Critical Embodiment Approaches to Antiracist Rhetorical Praxis

Euro-western tradition has long habituated a division between the body and the mind, at best confining the body to the phenomenological background, at worst dismissing the body as a hindrance to truth. Speech is privileged while the body that speaks is erased. Yet racism and other isms obtain through bodily habit, manifesting as rhetorical, spatial, temporal, affective, and embodied phenomena. As a result of this deliberate contradiction, racism becomes largely known as prejudicial language over the structural conditions that confer its rhetorical power. In response, this presentation stresses the need for critical embodiment approaches to rhetorical analysis and practice. Drawing from critical race theory, disability studies, and decolonial theory/activism, critical embodiment approaches counter impressions of knowledge as universal, objective, and disembodied, to underscore respect for our own corporeality and that of others, particularly that of multiple marginalized peoples.