Students, Teachers, Scholars, Storytellers: Exploring Embodiment through Social Constructs Darlene Johnston, Kristin LaFollette, and Stephen Ohene-Larbi Stories, like good scholarly monographs, explore connections underlying surface diversity. —Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory Katie Manthey and Maria Novotny begin their 2014 article “Telling Our Stories: Women’s Studies and Embodied Rhetorical Subjectivities” by stating the following: “Katie Manthey is a fat girl. Maria Novotny is infertile. We choose to start our piece about why women’s studies is important with these personal statements because they are powerful; these statements contain subjectivities that we, as the authors of this piece, currently embody.”1 At first, reading these statements can be uncomfortable. The authors continually point to these aspects of their identities as simultaneously bringing grief, becoming part of their scholarship and scholarly identities, and “viewing the intersections of the personal and the professional as a unique methodological framework.”2 As scholars, teachers, and professionals, what we embody impacts our experiences with ourselves, our students, and our colleagues, and this understanding is what led us to tell these stories. Manthey writes that “everyday rhetorical practices of fat and (in)fertility are areas of scholarship that have been viewed as ‘unscholarly.’ However, as graduate students participating in these communities, we understand that our own ways of knowing are informed from these community experiences.”3 We are graduate students. We are teachers. We are scholars. And we are also human beings with unique backgrounds, families, experiences, and bodies. The ways we think about and relate to our bodies come through in our scholarship, in our classrooms, and in our day-to-day lives. Our relationships and experiences with our bodies influence our teaching and scholarship just as much as our education and field of study. We are studying and teaching rhetoric and writing, but we inhabit those spaces and perform those roles with our backgrounds and bodies in mind. Currently, we are third-year graduate students in a doctoral program at a university in rural Ohio. We write and research and present our scholarship. During a graduate seminar on research methodologies, our professor asked us to get into groups and talk about the ways we saw embodiment impacting
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