All the right moves: Recognizing (in)visible gestures in academic publishing

Abstract

Having worked on a major rhetoric and composition journal, I have found that in order to authorize an argument through publication, one has to make all the right moves. This notion of making all the right moves is what I refer to as gesturing. Gesturing is a critical tactic that "shifts interpretive authority out of the context of everyday human and social activity (our professional practices) and into a timeless, independent, already constituted and structured realm of subjects, works, ideas, and linguistic patterns" (Epstein 65). Scholars who desire to contribute to composition's marketplace of ideas must therefore deny their local epistemology, that is, the material sites of their activities that ground their professional practices: the classroom, department hallways, universities. Instead, they must gesture to an already established set of rules to authorize their argument. Based on Michel Foucault's theory of discourse, gesturing becomes a method for controlling the production of knowledge. Using Foucault as a framework, I illustrate how scholarly journals function as a means of restricting the discursive resources available to create new knowledge. Although Foucault would never assign agency to individuals, I argue that editors and peer referees formalize the gestures required of a writer. They restrict our discursive resources by maintaining the conditions under which discourse may be employed. The purpose of my project, therefore, is to consider how these gestures function as a discursive convention within rhetoric and composition studies. Although recent research has begun to look at and critique the publishing system, no one has addressed or challenged the boundaries of our discursive conventions that authorize editors' and peer referees' practices in the selection and dissemination of knowledge. My project fills this gap by (1) mapping the perimeters of our discourse, and (2) exploring what gestures might persuade reviewers and editors to recognize what and who authorizes their reviews, reviews that otherwise interpreted as standard scholarly criteria used in adjudicating an essay's merits.