Weekend Theories

I'm slowly reading various texts for class next week. Too bad they're all mixing together in one giant confusing mess about ideology, rhetoric, and social construction. I'd love to say that I've got brilliant ideas for class, but I don't. Cultural studies makes sense right now, as does rhetoric...but when you ask me to think of it in terms of a composition classroom, I get theory overload. It's like, to use a cliched and dead metaphor, a big jigsaw puzzle, only there are four of them, and all the pieces are mixed together. Not only am I supposed to separate them all, but I'm supposed to put the different puzzles together, then arrange the four completed puzzles in a meaningful narrative. And I don't even have the picture on the box--I'm supposed to imagine it.
Of course, this is just another visual metaphor meant to arrange the chaos into something parallel to an imaginable object. In reality, my situation is nothing like putting together a puzzle. There's too much at stake, and the pieces are never guaranteed to all be there yet.
Theory, as Susan Wall said, is like a religion. It gives us a framework for making sense of everything. M theory, mother theory, the theory of Everything. The theory of me. I am self aware enough to know that I cling to the language of theory because it makes me feel in control of chaos. I know very well what I'm doing when I apply to a PhD program in Rhetoric and Theory. Theory and its application calms me. A theory of pain? A theory of disability, and its linguistic manifestations? Films about disformity, 20/20 and Dateline specials, Reader's Digest and women's magazines...where do these narratives come from? Should they be recognized for what they are (hegemonic tools) and changed? Can it be changed? Whose job is it? How do we start?