Is this a conference talk or a literary reading? Either way, I delivered a presentation at RSA 2022 with the editors of Bodies of Knowledge and other authors featured in the collection; given how pressed for time I was between preparing for my dissertation defense and reformatting the webtext into the “shadow dissertation” for deposit with the Rutgers Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, I protected my time by opting to read an excerpt from my contribution to Bodies of Knowledge.

Access copy of the talk below.

The Successful Text Is Not Always the One That Murders Me to Protect You

Dr. Vyshali Manivannan, Pace University – Pleasantville
Rhetoric Society of America, Baltimore, MD
May 28, 2022

Hello, I’m Vyshali Manivannan, and I’ll be reading an excerpt from the beginning of my chapter, “The Successful Text Is Not Always the One That Murders Me to Protect You,” a piece written in bullet points and footnotes.

• Maybe you can’t see it here, at this resolution, sized for this page, but the words are there, calcified in Zalgo’s white noise. With it, a dangled promise, a desperate need to believe, if I just look long enough, if I wait long enough, the veil will part, everything I need will rise.
• I wrote an essay in 2017. It traces relationships between chronic pain, digital imaging, clinical and academic scholarship, metaphor. It argues for a new poetics of pain. It’s 12-point Times New Roman, two columns, with 1-inch margins, paragraphs, section breaks. It was peer reviewed, published after a revise-and-resubmit in a SAGE special issue. Its citation alone suggests rigor.
• I am told the successful scholarly text, the publishable text that will earn me contract renewal, promotion, tenure-track conversion, is the one that kills me. I’m told it comes in unisex, one-size-fits-all, 12-point serif fonts, lines spaced the width of a baby’s fingerbone. It observes the margins. It’s not a Twitter thread, a lyric essay, handwritten marginalia, a series of hidden comments couched in HTML, a bulleted list. It is not, but really always is, one long authorial body told in muddy tripwire.
• I have written and published for several years with fibromyalgia, an incurable, nonprogressive chronic pain condition characterized by widespread pain, heightened pain sensitivity, affective dysfunction, and fatigue. My body is unpredictably unruly, but you’d never know it from my scholarship. The ways I express and account for my pain are radically constrained by the formats we expect and materially reward in academia: logocentric, rigidly formatted journal publications with headings, subheadings, linear argumentation, error-free writing disinfected of embodied language, meaning language that evokes bodily actions and functions, and other proofs of an attentive, rational mind unfettered by the urges of the flesh (Knoblauch 52). Mastery of knowledge conflated with mastery over a body so disciplined it disappears. Pages anesthetized to heights this author can’t reach.
• Linearity is another word for chronology. To extend crip time, the constant temporal shifting experienced by a disabled body, fibromyalgic time is measured in multiple temporal structures, as well as their loss (Kuppers). Here are four categories in chronic illness literature: clock time, biographical time, past-present-future time, and inner time (Jowsey 1093–1094). Clock time is endurance. Biographical time is the disruption of the rhythm of the social world and of futurity. Past-present-future time refers to the formation of bodily experience and habit over time. Inner time is the cacophony of all the body’s metronomes: heartbeat, breath, peristalsis (Jowsey 1095–1098). All of this, all at once, is fibromyalgia: a never-ending, cyclical degeneration, annihilation, and becoming, unpredictably and without end, intercalation that corresponds to no one’s timekeeping but my own. My body of scholarship is an exercise in eugenics, reproducing the illusion of homogeneous (able-bodyminded) academic writers with Western/rationalist notions of legitimate expertise. Even in papers representing and analyzing my patient expertise, I have to make that expertise something to be analyzed in place of knowledges, practices, and processes with inherent value. In the institution, expert is a status attained through reproducible, confirmable, objective analysis; revealing through craft what we already know, that pain is an interior and intersubjective experience, destabilizes that rank.
• Step lightly or enflesh “the ghosts who appear in the stories we tell each other here in the academy” (Powell 12).
• What becomes of the rhetoricity of a body chronically in pain if its selfhood is conceived as isolated, incommunicable, shameful? If our scholarship panders to this by favoring dominant discursive practices that are purportedly neutral to not only perpetuate the illusion of normative scholars but also protect a readership afraid of being either disturbed by suffering bodies or stigmatized for not being disturbed enough?
• The Greek uppercase delta signifies change. The asterisk is used to correct errors, censor profanity, cut off a piano’s prolonged sound.
• The dagger was for cutting dubious content or indicating death. The section sign, for law. The double dagger, checkmate. Each of these signs appears here. But we’re taught symbols only signify in literary texts. In scholarship, they’re just bullet points.
• A well-organized essay would go like this.
  • This chapter attempts to account for the ways successful, publishable scholarship deemed worthy of material reward privileges able-bodyminded, neurotypical layouts that implicitly center Western, masculine, linear representations of attention and thought processing (Cole; Dolmage; Hawkins). Such layouts do not include embodied rhetoric, which implies that bodies are rhetorical and that rhetorical arguments align with bodies and indicate an author’s intentional efforts to rhetorically represent embodied experience (Knoblauch; Wilson and Lewiecki-Wilson). It similarly avoids embodied knowledge, the material conditions of production, the corporeal processes and the default epistemological orientation of the fibromyalgic author, whose chronic pain and brain fog mean her body is never invisible or unnoticed to her. Her embodied language describes the flesh of a world that is palpable threat. Anything can fatally hurt. Everything is depletion. Our expectations of scholarly texts and pained subjects are predetermined by academic discourse, which configures legitimate textual knowledge as antiseptic, cleansed of appeals to sensation. Postanesthetic culture makes pain eradicable and therefore taboo, and so the exposure of pain is seen as a willfully licentious act done to attract curiosity (Garland-Thomson, Staring 63; Halttunen 304). Pain is affective contagion. A text that conveys pain, potentially infectious, imperils the “civilized” reader. “Curiosity in the service of mastery tames the extraordinary” (Garland-Thomson, Staring 64), but if that curiosity results in bodily arousal, the peril of absorbing carnal sensations contravenes academic expertise; it threatens the knowledge-making endeavor. Academic knowledge making, from drafting to publication, vanishes the epistemology and ontology of the chronically pained body, cultivating ableist genre conventions like linearity and clinical language, denying chronically pained authors a presence in scholarship. The able body is represented in scholarly craft as the able mind, while the pained subject, to readers and to academic culture, is a liability. Enabling the chronically pained body to visibly impact textual representations of knowledge challenges scholarly gatekeeping as it pertains to embodiment, morality, and intellectual endeavor.
• As the Zalgo text generator indicates, my text, going up, middle, down, is maxi fucked up. Maybe it’s the closest visual analog to thinking-through fog, thinking-with pain. Simultaneity to the point of chaos, fibromyalgia’s temporality. The linearity and typeface of academic discourse can’t reveal this. To do so would be to violate the implicit denunciation of the composing body (Dolmage, “Writing Against Normal” 119). Hence being a fuckup.
• Maia Dolphin-Krute uses the metaphor of ghosts to describe chronic illness, the body unbound by and abounding with pain that’s invisible to everyone else, saying, “[I]f linear continuity is the absence of disruption, the continuity of the ghostbody is the presence of perpetual disruption” (Ghostbodies 44). The unappeased ghost is eternal, outside of time, but participant in and witness to its flow. Composing with/in a chronically pained body means composing while disrupted by the absence of normalcy and normal time, the ghostly imperative to haunt your own homes. My epistemological production is most authentic when crafted like a timeline perturbed by its own lack of logical clarity. So the straightforward versions you publish with my name, doctored to look less circuitous, look like I didn’t write them at all.
• The successful scholarly text does not convey pain, even if/when the author radiates nothing but.
• Maybe you can’t see it here, at this resolution, sized for this page, but the words are there, calcified in Zalgo’s white noise. With it, a dangled promise, a desperate need to believe, if I just look long enough, if I wait long enough, the veil will part, everything I need will rise.

Works Cited

Cole, P. (2002). aboriginalizing methodology: considering the canoe. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), 447-459.

Dolphin-Krute, M. (2017). Ghostbodies: Towards a new theory of invalidism. The University of Chicago Press.

Dolmage, J. (2017). Academic ableism: Disability and higher education. University of Michigan Press.

Dolmage, J. (2012). Writing against normal: Navigating a corporeal turn. In K. Arola & A. Wysocki (Eds.), composing (media) = composing (embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing (pp. 115-131). Utah State University Press.

Garland-Thomson, R. (2009). Staring: How we look. Oxford University Press.

Hawkins, A. (2017). Why I hate Times New Roman, and other confessions of a creative-critical scholar. In C. S. Wyatt, & D. N. DeVoss (Eds.), Type matters: The rhetoricity of letterforms (pp. 159-186). Parlor Press.

Halttunen, K. (1995). Humanitarianism and the pornography of pain in Anglo-American culture. The American Historical Review, 100(2), 303-334.

Jowsey, T. (2016). Time and chronic illness: A narrative review. Quality of Life Research, 25(5), 1093-1102.

Knoblauch, A. (2012). Bodies of knowledge: Definitions, delineations, and implications of embodied writing in the academy. Composition Studies, 40(2), 50-65.

Kuppers, P. (2014, November). Crip time. Tikkun Magazine, 29(4), 29-31.

Powell, M. (2002). Listening to ghosts: An alternative (non)argument. In C. Schroeder, H. Fox, & P. Bizzell (Eds.), ALT DIS: Alternative discourses and the academy (pp. 11-22). Boynton/Cook-Heinemann.¹

Wilson, J. & Lewiecki-Wilson, C. (2001). Disability, rhetoric, and the body. In J. Wilson & C. Lewiecki-Wilson (Eds.), Embodied rhetorics: Disability in language and culture (pp. 1-26). Southern Illinois University Press.

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1. To contextualize this citation, I was unaware of the race fraud allegations made against Powell when I cited this piece. While “blood quantum” is extremely problematic as a metric, the federal recognition of some tribes has been terminated, and tribal enrollment or even claiming a Native identity can be fraught for other reasons, there were apparently reasons to believe these allegations were at least somewhat credible. I make no such claims myself, as I’m removed from this discussion, and I haven’t removed the citation, either—but I did feel it was worth mentioning as part of an ethical decolonial praxis. ↩︎