Immanent Interbodies: Composing Disability through Embodied Choragraphy

In this article, I argue that many praxes of composition stumble into pitfalls of ableism built into the default computer technologies that classrooms employ. Writing software and hardware writ large typically conflate the particularities of embodiment with the generality of “the body” equipped to succeed by standards of normalcy. Therefore, I propose a trajectory away from idealized interfaces, and toward immanent “interbodies,” which more fully account for embodiment's contradictive mutabilities. Such work requires strategies for composing disability to draw attention to the embodied ways that many composition practices are performed in writing processes. Composing disability, I argue, makes our writing more like our bodies by subverting the standard use of writing technologies that construct classroom discourses. These praxes contribute to embodied choragraphy, which calls into question ableist pedagogies. Through wide citation of diverse scholarship and description of classroom exercises utilizing videogames and related media, this article challenges the fields’ commitment to computers and composition, and questions what versions of embodiment it finds value in.