In the writing classroom, students and instructors alike must not only theorize experience but must also experience theory. This is no easy task, for despite cultural studies' emphasis on the "subjective side of social relations," contemporary theory is heavily directed toward signifying practices, and, as Lawrence Grossberg argues, affect is often lived through the body and is, in part, a-signifying; thus, scholars have developed an incomplete-at-best critical vocabulary for affective alliances. Yet popular culture works at the "intersections of body and emotion"; the visceral responses that music, images, and fashion elicit cannot be explained merely as an aura of ideological effects. Cultural analysis requires active reading, constructing meaning in a text, rather than passively accepting the authority of the written word. One writing assignment, developed in James Porter's "Audience and Rhetoric" requires students to review the background, discourse conventions, and the form and style of "forums" to help them identify the means through which they might negotiate and be accepted into a discourse community. Since the assignment demands that students analyze the ways they experience their magazine of choice, gender literacy comes to the fore. Students theorize the way affective alliances are formed as they learn what might be considered feminist strategies for analysis and then proceed to study how the magazine constructs readers of a particular magazine as an audience. (Contains 14 references.) (TB)