On the Violence of the Imagined Reader

[Appendix to “On Listening as an Epistemic Condition: Transnational Bodies at the Limits of Interpretation — Notes from an Encounter with Frida”]

This appendix exists because even On Listening as an Epistemic Condition (currently under review and therefore not publicly shareable) was necessarily partial.

That essay insists that the body cannot be cut out of knowledge production, that listening is an epistemic condition rather than a metaphor, and that certain encounters—such as my encounter with Frida—open up moments where embodied knowledge exceeds interpretation. Yet even there, something had to be cut.

Not because it was irrelevant, but because the academic container does not permit everything to remain. Certain bodies, temporalities, and modes of attention could only be gestured toward, not fully held. This appendix gathers what was excised—not as supplementary material, but as what the original text could not house without collapsing under the demands placed upon it.

The academic container itself is structured through the removal of the body. Its norms—clarity, linearity, neutrality, accessibility, and “consideration of the reader”—are not neutral values but techniques of filtration. They determine which bodies are allowed to speak without explanation, which affects can remain unmarked, and which modes of knowing are rendered excessive, unsafe, or illegible.

What follows are not isolated grievances but recurring scenes through which this structure becomes visible.

1. “People Will Think…” — The Violence of the Imagined Majority

Throughout my doctoral training, one phrase appeared with remarkable consistency in feedback from faculty: “People will think…[badly of this part because of misunderstanding]”

Who are these people?

They are never named. They are invoked as a collective, an abstract majority whose anticipated discomfort justifies preemptive correction. Yet in practice, “people” almost always resolves into the speaker themselves. The imagined reader is not a diverse community but a projection of one’s own location, preferences, and limits—presented as objective concern.

Communication fails at this point, not because critique is unwelcome, but because the structure of critique treats clarification as personal attack rather than as an invitation to understand what is actually at stake. The moment one asks who this “people” is, the conversation collapses.

This dynamic becomes especially visible in gendered and racialized contexts. In my work, whenever women are foregrounded in case studies, an additional comment reliably appears: “This does/should not aim to exclude men.”

This caveat is not requested by the text. It is demanded by an imagined reader whose discomfort must be preemptively managed. Notably, there is no equivalent anxiety when men occupy the center by default. The asymmetry reveals the structure: the white male subject is not one reader among many but the silent measure of inclusion.

One can easily imagine how this logic shapes every subsequent exchange. The work becomes less about what is being argued and more about who might feel unsettled—and how quickly that unsettledness must be neutralized.

2. Literature Review and the Politics of Linear Citation

In another instance, I submitted an article that explicitly problematized the politics of the literature review and linear citation practices. I stated upfront that I was deliberately refusing that format, not out of negligence but as a methodological decision aligned with the argument itself.

The response: Revise and Resubmit.

All three reviewers—each from different subfields—requested, in near-identical terms, that I add a literature review relevant to their disciplinary formation. The justification was consistent: the piece was “not sufficiently friendly to the reader.”

Here, “the reader” functioned as an unquestioned good, overriding the stated aims of the work. The logic was circular: even when the argument explicitly interrogated why such structures discipline knowledge, compliance was still demanded in their name.

What this reveals is not a commitment to rigor, but an insistence on recognizability. The reader imagined here is one who must be reassured through familiar scaffolding, even if that scaffolding undermines the very inquiry at hand.

3. Allyship, Safety, and the Demand for Neutralization

A third pattern emerges among sympathetic readers—self-identified allies who express genuine interest in my work. After reading, they ask why certain elements are “missing.”

Often, these questions rest on a fundamental misrecognition of the project’s purpose.

For example, when Korean performances appear as case studies, the assumption almost always follows that the work aims to translate information about Korea for an external audience. This persists even when the text explicitly states that the project interrogates forms of knowledge production rather than offering cultural explanation.

When I clarify this—when I restate what is already written—the response is immediate and directive: “Then you should make that explicit.”

At this point, the exchange typically ends. Not because I refuse dialogue, but because the demand itself reveals exhaustion. I have already written it. Repeatedly. And they failed to register this upfront, clear, opening statement detailing my stakes and arguments.

What is being asked is not clarity but neutralization and safety.

And safety here means containment. The work is allowed to be interesting, even “new,” as long as it does not disturb the reader’s epistemic comfort. Yet the force of the writing emerges precisely from its refusal to be safe. To domesticate that force in the name of friendliness is to hollow it out entirely.

What, then, are they asking for? A version of the work that resembles what they already know how to consume? Something that can be exchanged, cited, and sold without consequence? If that is what “kindness to the reader” requires, then whose interests does it truly serve?

The Colonial Logic of the Imagined Reader

These moments are not failures of communication; they are symptoms of a structure. The imagined reader functions as a proxy for power—an abstract majority whose comfort governs the conditions of legibility. This reader is overwhelmingly heteronormative, institutionally trained, and positioned as the default beneficiary of knowledge.

To call this structure non-violent is to misunderstand violence itself. It operates not through overt exclusion but through repeated demands for self-adjustment, clarification, and reassurance. It asks bodies to translate themselves endlessly while insisting that the standard remains neutral.

In a moment when much academic work claims decolonial aims, this structure persists largely unexamined. To acknowledge it would require dismantling the fantasy of the “decolonial scholar” as already outside harm. It would mean admitting that the container itself—its norms, its readers, its demands for safety—reproduces the very hierarchies it claims to resist.

Temporality as the Condition of Epistemic Violence

The question, then, is not only what gets cut, but why this cutting occurs so consistently across academic spaces. The answer, I argue, lies in the temporality of academia itself.

Academic knowledge production is organized around a productivity-driven timeline: submission cycles, review windows, grant deadlines, publication metrics, and institutional rhythms that prioritize output over duration. Within this structure, stopping is penalized. Lingering is inefficient. Reading that requires suspension—of judgment, of certainty, of interpretive mastery—is structurally disincentivized.

A container organized in this way cannot sustain deep listening.

To truly listen—to a body, to an encounter, to a form of knowledge that does not immediately resolve into legibility—requires temporal rupture. It requires stopping. Not as pause for recovery, but as a refusal of forward momentum. In a system that equates movement with value, stopping becomes unintelligible.

How can such a structure not be fundamentally colonial?

Colonial epistemologies are not only defined by what they extract, but by how they move. Speed, accumulation, translation, and circulation are not neutral values; they are techniques of domination. Knowledge must be made transportable, digestible, and efficiently consumed. Anything that resists this—anything that demands duration rather than throughput—is marked as excessive or unprofessional.

This is the deeper logic behind demands for “clarity,” “accessibility,” and “consideration of the reader.” These are not merely stylistic preferences; they are temporal demands. They insist that meaning arrive on schedule.

When I write about stopping in the Frida essay, I am naming precisely this rupture.

Stopping is not withdrawal. It is not refusal of relation. It is the condition under which listening becomes possible at all. Only when the forward drive is interrupted does the body enter the frame—not as content, but as epistemic force.

The “real” does not suddenly appear when one stops. It has always been there. What stopping provides is entry.

The Imagined Reader and the Demand for Motion

This temporal structure gives rise to the figure I name as the imagined reader: a projected community whose anticipated needs regulate the pace and shape of writing. This reader must not be delayed. They must not be made to dwell. They must be reassured quickly that the text is safe, legible, and headed somewhere familiar.

Under this logic, to ask the reader to stop is framed as ethical failure.

Yet what is actually being protected is not the reader, but the system’s velocity. A reader who stops is no longer productive. A reader who listens risks transformation. And transformation cannot be scheduled.

This is why bodies are repeatedly cut—not only whose bodies appear, but which bodily modes of knowing are permitted. Attentiveness that requires time becomes a liability. Writing that demands suspension is labeled unkind. The refusal to accelerate is misread as arrogance or obscurity.

The problem, then, is not that readers are unwilling to listen, but that they have been systematically trained to mistake speed, anticipation, and defensiveness for intellectual responsibility.

Defensiveness as Pedagogy

The defensiveness that structures academic writing is not incidental, nor is it the result of individual insecurity. It is trained.

The recurring comment—“people will think…”—that appeared throughout my doctoral training was not aberrant or idiosyncratic. It was exemplary. It named the core pedagogical lesson of the PhD: anticipation as survival. To be a scholar is to learn how to preempt discomfort, how to imagine attack before it arrives, how to smooth, qualify, and defend one’s speech in advance of being read.

This training culminates in a ritual whose name is telling: the defense.

The final qualification of scholarly legitimacy is not demonstration, not attunement, not the capacity to listen or to be transformed by one’s object of study. It is defense. One must prove, publicly and conclusively, the ability to defend.

Against whom?

Not against a specific interlocutor, but against an endless procession of imagined readers—figures who are presumed to be uncomfortable, easily threatened by what they do not already know, and quick to respond with correction rather than curiosity. Readers who may not ask what they missed, but who nevertheless demand reassurance. Readers whose anticipated reactions structure the scholar’s voice long before any actual encounter takes place.

This is not simply an unfortunate habit. It is the epistemic training itself.

Under such conditions, knowledge is produced not through openness but through fortification. Speech becomes legible only insofar as it can withstand attack. The scholar is rewarded not for listening well, but for having already anticipated every possible objection. What cannot be defended in advance is deemed irresponsible, unclear, or insufficiently rigorous.

The consequence is paradoxical but unmistakable: the more one is trained within this defense-driven regime, the harder it becomes to hear speech that does not arrive armored. This is why modes of articulation that undergraduates often grasp without difficulty—because they have not yet been trained to defend—can appear opaque or threatening to senior scholars. The problem is not complexity, but habituation.

Defensiveness, once internalized, forecloses listening. It produces readers who are primed to react rather than attend, to correct rather than dwell. In this sense, the imagined reader is not only a projection; it is the outcome of a pedagogy that mistakes vigilance for rigor.

The Violence Done to the Reader

The violence of the imagined reader does not stop at disciplining the writer. It also produces a specific kind of reader whose engagement is pre-scripted, managed in advance, and deprived of agency.

What often passes as “kindness to the reader” operates through a series of anticipatory gestures: assumptions made on the reader’s behalf, misunderstandings preemptively corrected, intentions sterilized before they can generate friction. The text is rendered safe not by care, but by control.

This mode of address is not respectful. It is intrusive.

To imagine the reader primarily as someone who might misunderstand, feel excluded, or react defensively is to deny them the capacity to listen, to dwell, or to arrive at meaning on their own terms. It substitutes management for relation. In doing so, it forecloses the very possibility of ethical reading.

To refuse the demand to “consider the audience” is not an act of negligence. It is an act of respect.

When I object to this demand, I do so because it rests on assumption about what the reader knows, what they can tolerate, what they will misunderstand, and how quickly they must be reassured. To write under such assumptions is not to care for the reader, but to preempt them—to decide in advance who they are and how they will receive the work.

I refuse this preemption as a matter of careful, deliberate respect.

The writing insists on being met on the writer’s terrain not out of arrogance, but because the readership is non-singular. There is no unified ground on which all readers stand, and to pretend otherwise is to privilege an imagined majority while erasing others. Under such conditions, the only ethical position is to clarify, with precision and patience, the ground on which the writing itself stands.

This clarification takes time. It cannot be rushed in the name of accessibility without collapsing into misrecognition. The labor of the text is not to arrive where the reader already is, but to make visible where it is speaking from—so that readers may choose, consciously and attentively, whether and how to meet it.

This is not a withdrawal from relation. It is an invitation that refuses to be coercive.