The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Departments of English and Women’s Studies A RHETORIC OF TOUCH: DISABILITY AND THE RESHAPING OF RHETORICAL BODIES A Dissertation in English and Women’s Studies by Shannon Walters Copyright 2008 Shannon Walters Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii The dissertation of Shannon Walters was reviewed and approved* by the following: Susan M. Squier Julia Gregg Brill Professor of Women’s Studies and English Chair of Committee and Thesis Adviser John L. Selzer Professor of English Stuart Selber Associate Professor of English Carolyn Sachs Professor of Rural Sociology and Women’s Studies Michael Berube Paterno Family Professor of Literature and Comparative Literature Robert R. Edwards Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature Chair of Graduate Program *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract In “A Rhetoric of Touch,” I ask how rhetorical and composition studies can value the contributions of contemporary writers with disabilities. I trace a trend of tactile rhetorics among today’s disabled rhetors, such as Temple Grandin, Nancy Mairs, Dawn Prince-Hughes and Eli Clare, all of whom use the sense of touch in order to enable rhetorical production. After exploring the dominant tradition’s discomfort with touch and disability, I show that disability is actually integral to the shaping of the able orator. Theories from disability studies regarding how the disabled body has been medicalized, rehabilitated, and normalized illuminate how rhetoric and rhetorical bodies have been similarly treated by Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian. As an alternative to this tradition, I redefine the sophistic concepts of logos, metis, and kairos as tactile rhetorics, arguing that these flexible practices can reshape rhetoric for a wide range of rhetors. I draw on Empedocles’ theories of fleshy logos and integrate current writing by people with disabilities to redefine logos as multi logos. Similarly, I blend sophistic theories and disabled rhetorics to redefine metis as tactile intelligence (rather than cunning intelligence) and kairos as tactile timing (rather than simple timing). I construct a theory of “rhetoric reshaped” which stretches contemporary rhetoric and composition studies to respond to the needs and contributions of disabled rhetors. Rhetoric reshaped transforms the traditional rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos and logos and the traditional canons of invention, arrangement, style, delivery and memory, for a range of rhetorical situations. I coordinate between neo-sophistic studies, feminist rhetorics and disability studies to explore the possibilities disabled rhetors offer to contemporary rhetorical and composition studies. iv Table of Contents List of Figures ………………………………………………………………………………….. v Acknowledgements ……………..…………………………………………………….………… vi Introduction Untangling Disability, Rhetoric and Touch …………………………………………………….. 1 Chapter 1 Rhetoric as Dis/Ability in the Dominant Tradition ……………………………………….…… 30 Chapter 2 Socio-Cultural Sensual Models in Disability Studies and Sophistic Rhetoric ……………....… 78 Chapter 3 Empedocles and the Redefinition of Logos for Disabled Rhetors ……………………...…….. 115 Chapter 4 Metis and the Reshaping of the Appeals for Disabled Rhetors ……………………………..... 154 Chapter 5 Kairotic Reshapings of the Canons for Disability ……………………………………...…….. 193 Conclusion Rhetoric Reshaped …………………………………………………………………………..... 236 Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………………..…. 251 v List of Figures Figure 1: Rhetorical Reshapings for a Rhetoric of Touch ………………………………. 242 vi Acknowledgements My partial attempt at acknowledging all of the support that enabled me to complete this project will surely only scratch the surface. I would like to thank my family: my parents Elaine and Charles Walters and my brother and traveling companion, Casey Walters. Your support, love and encouragement are invaluable. Thanks for understanding. I also thank Susan Squier, the director of this dissertation and mentor throughout my time at Penn State. I am continually amazed at your energy and enthusiasm as a scholar, teacher, community member and mentor. I think I am only just beginning to understand all that you have taught me. Thank you for your patience and your rigor. Thank you also to Jack Selzer, who convinced me to come to Penn State, as well as Stuart Selber, who introduced me to technical writing, and Michael Berube, who guided my interest in disability studies. This project was also shaped by the lessons I continue to learn from my friends, many of whom were also my gradate school colleagues. Thank you to my dissertation group, especially Marika Siegel and Melissa Littlefield, and to my Rock Ethics Group. Thanks in particular to my wonderful friends: Sarah Birge, Liz Kuhn, Erin Newcomb and Jessica Raley. Weight lifting with Sarah helped me relieve (some) stress, chatting with Liz always made me laugh, living with Erin and Jess and our three cats was fun, as were our late night draft workshop sessions. Thank you to my friends from college, Kelly Koscuiszka and Carly Zebuhr, for driving out so many times to the middle of Pennsylvania to visit me. Thanks especially to my friend from middle school, Jennifer Chang, who made sure I had fun this summer while revising in DC. Also, thanks to baseball, cats, travel, and running, which definitely helped me make it through. 1 Introduction: Untangling Disability, Rhetoric and Touch Touch represents a confirmation of our boundaries and separateness while permitting a union or connection with others that transcends physical limits. For this reason, of all the communication channels, touch is the most carefully guarded and monitored, the most infrequently used, yet the most powerful and immediate (S. Thayer Book of Touch 18). In one of the most well-known scenes of disability in recent history, Helen Keller, a deaf-blind young girl who had previously been deemed unruly, retarded and uneducable, experiences a communication breakthrough with her teacher Annie Sullivan, when she makes the miraculous connection between the letters that Sullivan signs into her hand and the feeling of cool water running over her hand from a pump. In her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller describes her experience: As the cool stream gushed over one hand [Miss Sullivan] spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that ‘w-a-t-e-r’ meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! There were barriers still, it is true, but barriers that could in time be swept away. (35) Despite the fact that this scene, immortalized repeatedly on stage and on film in The Miracle Worker, is probably one of the most wide recognized and recalled scenes of disability in the United States, it points to gaps in knowledge, research and scholarship in the two main disciplines it so interestingly weaves together. The fields of rhetoric and composition and 2 disability studies have yet to fully explore the sense of touch, poignantly immortalized in Keller’s introduction into symbolic language, but noticeably absent from studies of language and disability. Touch becomes the main way in which Keller learns the world, as she writes, “I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world” (36). Despite her growing sense of confidence with language, Keller was prone to attacks on the credibility and authenticity of her character as a rhetor. Keller wrote her autobiography in collaboration with her teacher, Annie Sullivan, to whom she was extremely close, and Sullivan’s husband, John Macy. Charges of plagiarism and doubts regarding the authenticity of her work followed her throughout much of her life. People doubted her as a rhetor, questioned the credibility of her ethos, and were skeptical of her abilities. They suspected that others were contributing too much to her rhetorical success. As Keller’s example indicates, rhetoric produced in close connections, especially physical, embodied collaboration, elicits anxieties regarding authorship and authenticity. For this reason and others I will explore in the following chapters, touch has been ignored and denigrated in rhetorical studies because the sense of touch disturbs basic assumptions regarding the status of the ideal or able rhetor. Touch calls into question the accepted model of the ideal orator shaped by the rhetorical tradition, who creates communication independently, ably, and without messy interconnections between bodies. Touch disturbs the boundaries of bodies and of rhetoric. Although both rhetorical studies and theoretical studies of disability have largely ignored the sense of touch, a trend exists among contemporary writers with disabilities who use touch to enable communication, which I term “a rhetoric of touch,” or as “tactile rhetorics.” The kinship 3 that Keller describes through touch inaugurates us into an underappreciated but valuable nexus of rhetorical strategies shared among a variety of disabled rhetors. The