Embodying the Writer in the Multimodal Classroom through Disability Studies

•The academy conceives authorship as an intellectual practice.•Academic conceptions of authorship limit students’ authority.•Multimedia composition can foreground the physicality of writing.•Students do not consider multimedia composition to be writing, limiting its impact.•Disability studies in the multimedia classroom may help embody writing for students.

This essay explores whether multimodal composition can compel the academy to revise its vision of writing as an exclusively intellectual practice, a vision that limits the authority students can claim in their academic writing. I argue that without theorizing the embodiment of composition, multimodal composition will ultimately do little to alter the ideal of the academic writer engaged in intellectual rather than material production. The essay advocates the pedagogical possibilities of disability theory as one approach to emphasizing the physical nature of writing and meaning-making in the multimodal composition classroom.