Expression of the embodiment contradiction in Natalie Wynn's ContraPoints video, Beauty

Abstract

This article analyzes the dynamics of embodiment and digital composing by examining trans woman Natalie Wynn's YouTube channel ContraPoints. By responding to Computers and Composition’s 2019 special edition “Digital Technologies, Bodies, and Embodiments,” I use the metaphors of decomposition, recomposition, and uncomposition (Alexander and Rhodes 2012; Bratta and Sundvall 2019) to analyze the video Beauty. I demonstrate how Wynn's understanding of her own body as subject to the gaze of others leads her at various times to accept, reject, and subvert language historically used to decompose marginalized bodies. Building on McCormick (2020), I find that one feature of emerging trans rhetorics distinct from queer rhetorics is explicit grappling with “the embodiment contradiction,” the unresolvable tension between the body-as-mediated and the body-as-mediating that gets expressed as a rhetorical oscillation between affirming and rejecting dominant norms of gender and sexuality. Using the example of Wynn, I argue that queer rhetorical perspectives may not fully capture the rhetorical dynamics of the embodiment contradiction because her trans rhetoric requires making space for affirming identity categories while simultaneously critiquing them. While this article focuses on the semantic content of the video, it has implications for the way scholars study how a video's ideas circulate in the larger ecology of YouTube and in other intersecting online landscapes.