In this article, I review contact zone pedagogy from a perspective of discursive positioning and with attention to two assignments that ask basic writers to play with the conventions of academic language. The first requires them to translate a passage of academic prose into a slang of their choice; the second, to compose a parody of academic style. Their responses afford these basic writers new, unusually powerful subjectivities: as deflating formality and pretension, as mocking those in power, and as de-naturalizing everyday texts and discourses to render them newly problematic. And they serve as counterpoint to studies that present the contact zone as opening up the classroom to the appeals of all parties, sexist, racist, or homophobic as they may be. Ultimately, I challenge an unspoken assumption of much writing pedagogy—that teaching on current social issues will eventually bring students around to their instructor's point of view—instead holding out the promise that in the contact zone, a teacher is just as likely to be moved and changed as a student. The above was produced by a student in a first-year writing class at a medium-sized state university. The class is a basic skills/first-year hybrid, a 4-credit course with the same completion requirements as the existing 3- credit first-semester course. The hybrid has all but replaced the not-for-credit basic skills course on campus, and accounts for more than one-fourth of all sections of first-semester writing there. Students are placed in the course