How can instructors in higher education understand and address the challenges of cultivating critical social justice knowledge and perspectives? In this paper an embodied knowledge framework is used to interpret the accounts of two former doctoral students within a US research institution who, while expressing appreciation for a graduate seminar designed to cultivate critical social justice literacy, did not embrace its content to the degree demonstrated by their peers. Narratives constructed for the two participants, a Black woman and a White man, suggested that knowledge inscribed deeply in their bodies from experience and emotion created friction with critical social justice concepts and principles examined in the seminar. This collision of bodily and conceptual knowledges can create disjuncture that is a barrier to learning. In order to cultivate critical social justice literacy in higher education, instructors may need to create tools that call on an embodied, experientialist view of cognition.