Abstract
Transnational and multilingual writing data are characterized by mobile practices that rarely hold still for study. As individuals form and re-form communities in the process of migration, their language and literacy paths increasingly diversify forms of language sociality, goals, or expectations. In such cases, a priori community knowledge around genre use becomes tenuous or nonexistent. Yet, many default methodological orientations in Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, focusing analysis especially on textual typicality. This article attends to this methodological issue by resurfacing and extending a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre. To demonstrate this shift, the article enacts a genre analysis of a multilingual community-based writing workshop, showing how centripetal and centrifugal forces run through workshop participants’ creation of a language portrait. Ultimately, the article shows that tracking genre’s stabilizing and destabilizing forces, particularly from a human perspective, provides an analytic guide to writing practices as they fragment and re-coalesce. It further demonstrates how centering the human handling of genre can orient writing researchers to the instability that is often the reality of transnational and multilingual writing.
Transnational and multilingual writing data are often characterized by interplay among fixed, fluid, and frictional practices that rarely hold still for study. As writers move—for example, through migration—their practices also collide with ideologies and institutions that can render their practices immobile (Blommaert, 2010; Canagarajah, 2012; Horner et al., 2021; Lorimer Leonard, 2018). As a result, the empirical realities of multilingual, migrant lives necessitate research that can account for “mobility, mixing, political dynamics, and historical embedding” as well as “homogeneity, stability and boundedness” (Blommaert & Rampton, 2011, p. 3). Navigating this tension can be especially pronounced for rhetorical genre studies researchers because rhetorical genres are often given legibility vis-à-vis larger-scale social agreements, recurrence-to-typification cycles, and some institutional or cultural predictability (C. Miller, 1984/1994), all factors made uncertain in contexts of mobility. Rich qualitative and ethnographic studies of transnational and multilingual writers have explored how writers navigate tensions between their unstable experiences of genre and an institution’s more stabilizing conditions (e.g., Cun, 2023; Lee, 2022). At the same time, studies document the limitations of these writerly attempts when writers encounter narrowed and reified genre expectations and ideologies (Zhang-Wu, 2022).
Such research suggests that the lived experience of multilingual and transnational writers poses a methodological challenge and an opportunity for studying genre. As individuals form and re-form communities as they move, their language and literacy practices diversify in turn, unsettling genre goals and expectations. Such frictions may quickly transform existing genres or compel the creation of new ones to suit transnational and multilingual needs. Thus, community knowledge around genre use fluctuates and rearranges in an ongoing process of coming together and falling apart—in ways that exceed genre change within more stable settings. Yet, many of our default methodological orientations in rhetorical genre studies, namely North American rhetorical genre studies, have tended to emphasize agreement, recognizability, and community cohesion, what Bakhtin (1981) called the centripetal quality of genres. These tendencies have been favored over genres’ counterforce, its centrifugal quality, which tends toward the “marginalized, heterologic, [and] dialogic” (Halasek, 1992, p. 67). While some studies have taken more active interest in understanding genre’s centrifugal nature (Bastian, 2010, 2017; Rounsaville, 2017; Schryer, 1993, 1994; Tardy, 2016; Thieme & Makmillen, 2017), we suggest that more emphasis is needed on two fronts: exploring what destabilizes genres, and then following the ongoing tensions: the solidifying, falling apart, and coming together again of genre in response to people’s evolving experiences and needs.
To more fully understand transnational and multilingual writing data, we urge a return to friction and dialogism in genre analysis, in which, as described by Bakhtin, “both actions (stabilizing and destabilizing) co-occur within utterances” (Schryer, 2011, p. 34). Specifically, to explore the shape and impact of such co-occurrences for transnational and multilingual writers, we suggest that rhetorical genre analyses further elevate writers’ conceptions of genre even more than has traditionally been the case. As a method, rhetorical genre analysis has a long and useful history of exploring writing’s conventions and innovations from the starting point of what is often most accessible—the text—which provides a discursive residue of genre’s shared agreements between writers and readers. But centering the human handling of genre can reveal the struggles and pleasures of constituting genre across shifting national or language contexts. Coupled with this human focus, we also argue for extended emphasis on the dialogic exchange between stabilizing and destabilizing forces, with destabilization as a core process for analysis.
Genre Methods for Transnational and Multilingual Writing Data
In this article, we aim to resurface and extend a discussion of the centrifugal nature of genre that can more fully account for the (im)mobilities and dynamism that characterize transnational and multilingual writing. To do this, we return to earlier genre theories that offer historical roots for analyzing transnational and multilingual writing data that are useful today. Specifically, we proceed from C. Miller’s “Genre as Social Action” (1984/1994)—with its emphasis on genre as shared rhetorical action—to Bakhtin and then Devitt, redrawing a theoretical line that helps highlight genre’s latent tendency toward destabilization. We then use this rebalanced methodological frame to analyze the use of a single multilingual, multimodal genre.
Rhetorical genre studies’ methodological emphasis on sharedness can be traced, in part, to how Miller’s original construct of social action has often been taken up at the level of study context, data collection, and analysis. Miller’s touchstone “Genre as Social Action” (1984/1994) strategically synthesized work in rhetoric and ethnomethodology, developing a theory of genre as socially derived and socially oriented actions (taking discursive and textual form) that respond to situations perceived to have repeated over time. Importantly for Miller, such social derivation is based on “large scale typification of rhetorical action” (p. 37), wherein writers “adopt social motives as ways of satisfying private intentions through rhetorical action” (p. 36). Put another way, genres facilitate writers performing socially shared actions made typical across a group based on a “mutual construing of objects, events, interests and purposes” (p. 30). Such “mutual construing” is not an isolated event but recurs. And such “recurrence is an intersubjective phenomenon, a social occurrence” that relies on typification of perception and community bond (p. 29). In this way, theoretical precursors to genre methodologies are anchored in notions of togetherness and sharedness, as evident in keywords like typification, mutual, intersubjective, and community.
Proceeding from Miller's foundational theory are a series of methodological habits that, we suggest, have privileged stabilization in North American genre studies. One tendency is the centrality of textually dense and writing-rich institutions—such as schools and workplaces—as primary contexts of study. Dominance of universities and schools (Berkenkotter & Huckin, 1993; Dias et al., 2013; Freedman et al., 1994; Winsor, 1996) and workplaces (Berkenkotter, 2001; A. J. Devitt, 1991; Paré, 2002; Schryer, 1993; Yates & Orlikowski, 1992) likely overrepresents research settings whose institutional needs—consensus, standards, coordination, and discipline—maintain an inevitable bias toward stabilization.
Further compounding the primacy of institutional studies is a methodological lean toward “regularity,” and textual regularity specifically. For example, Paré and Smart’s (1994) methodological intervention for “observing genres in action” proposes to study genre’s “distinctive profile of regularities” across texts, composing processes, reading practices, and social roles available to readers and writers (p. 147). Tracking textual regularity makes it hard to capture instances of irregular genre use during data collection or analysis. Several highly cited studies demonstrate this point. For example, in Dias et al.’s (2013) large-scale study of students’ transition between school and work, the authors analyzed students’ Law 100 course writing by identifying and listing “textual regularities” in students’ essays, which then led them to claim that “a distinctive genre was produced in this class, and by analysing the textual features we learned something about the nature and function of this distinctiveness” (p. 49). Tellingly, then, they interpreted these regularities through established linguistic, rhetorical, and discourse theories. This is less a critique of this important study and more an observation of two ways this methodology pulls toward an institutional center: (1) centering texts as the main site to infer social action and (2) listing typical features as having overriding analytical value. Without investigating irregularities as meaningful and without the students’ own explanations of the genre, we could wonder: How might findings and claims change if genre deviations were pursued alongside textual regularities? What are we unable to see when genres are analyzed apart from those who create and use them?
In a further demonstration of this point, Berkenkotter et al.’s (1988) case study of Nate, a rhetoric PhD student who is learning to write for his discipline, similarly centers textual regularities in its focus on “adapting [a students’] discourse to the norms” of a discipline (p. 35). The authors’ research goal—to understand the role of genre in disciplinary socialization—encouraged an analytic lens that tracked a writer’s movement toward a disciplinary center over time:
By the end of his first year in the rhetoric program, [Nate] had gained increasing control over the language in his texts. His ability to manage information within prescribed conventions is evident in his papers from this period. He had also learned to better accommodate his register to the rhetorical context in which he wrote. But he had learned something else that was to serve him as a writer: he had become familiar with the central concerns and disciplinary issues with which rhetoric program faculty were concerned. (p. 30)
Of note: “increasing control,” “prescribed conventions,” “better accommodate,” and “central concerns.” Like Dias et al. (2013), the driving energy in this analysis moves toward institutional stability, and such an aim guides the analysis of Nate’s use of normative features. Deviations from normativity are interpreted as genre misses on the road to socialization rather than meaningful moments of instability worth further exploration.
But even at the time when such studies were ascendent, tendencies toward tracing stability—how it occurs, when it occurs, and how to assist writers in such processes—garnered comment. For instance, A. Devitt (1996) noted that “genre becomes, for Miller, a ‘centripetal’ force (drawing from Bakhtin) that keeps this constructed rhetorical community together by ‘structur[ing] joint action through communal decorum’ (p. 74)” (p. 613). Devitt points out that the relationship Miller specifies resembles Berkenkotter and Huckin's identification of genres as “the intellectual scaffolds on which community-based knowledge is constructed” (as cited in A. Devitt, 1996, p. 613). In evoking Bakhtin, Devitt elaborated her concern that genre theory did not do enough to “acknowledge conflict and diversity as an important part of genre” (p. 613), calling for studies that explored the roles of ideology, power, and resistance. Such studies would help correct tendencies to focus too heavily on genre’s “centripetal” force and could explicitly “incorporat[e] diversity, conflict, and tension in their sometimes overly placid views of genre” (A. Devitt, 1996, p. 613).
Our article suggests that genre research can fully heed Devitt’s call by tuning genre analysis back toward reading against the grain of stability. Such reading not only tolerates but centers “certain moments” when “genre’s illusion of normalcy may be cracked or exposed” (Paré, 2002, p. 51). This approach resonates with other methods in rhetorical genre studies that foreground destabilizations, namely, uptake studies (Bastian, 2015, 2017; Bawarshi, 2010, 2016; Dryer, 2016; Reiff & Bawarshi, 2016), and extends this perspective to frame destabilizations as a continual and constitutive condition of genre use. Like Spinuzzi’s (2003) workplace writing studies that trace workers’ genre innovations amid organizational “contradictions,” “discoordinations,” and “breakdowns,” this approach follows Bakhtin’s “dynamic tension of centripetal and centrifugal impulses” (p. 20) to center instability. But distinctly, we re‑engage Bakhtin in order to treat genre’s action, as Miller explained in an interview with Dryer (2015), “as the illocutionary act itself, that is, the action in the saying, rather than the perlocutionary effect, the consequence or possible consequences of the speech act.” In other words, Spinuzzi traces writers’ genre innovations through workplace activity systems to perlocutionary effect; the approach we model in this article traces the destabilizing recursive dynamics among actors and genres as the illocutionary act itself.
In particular, we follow Schryer’s (1994) use of Bakhtin’s “paradoxical observation that genres are sites of both stability and instability” to understand how “genres are not only sites of social action—they are also sites of ideological action” (p. 108). To adequately address the ideological action that animates transnational and multilingual writing data, researchers can balance analysis of genre’s centripetal (tendencies toward stabilization) and centrifugal (tendencies toward destabilization) forces by tracing the processes of genres’ solidifying and falling apart from the perspective of users. It is genre users, and their productively messy writing lives, who help check the tendency to privilege how genres and communities come together over how they come apart. Neglecting this latter phenomenon—that genres also fall apart—can obscure the ways transnational and multilingual communities engage with fluidity, fixity, and friction in writing and language.
Further, a concerted return to this type of dialogic interaction in genre can encourage methods that hold together these “two tendencies—unifying and disunifying—exist[ing] in continual dialogue and struggle with one another” (Halasek, 1992). The gerunds in Halasek’s interpretation of Bakhtin are critical: a reminder to center dynamism, observe overlaps, deviations, and residues of “continual dialogue and struggle,” and a reminder to stay vigilant to ongoingness over closure. Because genre, from an RGS perspective, iterates through tensions among competing discourses, researchers need methods that can track how genres and their users mutually endure and evolve (Bakhtin, 1981; Schryer, 2011).
To learn about this genre activity from users’ point of view, we build on standard methods of group interviews by focusing on group members’ relational dialogue, such as that by family members whose lives have been differently shaped by transnational and linguistic mobility. This focus pointedly centers a dialogic creation of genre in situ and supports analysis that moves from genre out to actors, from actors to genre, from actors to actors, and back again. Identifying the unit of analysis as the ongoing movement between centripetal and centrifugal helps resist any methodological default that privileges unification or completion. Such analytic “tacking” (Mao, 2019) between artifact (as with textual analysis) and actor (as with interview analysis) can reveal how collective social actions take shape in relation to differentiated, uneven, and constantly changing experiences of languages, identities, and writing. Moreover, analytic tacking gathers the incongruity and incoherence writers experience as they encounter language ideologies across micro, meso, and macro scales in “an eventful process of becoming” (Mao, 2019, p. 336). In this way, tacking holds together centripetal codes like typifying, recurring, aligning, or intersubjectivity alongside centrifugal codes like resisting, discomfort, rearranging, rejecting, apart. Centrifugal moments are recognized in writers’ articulations and in extralinguistic moments. For instance, interviews in particular supply the extralinguistic excess evidenced through tears, laughter, silence, raising or lowering of the voice, and glances at or away from interlocutors. As we undertake many of these techniques in our analytic example below, we also explicitly elevate the genre’s ethnomethodological nature (C. Miller, 1984/1994) using a family discourse-based interview to explore the making, unmaking, and remaking of shared actions and connections through writing.
Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces in One Genre
We offer here one analysis of centripetal and centrifugal forces in a multimodal genre activity called a language portrait. The data are drawn from an IRB-approved study (ID: 4052) of a multilingual family writing workshop at a community language school in Western Massachusetts. The analysis draws from both textual data and a discourse-based interview to offer three takes on the same idea: Recouping the centrifugal helps genre researchers name analytic absence as a presence. Like negative space in an image, absence or lack of genre activity can be transposed as analytically present and important.
The community workshops in which the language portraits were created took place at the International Language Institute (ILI) of Massachusetts, a community school that offers language courses to immigrants, refugees, international scholars, and community members. The four weekend sessions, called the Literate Mending Workshops, were the result of 5 years of collaborative research at the school, and are designed to offer multilingual families opportunities to write about their multilingual heritage. 1 The first session uses Brigitta Busch’s work on language portraits to build participants’ critical awareness of their family’s multilingual heritage. During the workshop, participants fill body silhouettes with colors that represent how, as Busch (2018) says, they experience their discursively complex identities, building first-person or subjective “insight into everyday linguistic practices of bodily and emotional language experience” (p. 4). 2 Participants use a body shape to consider repertoires as “part of our corporeal being,” seeking not to internalize languages (within a body) but rather to raise participants’ awareness of embodied interactions with languages as they are lived (p. 4). Using scholarly definitions of language repertoires (Blommaert & Backus, 2012; Busch, 2012; Kramsch, 2009), the workshop group brainstorms what “counts” or can be included as a “language” that shows up in their portraits. They then write a key and a short description of their portrait and discuss it with their family member. In this session, we especially follow Busch’s notion that the portrait is “an interaction-seeking gesture of making visible and showing” one’s language experiences (p. 7). In this way, the genre was taught less as a text type—a body picture—and more as a visual invitation to further writing, thinking, and speaking about lived multilingualism in families.
While this is a genre that was offered as an activity to the group setting, it has become something of a phenomenon in the school, iterating across classrooms, teachers, and students. The language portrait was assigned, in a way, but its unassigned uptake in different classes, appearing as different body shapes and representations, indicates that it is a genre with social staying power at the school—the language portrait is doing genre work in this multilingual community.
In pursuit of understanding how these multilingual and multimodal portraits reveal genre’s centripetal and centrifugal movements, we focus here on the portraits and subsequent group interview of one daughter/mother pair, Cynthia and Ceci. Cynthia is an ILI teacher and staff member who was born in Brazil but did the majority of her schooling in the United States. Her mom, Ceci, was a bank administrator in Brazil and is now retired and a caretaker for Cynthia’s son. Their family came to the United States in the early nineties for Ceci’s husband’s work. The family identifies as transnational, with many extended family members still in Brazil and with much travel back and forth. Cynthia and Ceci reported attending the workshop to find some rare time to talk about their family’s migration and language history. When they created their language portraits (see Figure 1), they continually discussed how to represent all of this through their composition choices. At their table, they were sitting with two sisters from Ecuador, so Cynthia used Portuguese with her mom and Spanish with the sisters; table interactions were multilingual and often in translation as all four drew and wrote. Our analysis below offers three ways that the centrifugal is present and shaping Ceci and Cynthia’s enactment of the language portrait genre.
Cynthia and Ceci’s language portraits.
A Narrative That Unravels the Whole
Busch (2018) notes that the language portrait offers dual narrative possibilities—to visualize how language is experienced as a “subject-body” and then to step outside their visualization to observe and explain what they created (p. 9). In the Literate Mending workshops, participants move between these stances, narrating the subjective experience of being in a multilingual family while also narrating the social experience of multilingual families. Busch suggests that the interplay of the portrait’s generic elements—the image, the written captions, and the spoken interpretation among family members—“form a whole” that makes meaning “in the interplay between presentational and discursive forms of representation” (p. 6). However, for Cynthia and Ceci, their interpretive narratives unraveled “the whole” of their family story, especially as they moved between their individual, subjective creations of the portraits and their collective, objective narrative about what the portraits meant as a family set.
This narrative tension became especially evident in the discourse-based interview after the workshop, which focused on the creation of the language portrait itself. Interview questions about composition choices in the portrait often led to narrative moments in the interviews. When Rebecca, who conducted the interviews, asked about their portrait’s details or choices, both responded with information about their family life, with Cynthia at one point calling the portrait itself “a representation of my life.” For example, when asked what she drew on her language portrait and why, Cynthia said:
So, for my languages, I put Portuguese, English, Spanish. And then other minor languages that have affected my life. I also included motherhood and fear in the portrait. And, um, the blue hand is pretty important to me. It’s my English hand, and it’s the one that’s up so it kind of inspired me to think that, um, in English I am always asking for clarification for myself and others around me, so this picture kind of helped me like, ok I have a question. I am known as the person that–
–has a question.
–and, also my legs are English. Because that is what keeps me moving in this busy world. I put my feet different colors: Portuguese and Spanish because my feet and my hips is where dance movement is. My other hand is Portuguese and Spanish because this is my helping hand so I help others that speak Spanish and Portuguese.
Cynthia is mapping her languages in terms of utility, narrating metonymically her languages as practice—legs to move; hands to help. Her languages mix and overlap as they move toward her core, with the written text surrounding but separate from her body. The portrait demonstrates Cynthia’s self-identification as a mover, of languages and of herself through space. In this way, her use of the genre is dynamic but it is also settled—she composes what could be determined to be a linguistically whole translingual identity, in action. The portrait affirms who she knows herself to be, and Ceci agrees with this affirmation.
Ceci, though, created a language portrait that raised uncomfortable questions about their family stories, shaping an interview conversation that veered toward fragmentation. Figure 1 shows that Ceci’s language portrait is truncated. In the workshop, Ceci somewhat resisted the task of the genre. To draw where her languages lived in her body was seemingly painful for her; she often looked up and around, sighed or shook her head. But she did write—including straight across the blank body silhouette that she did not color in.
What Ceci did draw mapped her language identity in terms of what she experiences as her foreshortened language story. She explains:
I write here that Portuguese is my first language and I use it every day all the time, but I love English. I have some problems to talk but for reading, I don’t have problems. The book that I’m reading always is English. Yeah, I have the privilege to learn English here. When I moved here, we moved to Maine. And I didn’t have much friends and I always at home speaking Portuguese. . . . I had a job and a lot of friends and then we moved here. It was hard for me. . . . I worked in a bank; when I came here, I took a two-year leave because I think we was going back.
Ah, but you stayed.
Yeah, but I didn’t like it here, the states, coming here. I don’t work. I stay all the time at home and don’t speak English very good.
As demonstrated in the exchange above, when asked about what it felt like to create her language portrait, Ceci frequently switched instead to a narration not of the portrait but of her immigration story. The story of her portrait could not offer the parts of her language story that held the most meaning for her. Here is a further example with Rebecca seeking to point to places on Ceci’s portrait to ask for an explanation:
So English is here. Spanish is a little bit, and Portuguese is a lot of the top?
Yeah. Because we talk only, everyone in the family talks Portuguese, that’s all, and I don’t have much things to do when we move from Maine because they closed the company. The kids was in college and we decide not to go too far. Then we move here [to MA] for my husband work, and then I started helping him, doing the network and working at home. . . . But yeah, I get to help with my grandson because I feel that it help me with the language, and I feel a little bit more important.
These turns toward the family migration story show not only that the genre led Cynthia and Ceci to narrate their lives to each other but that they were reorienting themselves to their stories as they did it. In particular, the interview brought the gendered conditions of Ceci’s life in the United States to the fore. As they laid their portraits side-by-side and discussed them together, the contrast of Cynthia’s filled-in portrait and Ceci’s truncated one made evident who in their family was able to experience multilinguality and why. Gendered dynamics built into Ceci’s migrant experiences appear inside her portrait—interestingly, as blank space—in ways only the group interview invites into the unfolding family narrative. Importantly, although the body outlines were intentionally designed not to represent gender features, Ceci herself has a gendered experience of language learning. Therefore, the gender-neutral appearance of the language portrait falls apart for her as she seeks to include that ideological fact in her story.
So, while the language portrait activity led participants to join their individual portraits together into a unified family story, with what we might say is centripetal force, the multilingual, mobile stuff of these participants' lives—the content they used to fill in the body silhouette—also led them toward stories of incompletion and fragmentation. In drawing, writing, and conversation, Ceci and Cynthia remembered to include in their family story the in-process and ongoing disappointments of life after migration. Such centrifugal forces enliven the “diversity, conflict, and tension” of lived multilingualism (A. Devitt, 1996, p. 613), but also demonstrate the ways that whole-ness is temporary. That is, although the “interplay between presentational and discursive” modes in the portrait can form a unified understanding of multilingual repertoires (Busch, 2018, p. 6), that formation, from a generic point of view, cannot be complete or finished: a lived family language repertoire has to continue, and sometimes that involves the whole, at least temporarily, coming apart.
Resisting the Genre’s (Im)mobility
A genre analysis of the language portrait also reveals the ways that participants resisted the portrait’s implied emplacement of multilingual, migrant lives. In the workshops, the instructions for the language portrait task were: “Think about all of the languages and varieties you use in your life. Choose colored markers to represent them. Use the colored markers to draw where each language lives in your body silhouette.” After drawing, participants were asked to make a key that defined the colors and write an explanatory description. But as participants started picking up markers to begin, they often paused, turned to each other, talked, started, stopped again. It was not necessarily a free-flowing activity for all. Cynthia helps explain why this might be.
I had a hard time committing. This was like, putting colors down was like: oh! This is too much of a commitment, you know? (laugh)
Because you feel like it should change? Because it has changed?
Yeah, yeah. Kind of like changes.
For the recording, I will say Cynthia is moving her hands all around in a fluid motion.
So, it was a bit hard. And then, once I started, you know, things started flowing.
This phrase—"it was hard”—was used frequently across the study’s discourse-based interviews. When asked what they found hard about the portraits, participants said they struggled to put languages in just one place on the paper; they often blended the colors or spiraled them together. Some participants asked if portraits were meant to represent where their languages lived for them right now, in the moment of the workshop, or where they had lived over the course of their lives. Questions like these opened up the possibilities inherent in the genre, like the ability to visualize all of one’s literate resources in unity. But participants still described the experience of capturing that totality as limiting, expressing a kind of discomfort with the fit of the activity. Like an ill-sized garment, the activity was too tight. To participate while tolerating the genre’s constraints, writers pushed at its seams.
Cynthia dealt with this tension by relegating mobility to her written description, building motion into the way she explained what each color of her portrait was doing and the physical movement it represented. But Ceci resisted the genre nearly in total. While the portrait asks participants to settle into a linguistic representation—to literally stay within the lines—Ceci’s representation exceeds them. She colors her head and her heart as language locations, but the rest she leaves blank. The portrait’s assumptions—that experience can be concretized—and its textual features-–silhouette outline, the physical paper and permanence of markers—required a “commitment,” as Cynthia says, to emplacement. In this sense, the genre’s constraints centripetally hold together how Cynthia visualizes her multilingual lived experiences. Interestingly, the portrait’s visualization process invites participants to slow down—to pause, reflect, draw—in order to graphically re-organize languages that are often instead represented on resumes or in conversations as an enumerated list. But the genre also contains the meaningful possibility of being written over and through. Such dissonance in the genre’s possibilities leads it to fall apart for Ceci and other participants who struggle to bind, even provisionally, language lives that feel so mobile.
Writing, Itself, Is a Centrifugal Force
Finally, our last turn of genre analysis raises questions about the role of writing in the language portrait. Here, writing indicates one textual element of the language portrait activity, specifically the composition of the key and the explanatory description. Because the portrait is designed as an “interface where the biographical and the discursive intersect,” the activity of the workshop is an opportunity to compose the multilingual self while exploring its meaning. Writing is one way that participants traverse these subjective and objective stances (Busch, 2018, p. 5). That is, as they write the portrait’s key and description, participants shift from visualizing the lived experience of their repertoire to making sense of that multilingual experience from a distance. And this writing carries ideological freight (social capital, actual cost, cultural tradition and routine) as participants use it to shift perspectives. As previous work in RGS has shown, writing is an activity “overdetermined by social experience” (Giltrow, 2011, p. 66) and entangled within people’s sense-making impulses at the crossroads of a range of ideological forces. Therefore, in this workshop, writing itself is a driver of centripetal and centrifugal forces—it doesn’t simply contain these forces; it acts as a stabilizing and destabilizing force itself.
For Cynthia and Ceci’s family, the role of writing is ideologically complex. The interview was especially important for contextualizing writing as an activity in their family traditions.
Last year, I gave my dad for Father’s Day a journal that was for grandpa to fill out, like things about his childhood. I was super excited to hear about him, his story. . . . But it just seems he can’t do it. [To Ceci]: It’s just like, you’d probably have a hard time doing it too if I were to give you that book. Or no?
Yeah, I think more because time for me because it’s not that I don’t have time but I cook every day and clean. I do some work and rest and computer.
So, your point is that the occasion [i.e., to discuss the family’s language history] did not come up because there weren’t these writing routines?
Yeah! I thought like if my dad wrote about his childhood in this book that I got, we could talk about it but there isn’t even that opportunity from writing. [Turns to mom]: Right?
Yeah.
Cause it’s not part of our tradition.
In Ceci and Cynthia’s exchange, mother and daughter sort and sift their family’s writing values, giving the writing on their portraits new shades of meaning. Cynthia describes gifting a fill-in book to her father in hopes of creating a conversation around family history she feels they cannot have in person—she highly values writing as an opportunity to create familial connections. But when he does not engage with the book, Cynthia concludes that he does not or cannot value writing: “he can’t do it.” She then turns to her mother to confirm that she would “have a hard time doing it, too,” implying that a struggle with writing is a shared experience for her parents or perhaps even for their Brazilian generation.
But Ceci responds with different reasons for why writing might be hard in their family—time and work. She cooks and cleans, she notes, and after working and resting, she doesn’t have much time for writing. Nevertheless, neither Rebecca nor Cynthia pick up on Ceci’s point, and she ends up concurring with a “yeah.” In just one interview exchange, writing becomes ideologically complex, interpreted as a practice not shared by the family, but then also reinterpreted as a practice not shared due to differences in family labor roles. And writing carries these ideologies into their portraits, acting as a meaning-making tool for their visual representations. Ceci’s portrait shows that her bilingual writing is a mode with which she has great facility, with her writing taking up more meaning-making space than colors or images. But her interview suggests that it is a mode she has no actual time to practice or enjoy.
In this complex genre space, writing was a centripetal activity, acting as an “intellectual scaffold” with which Ceci and Cynthia could build an understanding of family multilingualism (A. Devitt, 1996, p. 613). At the same time, Ceci’s and Cynthia’s perceptions of writing’s centrifugal nature inserted uncertainty and distance into the family’s shared traditions and values. This tension not only makes sense, it has explanatory value, shaping Cynthia’s and Ceci’s differing understandings of writing as core to how they used the genre to understand each other. Not looking away from the dissonance Cynthia and Ceci feel as they look at their portraits together underlines Paré’s (2002) notion that “genre’s illusion of normalcy may be cracked or exposed at certain moments” (p. 51). Our analysis here suggests that, with the heft of its ideological baggage, it was writing that created these moments.
Conclusion
Methodological leanings toward stabilization in rhetorical genre analysis can obscure genres’ falling apart, inadvertently rendering those moments as rare, special, or singular. Pursuing further transnational and multilingual experiences within RGS helps counter drifts toward conventionality in two ways. First, the overt presence of mobility in such data helps reassert processes of destabilization, highlighting genre’s centrifugal nature. For instance, our analysis of Cynthia’s and Ceci’s genre experiences suggests that the centrifugal is present from the start and is constitutive of every engagement with genre. With an awareness of instability, writing researchers can better account for resistant, dispersed, and negotiated ways of acting with genres.
Second, transnational and multilingual data provides additional direction for ways to collect and analyze for centrifugality. Such analysis can treat the falling apart of identities, roles, and relations not as disintegration but as reorganization. For instance, if a genre analysis examines how writers are led into certain interactions and social roles, then the language portrait has led Cynthia and Ceci into new roles of unsettled togetherness as they differently articulate the geography and history of their language lives. The language portrait, its materials and modes, guided Cynthia and Ceci to reconsider how their language repertoires are shaped not just by schooling or classes, but by the complex, gendered contours of their family history. Ceci and Cynthia represented these dynamics differently in their individual portraits, but those dynamics became additionally meaningful when they shared them with each other. That is, family members reorganized themselves—their roles, their stories—when they put their portraits side by side and asked what they meant as a set, or as a visual representation of the family’s collective multilingual heritage. In fact, the collective experience of a transnational, multilingual family cannot always be characterized as a coming together; perhaps it is more apt to articulate the experience of staying together as they move apart.
Importantly, this version of a return to the centrifugal need not be contained to single case-studies, as with the analysis above, or to community, transnational, or multilingual study contexts. While the uncertainties and (im)mobilities navigated by transnational and multilingual writers vividly demonstrate the genre dynamics we suggest here, the full dynamism of actors’ and communities’ engagements with genre offers promise across writing studies research. The analysis above is guided by sociocultural literacy studies’ close readings of literate experience, but seeking the centrifugal can matter for any literacy analysis—much writing activity traverses the social coming together and falling apart of identities, roles, and relations. Thus, we position this method as part of a larger research movement focused on better understanding the unsettled interactions between writers and genres, particularly those that rearrange social actions and spur changes internal to the writer herself. Tracing unsettled relations, no matter the scope or setting, can reveal writers’ social acquiescence and resistance, both to genres and to the social conditions surrounding them. This is an asset-based genre analysis, in which perceived lack is treated as analytic resource—one vital way for genre methods to better attend to the mobile practices of transnational and multilingual writing.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Rebecca Lorimer Leonard appreciates funding received for this research from a Community Literacies Collaboratory Literacies Research Grant and a University of Massachusetts Amherst Public Service Endowment Grant.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.