Writing Dyslexia
Sara Rosa Espi
AbstractThis article explores the challenges of writing about dyslexia outside the framing of an objectivist scientific language. I argue that to be able to portray dyslexia it becomes important not only to describe a personal experience of its symptoms, but to draw attention to the larger “alphabetic environment” (Upward and Davidson, 2011:1) which helps to create the condition of dyslexia. I examine two autobiographical narratives, the performance SLOW by Julie Cosenza (2008), and the zine Fuck You I’m Dyslexic…an unedited zine by Maggie. I argue that these works are both instantiations of performative writing: a mode of writing which does not only describe, but simultaneously does what the author intends it to do. I will show that these performative writings create a critical disruption in our processes of reading and writing, thereby making English literacy newly visible as a system of discipline. By creating textual narratives that both compel us to read, but simultaneously repel our attempts to do so, Cosenza and Maggie engage us in a dyslexic experience: rather than simply describing dyslexia, their texts produce dyslexic effects.
Résumé
Cet article se propose d’analyser les défis que suppose l’écriture sur la dyslexie en dehors d’un langage scientifique objectivant. Je défends l’idée qu’afin d’écrire sur la dyslexie il importe non seulement de s’appuyer sur une expérience personnelle de ses symptômes, mais aussi d’attirer l’attention sur le «contexte alphabétique (Upward et Davidson 2011: 1) qui aide à créer les conditions de la dyslexie. J’examine deux récits autobiographiques, la performance SLOW de Julie Cosenza (2008) et le zine Fuck You I’m Dyslexic…an unedited zine by Maggie. Pour moi ces deux travaux représentent chacun un exemple d’écriture performative, c’est-à-dire un type d’écriture qui ne se contente pas de décrire mais qui produit ce que l’auteur a l’intention de faire. Je tenterai de montrer que ces écritures performatives provoquent une perturbation de nos façons de lire et d’écrire. Corollairement, je ferai ressortir aussi le pouvoir disciplinaire de la langue anglaise. En créant des récits textuels qui à la fois nous forcent à lire et découragent nos efforts de le faire, Cosenza et Maggie nous impliquent dans une expérience dyslexique. Plutôt que de décrire ce qu’est la dyslexie, leurs textes produisent des effets dyslexiques.
Keywords
Have you ever had to explain how you learn (read, write, memorize)? How would you do it? I have to do it in the context of you (you being learning normal (learning normal is the insificiant term I made up for this zine, as people with out learning disabilities are so normalized there isn’t even a term for you)), and what I lack in comparison to you. I read slower (then you), I don’t spell (as) well (as you). (Maggie, 2)1
People who use life writing to portray experiences of living with dyslexia face the challenge of how to write about having difficulty with words. What kind of written narrative can show what it is like when letters become hostile to communication? In this article, I will examine two important contemporary autobiographical narratives which take on the challenge of portraying a “lived experience” of dyslexia. The first is the solo performance SLOW by Julie Cosenza (2008), and the second is a zine called Fuck You I’m Dyslexic…an unedited zine by Maggie, which is quoted at the beginning of this article. I will argue that these works are both instantiations of performative writing: a mode of writing which does not only describe, but simultaneously does what the author states it intends to do.
As media theorists like Marshall McLuhan, Vilém Flusser and others have pointed out, the Gutenberg galaxy we live in is constituted by alphabetic writing and print, and it has forged human consciousness, the way we think and the way we perceive the world.2 In this environment, “literate
people take [writing and printing] for granted, almost like the air they breathe” (Upward and Davidson, 2011:1). Maggie and Cosenza use performative writing as a strategy to make the reader newly conscious of the ways in which reading and writing are enforced in an “alphabetic environment” (ibid). They achieve this by engaging us in a dyslexic experience: rather than simply describing dyslexia, their texts produce dyslexic effects.
In her zine Fuck You I’m Dyslexic: an unedited zine by Maggie (FYID), Maggie wants to “Write something without having it checked for spelling and grammar + make all ya’ll learning normal kids read as is.” (3) What follows is a handwritten text that is completely unedited for spelling mistakes. The sections quoted from Maggie’sh zine will be reproduced exactly as they are written, as I will argue that these spelling “mistakes” are an essential part of the narrative of the zine. She recounts her difficulties in normative learning situations, and critiques the ways that this excludes her not only from academic institutions, but from political and activist communities as well. Zines are hand-made, self-published personal manuscripts which are always printed and distributed in analogue, paper media. Sometimes theorized as being predecessors to the blog, zines are “Halfway between a personal letter and a magazine.” (Duncombe, 2008:14) These manuscripts are created using a diversity of formatting styles: cut-n-paste, typewriting, handwriting and drawing, collage and printing. The visual and material aspects of the zine form an integral part of the narrative, and are what Anna Poletti describes as “autographics.”(2008:85) In my analysis of FYID, I will argue that Maggie uses autographics to augment the reader’s understanding 1. Quote from Fuck You I’m Dyslexic…an unedited zine by Maggie. This publication has no date or full name for the author, so will be referenced only by the author’s first name and page numbers.
2. See Marshall McLuhan, W. Terrence Gordon, and Elena Lamberti. Gutenberg galaxy. University of Toronto Press, 2011.and Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future? University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
of the text.
On an actual stage in a lecture theatre at the Western States Communication Association convention in Phoenix, Julie Cosenza presents a solo performance entitled SLOW (2009). At the centre of the stage, she places an overhead projector onto which she projects phrases which were said to her during her schooling, like “You have five more minutes”, “Time is of the essence”, “This is not your best work”, “Hurry Up”, and “You are just lazy.” These phrases are timed to speed up as the performance progresses, and are relentlessly repeated. Underneath the projection, Cosenza performs a slow, painstaking dance, which contrasts with the speed of the letters flashing onto the screen. In her performance, she wants to express how it felt to grow up as dyslexic in a schooling environment which demands writing and reading ability as an essential part of everyday life. She describes dyslexia as a disability which is “invisible” as it is not physically apparent. Through her performance she aims to “Use my unmarked body to make ‘invisible’ disabilities visible.”3 As she performs, the text is staged in an
interaction with Cosenza’s body in front of a live audience.
Through an analysis of the solo performance and zine side by side, I will trace the ways that performative writing can exist on and off the page. Adapting a theoretical framework from Hans Belting which understands perception as arising in a dynamic interaction between body, medium and image, I will analyse how performative writing can be created in the interaction between body, medium and text in Cosenza’s performance and Maggie’s zine. What is performative writing, and what could it contribute to portraying experiences of dyslexia? In the next section I will discuss the challenges of writing about dyslexia outside the framing of an objectivist scientific language, and argue that performative writing is a mode which can be used for expressing divergent experiences of perception.
Dyslexia in a Network of Writing
There is a large body of scientific and psychological literature on dyslexia that by and large uses a “causal and objective methodology” (Philpott, 1998:1), regarding dyslexia as a failure to perceive “normally”. This perspective doesn’t account for the cultural construction of normal perception, and how it is influenced by our educational system as a mode of discipline. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish(1977), Foucault shows how the end of the eighteenth century brought new techniques of writing such as the examination which was used as a powerful form of social control:
The examination that places individuals in a field of surveillance also situates them in a network of writing; it engages them in a whole mass of documents that capture and fix them. (1977:189)
The “network of writing” which Foucault is referring to here is the mass of documents that accumulate as the by-products of the surveillance of others, the archive of documentation from hospitals, police stations and schools of patients, criminals and pupils. This metaphor of a “network of writing” is particularly apt for describing the position of a dyslexic person in this educational and medical system. On the one hand, 3. This quote is taken from the article “SLOW: Crip Theory, Dyslexia and the Borderlands of Disability and Ablebodiedness” by Julia Cosenza in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies Vol. 6, No. 2, October 2010.
such a person is expected to engage with a learning environment where evaluation of their performance is undertaken almost entirely through written texts. On the other hand, people who are dyslexic are written up by scientists and psychologists, who create definitive documents like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for which defines how to diagnose mental conditions.
How can the texture of a dyslexic experience be told in a way that doesn’t objectify the person living with dyslexia? In “A Phenomenology of Dyslexia: The Lived-body, Ambiguity and the Breakdown of Expression”, M.J. Philpott attempted to provide a phenomenological description of the “lived experience” of dyslexia, arguing that this would be an essential addition to prevailing literature on dyslexia. Using his own experience as a case study, he hoped to show “a radically different manner of Being-in-the-world.” (1998:21) Ultimately, however, reviewers felt that the language he used to describe this way of being undermined his project.
Philpott…appears to reflect a curious and unexpected failure of nerve. He describes his own experiences—which he emphasizes are embedded in his everyday life—using the language of objectivist psychology (eg. he refers to his “tendency to want to use words at the start of a sentence, when grammatically, they should occur at the end of a sentence”) as “strephosymbolia.” (1998:22)
This “failure of nerve” can actually be seen as a trouble with language. There is a scientific vocabulary for disability which is hard to escape. As Raymond Williams has pointed out, there can be times when the problems with the meaning of a word can be “inextricably bound up with the problems it [is] being used to discuss.” (Williams in McRuer, 2008:5) Philpott attempted to write differently about dyslexia, but his project failed because he got caught up in using the very words that he was trying to critique. To be able to portray dyslexia it becomes important not only to describe a personal experience of its symptoms, but to draw attention to the larger “alphabetic environment” (Upward and Davidson, 2011:1) which helps to create the condition of dyslexia. I will argue that performative writing works by creating a critical disruption in our processes of reading and writing, thereby making English literacy newly visible as a system of discipline.
Writing, Performatively
J.L. Austin’s concept of the performative has gained so much traction in the humanities4 that there has
even been what is described as a “performative turn” (Kattenbelt, 2010:34). While Austin originally applied this concept to acts of speech, here I use the concept of the performative to distinguish a mode of writing that does not only describe, but simultaneously brings into being what the author intends to do. In the case studies that follow, I will show how Maggie and Cosenza do not only state what it is to be dyslexic, but create a dyslexic experience for their viewers or readers. This experience is created through the content of their texts, but more importantly through the way that their texts are put into action, or communicated to their readers.
4. Postmodern critiques of the performative have been instrumental in creating this “performative turn” in the humanities. See Judith Butler, Excitable Speech, a Politics of the Performative (New York 1997) and Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’ in: Limited Inc, 1988, 1-23.
Analysing their writing with a focus on how the text is communicated allows for an analysis not only of the writing itself, but also the staging: where is the writing set? Who watches, or reads it? How is it expressed to the audience? While it is perhaps more obvious how writing could be performative in Cosenza’s piece which is performed on a stage, I argue that writing can also be performed within the pages of a zine, where the text is staged and framed by the corners of the page. To analyse Cosenza and Maggie’s works in conversation it is necessary to adapt a theoretical framework which allows for a consideration of the materiality of the specific media while acknowledging that images (and texts) can travel, and are always in motion, even if they are read on the page.
Media theorist Hans Belting argues that viewing an image is a dynamic interaction, rather than a passive perceptual process. According to Belting, all images are produced in the meeting of body, medium and image:
Medium, here, is to be understood not in the usual sense but in the sense of the agent by which images are transmitted, while body means either the performing or the perceiving body on which images depend no less than on their respective media…Images are neither on the wall (or the screen) nor in the head alone. They do not exist by themselves, but they happen; they take place. (302)
Belting is referring here specifically to images. But I would argue that this model can be used equally well for analyzing the ways that we interprete texts. In fact, Katherine Hayles makes an argument very similar to Belting while arguing for the emergent properties of texts, saying that:
Materiality…is not merely an inert collection of physical properties but a dynamic quality that emerges from the interplay between the text as a physical artifact, its conceptual content, and the interpretive activities of readers and writers. Materiality…performs as connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artifact and the user.(71)
Here Hayles argues for a triangular configuration for understanding how texts are created in different media. Her idea of the text emerging echoes Belting’s concept of the image happening - they both foreground the process of interpretation rather than the object. Central to this process is the human body, as interpreter, seer and reader of the image or text.
Understanding the creation and interpretation of writing as happening between body, medium and text allows for an examination of the bodily performances of writing, reading and interpreting Maggie’s zine. This same framework can be used to analyse Cosenza’s performance where the text is projected onto a human body which is reconfigured through this process as a medium to be interpreted by the audience. As I will show below, this framework offers a new way of understanding the writing of pathography and in particular dyslexia as not only representative but also evocative, not only re-inforcing an objectivist language about divergent perception, but interrupting our processes of perception, and in that way questioning the very notion of “normal perception” itself.
Julie Cosenza originally performed SLOW as part of a larger performance, The Turtle Walker: Staging Disability, Crip, and Queer Theory (2008). She devised the performance in the Women and Gender Studies Department at San Francisco State University as part of her Masters dissertation, and continued to develop it as part of her PhD. In “SLOW: Crip Theory, Dyslexia and the Borderlands of Disability and Ablebodiedness” (2010), Cosenza argues that she belongs to a “borderlands” of disability where she is not visibly recognized as disabled, but not able to function in a normative educational environment. For her performance, she wanted to evoke a “dyslexic anxiety” in the audience, and give them an experience of dyslexic perception. How was this dyslexic anxiety evoked? And how is this an instance of performative writing?
Cosenza literally brings her texts onto the stage with her. She presents her performance in a lecture-theatre, using a large screen in the middle of the room to project words. The screen is lit up with type in a white font, Lucida Grande, which is the default font setting for Apple computers.As the performance begins, the screen lights up with a sequence of single words and phrases:
WHY
…are you not trying? This test will be timed Time is of the essence Hurry Up5
These phrases begin at a slow, even pace and begin to flash faster and faster, which creates the effect of making the commands seem more and more urgent. The words appear overhead like an authoritative disciplinary voice, telling Cosenza and the audience what to do. In sharp contrast to the frenetic pace of the words, Cosenza performs a smooth, slow dance choreography. She begins the piece standing at the left hand side of the screen, almost in the wings. As the phrase “Hurry up” comes onto screen she slowly dives towards the floor, then walks on her hands and feet in an animalistic gait. She rolls on her back, opens her arms and lifts up her legs in the shape of scissors. She stands up in front of the screen only at one point, when the word “SLOW” flashes onto the screen. At that point she faces the audience directly, then slowly does the splits and lands on the floor again, where she remains till the last word of the performance, “BAD.”
The texts above Cosenza’s head can be seen as subtitles for her dance, as if they speak her and articulate what she is doing. Except that the meaning of the sentences runs in opposition to her performed actions. These phrases are straight from a schoolroom, the vocabulary recognizable to every child who has ever sat behind a desk. But Cosenza has chosen not to enact what these sentences are telling her to do by dancing in slow-motion, and freely moving across the stage seemingly in her own self-contained world. In the juxtaposition between her body and the text, the audience is confronted with her rebellion. In contrasting the text with a dance, Cosenza gives a bodily dimension to reading, thus revealing how “Perception is…midway between mind and body” (Merleau- Ponty in Grosz, 94). She contrasts 5. My analysis is based on watching this video of the performance, rather than a live viewing. This video can be accessed at http://liminalities.net/6-2/slow.html.
the “intellectual” process of reading the text with a sensualized depiction of “being in the world”. This performance is not simply setting up an opposition between intellectual knowing and physical perception, it is rather showing that such an opposition is illogical, that in fact perception arises up from all the contours of the body and mind.
Cosenza’s performance makes it clear that there is a hierarchy in which a specific mode of perception is privileged in the current knowledge system. The “network” of texts tower over her onscreen and dominate her performance. For the audience, this is a reading experience without the natural punctuation we have when turning the pages of a book (Drucker,1997:99). The words are in continual motion: they cannot be “caught”. Instead, we are required to consume the sentences as they are projected.
In addition, we are trying to catch two strands of action at once: the letters, and Cosenza’s dance. As with subtitles in a movie, it is not possible to focus on both at the same time, so we have to switch our gazes between them. This set up was designed by Cosenza to evoke “dyslexic anxiety” in the audience, a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety about not being able to catch the phrases and what they mean:
After four minutes of reading negative phrases, the audience experiences an example, or reframing, of a dyslexic student’s internal monologue and external messaging. As the performance progresses, the pace of the phrases that flash on the screen increases as a means of producing a “dyslexic” anxiety in the audience…The everyday performance of “invisible” disability becomes visible or realized in a visceral way by the audience. (Cosenza, 2010:5-6)
In Cosenza’s account of the performance she describes how writing is given centre-stage and projected in an unusual way, as movement, so that our reading experience is interrupted. Cosenza’s own role as the perceiving body in Belting’s conception of body, media and text is highlighted as we see her rolling on the floor and being subjugated by words. Lastly, this work does what is says – it does not only describe dyslexia, but critically interrupts the usual formats of reading/writing to create writing as a moving image instead.
Cosenza tries to create a subject position for her viewers that allows them to identify with the anxiety of a dyslexic person. In contrast, Maggie projects that focus back onto the reader, and instead forces us to consider our position as a “learning normal person”. While Cosenza staged the text within the context of a performance space, Maggie uses as her stage the borders of the page. In the analysis that follows, I will examine how writing in text-form can transmit an experience to the reader using the specific material possibilities of the zine.
Fuck You I’m Dyslexic
In the very first breath of the zine – the front cover- Maggie places the reader in an antagonistic subject position. Saying fuck you, I am dyslexic immediately marks a change from SLOW where the audience is invited to inhabit the subject position of the dyslexic person. Instead, Maggie interpellates the reader as a normal functioning subject in the “alphabetic environment” (Upward and Davidson, 2011:1). While Cosenza’s performance tried to make “visible” an “invisible” disability, Maggie’s zine is addressing a
quite different and more insidious type of invisibility: that of the “learning normal” person, the one “so normalized there isn’t even a term for you”(FYID,2). As in other institutions, in educational institutions, “Disciplinary power…is exercised through its invisibility”(Foucault, 1977:187). Maggie determines to make this disciplinary power newly visible in her zine.
Robert McRuer argues that able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as nonidentity, as the natural order of things. (McRuer,2008:1) This is particularly true in regards to able-bodiedness around literacy, where “the natural order of things” appears so well entrenched: printed words of mass-produced texts are spelled “correctly”, and march in obedient lines across the page.
Maggie’s choice of the zine as the medium to encapsulate her text immediately signals a choice to write in an unconventional format. While the content of her narrative presents a divergent account dyslexia, the zine echoes this visually through a formatting which eschews the orderly aesthetics of print. Creative design is inherent to zines, which can be so small as to fit into the palm of your hand, or extra-large like an over-sized newspaper, and can combine drawing, collage, type-written text, cut-n-paste to communicate a narrative. These creative choices add a visual and material dimension to any autobiography, what Anna Poletti theorises as “autographics”(2008:86). Poletti has suggested that to understand any zine profoundly, we need to analyse “the intersection between narrative and materiality” (2008:87).
Reading Maggie’s zine in this intersection will reveal how she uses a performative mode of writing to make visible the position of the able-bodied person. In this section, I will analyse how the narrative approach of addressing the reader directly and using unconventional spelling intersects with her autographic choices of using her own handwriting and experimenting with formatting to create an intimate reading experience in which we as readers are compelled to consider our own “able-bodied” position.
Maggie’s text does not contain a continuous narrative, but rather is composed of different pieces of writing in different styles. She has created a number of “storytimes” which describe different episodes in her life when she has experienced discrimination for being dyslexic. In one vignette she describes being in a university course which required that she memorise by rote the facts and dates of the African Revolution, which meant she nearly failed despite having a deep understanding of the material. In another she recounts how other children in primary school accused her of being stupid. These personal stories are interrupted by narrative breaks where she addresses the reader directly. These pages are written in a much larger hand and openly address “ableism” in relation to dyslexia. For example, one page reads:
People always say their biggest pet peave is: Bad Grammer
I never say my biggest pet peeve is: Abelism douche bags…(21)
In the “storytimes”, the reader is invited to treat the narrated subject as a subject of empathy, but the breakout moments disrupt empathetic identification with the narrated autobiographical subject. In this
way, narrative structure enacts a Verfremdungseffekt, creating an estrangement from the text which does not allow us to get too absorbed by it, but forces us to consider it critically.
Maggie critiques able-bodiedness by consciously leaving “mistakes” throughout her zine in the form of unconventional spellings of words. These divergent spellings change the shape of the word and mean that we can’t read them instantly as a word-symbol, but have to puzzle out the letters. In this process we as readers have an experience of dyslexic interpretation, as the words become unfamiliar. In this way Maggie interpellates us as would-be dyslexic subjects while at the same time emphasizing our otherness from dyslexia.
Futhermore, Maggie’s refusal to spell “correctly” is a critique of the way that English spelling has been standardised. Before the advent of the first English dictionary, created by Samuel Johnson in the second half of the 18th Century (not coincidentally, the same period in which Foucault dates the
examination as gaining prominence as a disciplinary mechanism), spellings were relatively fluid, with “words being spelt almost according to the writer’s whim.” (Upward and Davidson, 2011:5) English words have been standardised in a way that often does not correspond to the phonetics of the word, making it very difficult to write and pronounce correctly as a non-native speaker. The English Spelling Society (TESS) is a group campaigning for the reform of these illogical spellings. They claim that “Neglect of the alphabetic principle now makes literacy unnecessarily difficult in English throughout the world, and learning, education and communication all suffer.” (Aims and Objectives of TESS, 1993) A research study completed in 2001 showed that English words have an adverse effect on dyslexics, and that “Dyslexia is a common problem in English-reading nations, but relatively unknown in Italy.”6 That
is not to say that Italian dyslexics do not exist, but rather that the language is so much easier to read and write that dyslexia is less of an obstacle in that education system. In Maggie’s zine, she points to the fact that “spelling is a social construct in an obvious and literal way” (11) and she makes it clear that she will not abide by these rules.
Reading the spelling errors also made me aware of a very persistent voice in my own head, that wouldn’t stop correcting. “It’s not insificiant, its insufficient! Not relizied but realized!” This superior voice in my own head cannot be switched off, and is very sure that it is correct. The inner monologue triggered by Maggie’s mis-spellings illustrates the point that she is trying to make: spelling “correctly” is a practice designed to discipline those who spell (or perceive) differently.
On my own page as I write this, my computer squeaks mute indignation when I spell something wrong, in the form of a red line underneath the word. When I “correct” the word it goes away. The “auto-correct” of the computer is a pre-programmed visual representation of the internalized spelling normativity. It is no coincidence that Maggie has chosen to handwrite her zine. Handwriting is free of “auto-correct”. As well as escaping spelling control, Maggie’s handwriting also communicates meaning to the reader on an “autographic” level. In a hand-written document, meaning can be communicated through form as well as content, through the size of the letters, the haste with which they have been
6. Scientist Uta Frith quoted by Tim Radford, Science Editor in English teases the brain and twists the tongue. The Guardian. 21 december 1999. For more information about the study, see Dyslexia: Cultural Diversity and Biological Unity at http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j29/dyslexia.php.
written, the angry grooves etched into a page.
While the content of Maggie’s zine contravenes the norms of spelling and writing, the formatting of her text enacts this subversion visually. In FYID, the formatting of the text makes it seem as if the handwritten words want to escape the frames of the page. The zine7 has been compiled and folded
together in such a way that some of the words are cut off the page, so that page 17 has a small column of words leaking over from page 24, the words illegible. On page 24, the text is harder to read because some of the words are missing. While the (mis)spelling made the words hard to read, Maggie’s autographic intervention shows the words literally escaping our grasp as they run over the margin of the page.
While this formatting could be alienating for the reader, there are other aesthetic, autographic dimensions of the zine which draw us in and make us want to engage with the text. The fact that it is handwritten gives the document the appearance of an intimate diary or a letter addressed to the reader personally. In picking up the zine and reading it, it feels like we are receiving a personal communication. We become the “you” that Maggie addresses in her zine. We are immediately positioned as the non-dyslexic, the able-bodied, and so we read the zine through this frame.
Michael Warner has argued that the constant circulation of texts among a public is what discursively creates that public, what brings it into being. “Writing to a public helps to make a world, in so far as the object of address is brought into being partly by postulating and characterizing it.” (2005:64) When reading the zine, we are in one sense a private, dispersed audience, as it is read in different places at different times. In another sense, the fact that the zine has been written and distributed to a community of readers means that we also form part of a public who are sharing in the knowledge of the zine. By writing and releasing this text, Maggie has “made a world” of readers who undergo an experience of learning to perceive differently through interacting with her zine.
Conclusion
At the beginning of this article I questioned what kind of life-writing could portray an experience of dyslexia – classified as a medical condition – without effacing the subjectivity of the author with a list of medical symptoms. This is a challenge for all writers of pathography. How do you relate an experience determined by a diagnosis without being so determined by the diagnosis that it becomes your identity?
I have argued that Maggie and Cosenza critique the identity of the dyslexic person by pointing out that literacy as we know it is constructed and enforced through systems of discipline. By foregrounding these systems that are usually invisible, Cosenza and Maggie force us to think about how our own ‘able-bodied” perception works, rather than allowing it to “masquerade as nonidentity, as the natural order of things.” (McRuer, 2008:1) Cosenza uses the jarring repetition of disciplinary phrases to demonstrate how all-pervasive and accepted it is to bully and chide students in how to work, think and read. Maggie repeatedly confronts the readers about our ‘ableist” thinking. Why should we feel entitled to correct her spelling? She asks
7. I am referring to the copy of the zine I have, purchased at the Canberra Zine Fair in Australia, March 2013. As there are often various printings of a zine, and each is folded individually, it can be that the formatting differs depending on the edition.
Cosenza and Maggie do not only describe what it is like to have dyslexic perception; they also create for their readers an experience of reading with difficulty and in that way give us an insight into dyslexia on a visceral, as well as intellectual level. Both of these works show text as being ungraspable: flipping by almost too quick to catch in SLOW and crawling off the page in FYID. By creating textual narratives that both compel us to read, but simultaneously repel our attempts to do so, Cosenza and Maggie write performatively. They create texts which put into action what their authors intend to do, which is to give their readers an experience of “dyslexic anxiety” and an insight into what it could be like to perceive differently. These performative writings have the potential to interrupt the “network” of objectivist, scientific writing so that Maggie and Consenza’s experiences of “being in the world” with dyslexic perception can become newly visible.
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Sara Rosa Espi is a PhD candidate in the NWO-funded research project Back to the Book at Utrecht University. She has a background in performance studies, and completed her MA at Amsterdam University with distinction. In Back to the Book, she focuses on personal zines, how they are made, circulated, and kept, and what that tells us about our contemporary (media) culture in transition.
