ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I focus on verbal imagery, not the privileged poetic devices such as poems, but everyday, conversational verbal imagery. Like its literary sister, everyday verbal imagery provides participants with a sense of place, people, and practices, shaping us as we shape them. As everyday verbal imagery permeates spoken discourse to the point of its own invisibility, it exercises a kind of hegemony over us. Despite its very real power, however, verbal imagery is not wholly deterministic. Spoken images might norm, but they can also offer possibility. Through repeated, detailed language, everyday verbal imagery can create an alternative, even an idealized (if unrealized) potential that can position participants in ways we might not readily recognize. It is this space between the ideal and the real that is a site for agency (see Butler, 1993). By invoking and enacting these images, we can alter them and our positions in relation to them, opening up agency where once agency seemed denied. Whether in the community or in the classroom, this opening is a rich site for teaching and learning.
