Emm's Digital Library

While reading “On Rhetorical Agency and Disclosing Disability in Academic Writing,” by Stephanie Kerschbaum, I felt a complex mix of emotions. The whole premise of her essay, being asked to talk about yourself in an academic setting, feels like a complicated situation to me. I’m not saying I have anywhere near the same experience as Kerschbaum, but being asked to insert myself into academic writing feels like it goes against everything I was taught. I think she opens really strongly by telling stories about people who have asked her to connect her disability (deafness) to her research. This felt invasive to me so I can’t imagine how that felt for her, no matter how ‘well-intentioned’ they were meant to sound. She starts a conversation that begs the question: How often (and what’s the impact of) do scholars that have disabilities get asked to disclose details of their personal lives to people that will never understand on the same level, and never have to do that themselves. Kerschbaum bounces her definitions of agency off of Marilyn Cooper’s idea of ‘pertubation and response’ where “individuals participate in a never-ending series of feedback loops” (Kerschbaum 57). So agency and disclosure as acts in part of an ongoing loop of feedback between writer and audience. This makes her point of the essay feel more approachable and, for lack of better terms, authentic. Simultaneously, she balances her personal narratives and experience with her academic tone, which creates a push and pull that feels very true to the point that she’s trying to make; When does disclosure ‘fit appropriately’ into academic writing? I can’t help but feel in the back of my mind like there’s contradiction in actually writing this academic essay and what she discusses, because it does disclose her disability and would satisfy those people she talks about within it.

Playing Vyshali Manivannan’s, “Hollow Me, Hollow Me, Until Only You Remain,” gives the audience (me) a completely different experience. The writing is often referred to as a game, but feels very different to a game in the usual aspect. The reader moves through the thoughts and pieces openly, there’s no winning like would be expected from a non text-based game. Clicking through each page, I had the obvious recurring feeling of unease and discomfort. I think that the overall messaging of this format is the lack of control that Manivannan experienced over and over, and relaying that feeling onto the readers in order to drive the point home. Manivannan’s interactive text-based game makes you actually live the experience and struggle of being read and misread. The format forces the reader to interact and participate in the meaning-making process, the relationship between the author and the audience. The ‘choices’ that the author gives us, mostly just reminded me of how little control I really had over the situation. That tension that I felt from the lack of control mirrors the ideas that Kerschbaum gives about trying to disclose something extremely personal; we can take the risk and disclose details about ourselves, but we can’t control how people will understand or react to it.

Obviously, both pieces of work discuss topics of agency and disclosure in deeply personal ways, but they think about it and display their thoughts in different formats. Kerschbaum talks about these ideas, while Manivannan shows it instead. Overall, my big takeaway is that together the authors both propose that revealing those personal parts of yourself is about negotiation and can sometimes be uncomfortable.