Roughly mid-way through Stephanie Kerschbaum’s recent book Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference, as she reflects on the shifting meanings invoked by her deafness in various contexts, she hypothetically addresses her readers, stating, “When you meet me, you might find that I fit a lot of your assumptions about deaf people and that many of your predictions were accurate. But you might also find that I challenge or resist your expectations” (66). This challenge may well serve as the theoretical backdrop for the new rhetoric of difference she forwards in this work. Her theory offers a revised orientation to difference focused on the interplay of larger identity categories and the
micro-interactional communicative moments in which those categories are performed. In an effort to enrich the study of difference,
Kerschbaum argues that we must resist the “difference fixation,” which she defines as the attempt to render identity as a stabilized and
immobile fixity, and instead devote attention to “marking difference.”
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric