Mel's OSU International Literacy Studies Conference Abstract DRAFT

J. Elspeth Stuckey argues that traditional Western literacy reinforces social class structures. Contrary to the mythology that surrounds and supports its position as a liberating and apolitical panacea, Stuckey claims that literacy perpetuates power differentials through duality and exclusivity, through ideals of what constitutes legitimacy and illegitimacy. She underscores the importance of understanding “the relationships of literacy” to a culture of inequality (Stuckey 59). Similarly, Anne Francis Wysocki argues that “formal approaches to the visual” are neither “neutral” nor “univeral” (Wysocki 158). They are political. They are powerful in their abstract, groundless, taken-for-grantedness, embedded in cultural framework. New media offers the opportunity to redefine and repurpose literacy as a tool of democratization and education. I argue that current traditional approaches to literacy require building a new literacy with new media: a SpiderWeb Rhetoric. SpiderWeb Rhetoric equally empowers traditionally coded feminine visual and traditionally coded masculine verbal principles. SpiderWeb Rhetoric is integrational, multi-vocal, and reciprocal.