Lit Review: McRuer
McRuer posits that composing itself (as a practice) is messy and dis-composed; he then advocates for connecting the agitation of the composing, laboring body into composition classrooms (49) and even claims that enforcing “programmatic” and compulsory performance of rote forms and docile bodies (51) in composition classrooms, we are serving capitalist interests. This service strips composition of any radical political possibilities, and composing’s innate connection to embodiment renders this disconnect highly problematic.
For McRuer, it is in composition that we have a political obligation to challenge hegemonic identities and narratives; there is an opportunity for embodiment to be taken seriously, and McRuer holds that engaging student writers in moments of otherness, what he terms “queer/disabled moments,” opens possibilities of resistance. He further advocates for queering or “cripping” texts, challenging essentialist ideologies within cultural artifacts (59), invoking Sedgwick to explicate his use of “queer” as a verb: “‘the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances… [that] aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically’” (57).
