A Tribute to My Dyslexic Body, As I Travel in the Form of a Ghost

Abstract

In schooling structures concerned with a mind/body divide, various intelligences and voices are pathologized. There is a plethora of knowledge that tells a powerful fiction about how we are unable to learn. Unfortunately, this fairy-tale is not experienced as fiction but as truth. Sometimes I slip between the two, where ghostly forms thrive, where we can begin work to recognize the potential in dyslexic ways of knowing (Gordon 1997, 38). It is only after we begin to recognize these hauntings that we can begin to imagine how the category of learning disability is a political one. Ultimately, I hope to make visible the narrowness in the ideal academic body, and open up new potentials for sensual (sense-making) embodied academic labor.