Kress, Wysocki, McDonagh and Gender

Kress’s notion of transformation made me think of lesbian feminist poet and critic Adrienne Rich, among other feminists, who consider the ways in which the notion of agency can resist a particular kind of “victimhood” and work to transform the power structure that patriarchy has constructed. As I read the responses to Kress, I noticed Wysocki and McDonagh, Goggin, and Squire also bring up feminist issues. Both take issue with the binary distinction Kress makes between print and image. Wysocki demonstrates the visuality of text by considering the spacing and the page layout as well as the order, based on emphasis, foreground, and background, of images. McDonagh et al. argue that images are primarily symbolic, rather than specific contra Kress’s notion that the verbal is a bunch of empty signifiers waiting for readers to fill it with meaning and images are specific. Wysocki makes a really interesting move when she maps the assumptions Kress, and our society, makes about the verbal and the visual—when she maps these onto notions of binary gender identities: “If human practices do entwine, as I have been arguing, to the extent that the spacing of lettershapes on a piece of paper reflects and helps continue unquestioned restrictions on behavior or that a habit of understanding words and images as opposites reflects and helps continue beliefs about relations between men and women, then it is possible that trying new spaces on pages or exploring the visuality of alphabetic text can be seeds for changes in such practices and beliefs” (59). Wow! She offers this new understanding of the visual and verbal as a way to rethink gender relations. This may be seen as a better understanding of the transformation that Kress begins to articulate in his theory. It does seem that the visual has been associated with all the things that women have been associated under a polarized understanding of gender (what feminist and queer theorist Judith Butler calls the heteosexual matrix of gender relations that require there to be opposites). “Common sense” views seem to suggest that the visual is immanent (connected to earth and body), whereas the verbal is abstract (connected to the mind). This is representative of the Cartesian mind/body split. However, as McDonagh explains, it is the emotional and symbolic that has drawn professionals in the visual design field to that line of work (82). Philosopher Ken Wilbur argues that to overcome the mind/body split that we inherit through the Western tradition, we must re-integrate the body, earth, and emotion into our lives. He calls this becoming the centaur—being a hybrid fully connected to mind and body in conscious awareness. Wysocki seems to be suggesting a way to use writing technology to become a centaur. Any thoughts on gender in these pieces??