Embodied Challenges and Complex Experiences 131
24. 6.3. Out of Hand 137
25. CULTURE OF WHITENESS
26. 7.1. Bodies, Visible 143
27. 7.2. Dancing with Our Fears: A Writing Professor’s Tango 158
28. 7.3. “Do Not Disturb—Breastfeeding in Progress”: Reflections from a Lactating WPA 163
29. RELATIONSHIPS
30. 8.1. The Circulation of Embodied Affects in a Revision of a First-Year Writing Program 169
31. 8.2. More Bodies Than Heads: Handling Male Faculty as an Expectant Administrator 184
32. 8.3. About a Lucky Man Who Made the Grade 188
33. TRAUMA
34. 9.1. A Day in the Life: Administering from a Position of Privileged Precarization in an Age of Mass Shootings 195
35. 9.2. When Discomfort Becomes Panic: Doing Research in Trauma as a Survivor 208
36. 9.3. Embodied CV (Abridged) 212
37. CANCER AND DEATH
38. 10.1. WPAs and Embodied Labor: Mina Shaughnessy, (Inter)Personal Labor, and an Ethics of Care 219
39. 10.2. Somatophobia and Subjectivity: Or, What Cancer Taught Me about Writing and Teaching Writing 237
40. 10.3. A Scholar Anew: How Cancer Taught Me to Rekindle My Embodiment Research 241
41. 10.4. A Comp Teacher’s Elegy: To Carol Edleman Warrior 244
42. 10.5. Born for This 248
43. Index 255