University of Wisconsin Milwaukee UWM Digital Commons Theses and Dissertations May 2015 Intertheory: Disability, Accommodation, and the Writing of Composition Adam Matthew Pacton University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Follow this and additional works at:https://dc.uwm.edu/etd Part of theRhetoric Commons Recommended Citation Pacton, Adam Matthew, "Intertheory: Disability, Accommodation, and the Writing of Composition" (2015).Theses and Dissertations. 907. https://dc.uwm.edu/etd/907 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by UWM Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of UWM Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. INTERTHEORY: DISABILITY, ACCOMMODATION, AND THE WRITING OF COMPOSITION by Adam Pacton A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee May 2015 ABSTRACT INTERTHEORY: DISABILITY, ACCOMMODATION, AND THE WRITING OF COMPOSITION by Adam Pacton The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2015 Under the Supervision of Anne F. Wysocki Combining approaches from composition studies, legal studies, and disability studies, this project theorizes a new model of accommodation in composition (and beyond): “complex accommodation.” Complex accommodation frames disability as critical kairos; in other words, I argue that the encounter of disability and attendant necessity for accommodation creates a moment of practical and theoretical dissonance in composition that may reveal under-critiqued norms in individual classrooms, writing programs, and the field as a whole. This project provides the theoretical grounding and articulation of complex accommodation while also creating practical accommodational heuristics for instructors and writing programs. ii © Copyright by Adam Pacton, 2015 All Rights Reserved iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Americans with Disabilities Act, “Reasonable Accommodation,” and Legislated Essentialism 21 Chapter 2: Cripping Complexity: Medical, Social, and Complex Models of Disability 53 Chapter 3: Complicating Composition: First-Year Writing and Complex Accommodation 86 Chapter 4: Considering and Concretizing Complex Accommodation 130 Chapter 5: Objections and Directions 163 Works Cited 184 iv LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Current Traditional Rhetoric’s Textual Production/Reception 7 Figure 2. The Ad Hoc Heuristic 111 Figure 3. Locating Disability 119 Figure 4. The Programmatic Heuristic 121 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank each of the members of my dissertation committee for their willingness to work with me, guide my project, and contribute their unique, expert, and generous perspectives. I would especially like to thank my Chair, Anne, for her patience, good cheer, and sharp eye not only during this project’s journey, but also during my larger graduate school odyssey. I would also like to thank the larger program, department, and university communities at UWM for the many kinds of support they provided. Finally, a special thanks to my wife, Jamie: without her none of this would have been possible. vi 1 Introduction The origins of this project are difficult to trace, and like any origin narrative of myself, it has become necessarily fabular and fictive even to me (Butler 39). That said, all fables worth remembering start with a good story. While still in coursework as a Rhetoric and Composition PhD student, I participated in a writing workshop in which I was asked to develop a previous seminar paper into an elaborated, publishable article. I chose a paper written on Bakhtin and on Nancy Welch’s idea of sideshadowing and got to work.1 In short order, I was as restless as Bakhtin shows all texts and writers really are. The target journal, the peer- and professor-reviews, and the general structures of acceptability encoded in the field of Composition Studies were quietly squeezing the text at the same time I was trying to open it up to new possibilities. I felt that in both form and content the piece was merely another minor variation in a series of similar papers and articles. So, I turned to my teacher. I expressed my concern and uneasiness for my work along with my confusion regarding the actual contours of Composition Studies, a sometimes protean field. In response, my professor issued me an invitation and a challenge. In general terms, she asked me to table the piece and address a number of related yet more fundamental 1 In “One Student’s Many Voices: Reading, Writing, and Responding with Bakhtin” and “Sideshadowing Teacher Response,” Nancy Welch describes the possibilities of approaching student texts—and response to student texts—in a way that recognizes the inherent instabilities and uncertainties in such texts and capitalizes upon such indeterminacy by creating new opportunities for dialogue in texts: “In contrast with the much more common narrative device of foreshadowing, which fixes our attention on a predetermined future, sideshadowing redirects our attention to the present moment, its multiple conflicts, its multiple possibilities.” (376-77). 2 questions, questions which might help me to work out some of the frustrations and anxieties I was feeling. She asked: What are you doing when you teach composition, what’s at stake for students in the composition classroom, and what really is “Composition?” I was allowed and challenged to eschew formal requirements and instead to work through these questions in whatever ways I saw fit. I accepted and what followed was the beginning of a personal and professional process of destabilization. Over the course of a few weeks, I hammered at my computer and at my sense of Composition Studies’ purposes, articulations, and interpellations. The resultant text reflected my sense of the conflicts within the field and within myself as a teacher and scholar of composition. In its genre-bending construction, it probed what the field permits, forbids, foregrounds, and elides. More importantly, it presented students, language, and the text itself as irreducibly complex and only partially accessible. With this realization—with this unstable, confusing, eclectic, and (I thought) beautiful text—I stood in front of the composition classes I was teaching that semester and felt like the doctor from Peter Shaffer’s Equus: In an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place—yet I do ultimate things. Essentially I cannot know what I do—yet I do essential things. Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at heads! I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in the dark. (108-09) In one sense, invoking Dr. Dysart’s struggles with his methods and ends as a corollary of my own as a compositionist smacks of hyperbole, but in another sense the association rings true. If compositionists take seriously the imbrications of identity, language, and 3 rhetoric (as I think they do), then the process, product, and even play of composition becomes (as I say in my exploratory piece) “very fucking serious” (Pacton 77). My exploratory/experimental text and the process of composing it led me to a skeptical, conflicted place thrumming with dissonances. The text both describes such dissonances but also enacts them formally in the ways it plays with various multimodal elements and polyvocality. The reaction in workshop was, perhaps, unsurprising. My peers approached my text in much the same way that I did: with confusion and some degree of discomfort. While they were undoubtedly generous readers, their comments and recommendations pulled the text centripetally towards something that more closely resembled an academic article in structure, form, and epistemological and rhetorical moves. While I discussed how our teacher had offered me an alternative textual invitation, our group still had difficulty moving outside of our frames of reference for how a “Composition text” ought to appear and function. Even so, I continued to experiment and see where the text could take me and the work of Composition Studies rather than focusing overmuch on aligning the piece with my notions of what the field expected as acceptable. When I brought the new text to my teacher, she praised the experimental effort, stretching, and flexing that the text afforded me, and she told me to take what I had learned in constructing the text and rewrite it as a conventional academic essay. Upon hearing this, I was conflicted. I understood that we were participating in a writing workshop dedicated to crafting a text for academic publication, but I also knew that the text I composed was an organic whole. I believed that the proposed revision was a fundamental remediation and that such remediation would essentially change what was important about the piece. I was