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Articles Conference Reviews |
A.38 Listening To/For Embodied RhetoricsA.38 Listening To/For Embodied Rhetorics: Making Meaning across Difference as an Act of Alliance Building Gabriela Raquel Ríos, Texas A&M University. “Transforming Cholita: Border Thinking, Technologies of the Body, and Indigenous Bolivian Women Wrestlers in the Lucha Libre.” Gabriela Raquel Ríos introduced me, and perhaps others in the audience, to the Lucha Libre, a Mexican-style wrestling match that, as Ríos explained, is becoming increasingly popular in Bolivia. The Lucha Libre, however, is marked by what Ríos called “the coloniality of power,” especially when considering the “cholitas,” the female wrestlers. Many decolonial theorists have begun to analyze the Lucha Libre as heteropatriarchal, but Ríos asks, instead, what brings these women to the ring? What motivates them? Drawing attention to the gendered and embodied performances by the cholitas, Ríos argues that we might queer the space of the wrestling ring. As these women are participating in what is often seen as a traditionally masculine sport, they challenge notions of gendered space; yet, within that space, they sometimes reinforce, challenge, and subvert traditional gender norms. Additionally, cholitas sometimes fight male wrestlers. And although the matches are scripted, audience desire can affect the outcome of the match. Wrestlers, then, must be well-attuned to the coded movements of their opponents’ bodies, speaking in code about the revised (or not revised) conclusion to the wrestling match. In all of these ways, Ríos argued, the Lucha Libre provides a productive arena for border thinking. Stephanie Wheeler, Texas A&M University. “Music as a Universal Language?: Challenging Abelism in the Construction of the Language of Music and Embodied Forms of Experience.” Many of us have heard that music is a universal language. In her presentation, Stephanie Wheeler complicated that notion. Music, she reminded us, is also bodily. Of course music is made in and through the body and is experienced through the body, but Wheeler also noted that there are particular ways in which bodies are expected to move to music, perhaps especially when performing in public. Wheeler related the story of her disabled sister who badly wanted to join the church choir but was denied that opportunity because of the way her body moved. These “undisciplined” movements were deemed too distracting, too unsettling. Wheeler used this distressing story to draw attention not only to the ways in which her sister was discriminated against, but also to the ways in which much music privileges assumptions based on abelism and bodies that are symmetrical and balanced. Wheeler explained that disabled musicians provide an opportunity for fragmentation in music, opening up concrete ways in which many able-bodied people might be able to hear an experience and a perspective that is too often silenced. Garrett Wedekind Nichols, Texas A&M University, College Station. “How You Live Your Life Behind Closed Doors: Valuing Feeling as Partial Perspective in Understanding Embodied Rhetorics.” Drawing on his own experience with and feelings about coming out to his friends, Garrett Wedekind Nichols supplements the work of Krista Ratcliffe (cross-cultural rhetorical listening) and Donna Haraway (partial perspective) by arguing for the importance of subjective feeling as a trope for both personal and cultural experience. Deviating from culturally sanctioned standards of feeling, argued Nichols, often brings a sense of shame. Nichols defines feeling as both physiological emotional response, but these responses are also culturally coded. The way we interpret feeling, according to Nichols, is dependent upon our always shifting embodied and social subjectivities. Feeling, however, is not “mere” relativism. Nichols argues for relativism as a productive starting point, but reminds us that embedded within relativism is relations. Feelings, argues Nichols, are always in relation to cultural discourses. Recognizing feelings as partial perspectives in relations to cross-cultural rhetorical listening can then help us better analyze how we understand ourselves and our relations with others. |