The embodied literacies of collegiate football players

College writing classrooms across the curriculum are becoming recognized by scholars in composition and rhetoric as complex spaces of overlapping communities and intersecting ideologies. Nevertheless, social constructions of the student-athlete that separate the mind and body are still present in higher education and in our writing classrooms, influencing the way we evaluate the textual practices of student-athletes. The literacies that are connected to the body which student-athletes bring into the writing classroom and the relationship between these embodied literacies and the textual practices of student-athletes produce layers of complexity that have not received the attention they deserve.;Drawing on ethnographic methods and case study analysis, this study examines the writing of four collegiate football players in four different writing contexts---an advanced expository writing course, a writing-intensive course for engineers, an upper-division course investigating intercultural communication, and a speech communication course focused on theories of listening---in order to answer the following research question: what relationship exists between the football body and the textual practices of collegiate football players?;This series of case studies suggests that the bodies of collegiate football players are connected to the discourses they write. It suggests that the body as weapon and body as machine are important elements of the somatic literacy emerging from the sport of football; balance, containment, and force as metaphorical image schemata are important elements of the polyscopic literacy emerging from a football team as a cultural space. Although not all football players move out of their athletic community with these same embodied literacies, the degree to which a football player's personal experience fosters lateral narratives affects his relationship to these embodied literacies.;This study suggests that there are three primary relationships between the embodied literacies and the textual practices of collegiate football players. First, the embodied literacies may be a contributing factor in fostering particular textual practices in the writing of football players. Second, lateral narratives may position collegiate football players in opposition to the embodied literacies, and the writing of collegiate football players may manifest these resistances. Finally, since a football player's identity is formed through his history with multiple activity systems, the embodied literacies may be interacting in a number of ways with other literacies. Although these interactions may take a number of forms, such as negotiation, competition, or interference, this study found that the embodied literacies enabled football players to draw on literacies connected to other contexts.;The most important finding of this study is that the writing problems collegiate football players face in the writing classroom may be the result of double binds rather than deficits in general cognitive ability or underpreparation for college-level course work. As a result of this finding, writing instructors are encouraged to develop ways of bringing the body into the writing classroom by becoming conscious of writing as a community practice and finding ways to double-map their classrooms. Such practices may aid collegiate football players in becoming conscious of the literacies connected to their bodies in order to more effectively reconcile their embodied literacies with the literacies they encounter in writing classrooms across the disciplines.