Talk to the Hand: Reading as Refusal

This visual-verbal essay is a modified version of the script for a virtual performance that I did as part of the “Scholarly Reading Practices” session at the ICQI conference in May 2022. It is a work of “autotheory” (McCrary, 2015) that explores the literacy and cultural implications of my mother’s acts of editing my childhood books. I treat the script and its visuals, now absent of performance or verbalization in the context of that panel, as an invitation for future performances by other scholarly readers who might relate to this content. The essay, in short, moves the script initially intended for the author’s performance at a virtual conference into an offering for any scholar who reads, or any reader who scholarizes. This is a laughing abstract, trying hard not to split its sides out of respect for the conventions of its form. This abstract is already falling apart. The author worries it is no longer an abstract and now part of the piece. Having turned to third person out of fear she may not be read seriously by her reader, likely a scholar, she ends here.