English Teaching: Practice and Critique
Bodily pleasures and/as the text
Margaret Hagood (College of Charleston, South Carolina)
Literacy education is at a crossroads. While
traditional school experiences still prize disembodied experiences of
reading print-based texts as the pinnacle of sound education, informal
learning experiences provide fruitful examples of the ways that visual
texts are read as they are embodied by readers. In this paper I draw
from the literacy lives of two, Grade 8 boys to illustrate how their
popular culture interests become a means of reading their bodies as
visual texts that ultimately define them and allow them to define
themselves in relation to their peers. Using poststructural theories,
data are analyzed using Barthes’ theories of plaisir, jouissance, and
the anachronic subject, Foucault’s theory of power, and Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory of the assemblage. The paper also discusses a
projection for future conceptualizations of literacy education, one
that validates youngsters’ readings of their embodiment of visual texts
as they use print-based texts to create notions of self.