We're still talking about bodies
There is no escaping the physicality of our lives
In the spring of 1997, at the university in Freiburg, Germany, I took my first feminist theory class. I remember feeling nervous about being in the class, about being one of “those women” who were fighting for rights and whatnot. A childhood of apolitical dinner conversation and constant instructions to keep my head down instead of raising my voice made talking about things like women’s rights and bodies deeply uncomfortable for me.
But this week, every thing I read seemed to return to the body one way or another. The way we talk about bodies has changed, instead of bodies as a thing to fight for, we are talking about listening to and caring for and trauma in our bodies. We are asking questions about what a body means and what it means to live in one body or another and just how much control do you or I get to have over our own bodies. Are they our own?
In “There Are No Angels,” an essay by Meredith Talusan in Amber Tamblyn’s Listening in the Dark, Meredith describes her first relationship after sexual reassignment surgery. You can read an excerpt of the essay here and all credit to Amanda Hirsch for telling me about Amber’s work.
It’s not a spoiler to say things don’t go particularly well. What struck me, though, was the idea that she did not know what it was to fear for her body, to fear violation or violence.
Being new to womanhood, I still didn’t know then how men could hurt me so deeply, even though they already had.
-Meredith Talusan, “There Are No Angels”
Women live with physical vulnerability. We tell girls that their bodies are designed to be penetrated, which is factual and true and biology, but also a bit terrifying. I remember being a little girl watching a film strip thinking, “no way.”
Weird things happen when we try to address women’s lives without addressing women’s bodies. I’ve read dozens of articles about imposter syndrome, that old “I’m not good enough” feeling, and how women suffer from it and should get over it. “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” by Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey was the first article I’ve seen that ties imposter syndrome to bodies and specifically to skin color. Read this:
…imposter syndrome puts the blame on individuals, without accounting for the historical and cultural contexts that are foundational to how it manifests in both women of color and white women. Imposter syndrome directs our view toward fixing women at work instead of fixing the places where women work.
-Ruchika Tushyan and Jodi-Ann Burey, “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome”
So here we have two women suggesting, in the Harvard Business Review no less, that the way people treat women, and particularly women of color, is an important part of understanding imposter syndrome. Wait, so it’s not me? Well, isn’t this revolutionary. Imagine that women who live in a world that constantly tells them they aren’t good enough might end up feeling like they aren’t good enough. Hm.
It makes me want to take time out of this world and this life just to process what that means when people kindly tell me that I don’t have to pretend I’m a writer because I am, when they urge me to fake it until I make it.
Disappearing is exactly what the father does in “Dad as House” a short story by Candice May that I read in Prism International, a literary journal out of the University of British Columbia. The story is about the middle child, a daughter, of the family. Dad is building a house, Mom leaves to live with the guy up the road, older sister is being an absent teenager, younger brother is liking life in Mom’s new place, and the middle sister decides to help her dad finish the house. As they work, the dad disappears into his work. One day it’s tiles in the living room. Another day, it’s a door knob. At first, the daughter panics, but the dad is reassuring.
“I’d like to stay here a while,” my dad said.
“Inside the doorknob?”
“Yes.”
. . .
“What’s it like in there, Dad?” I asked him.
“Mmm, it’s peaceful.”
-Candace May, “Dad as House”
Her father’s desire to hang out in the doorknob resonates deeply with me. Adult life is hard. We’re expected to both responsibly deal with our pain and get on with things. This in spite of all the important self-care and mental health conversations happening today. I love the way May gives the dad a way to pause and step away from the work and the pain. I love the way the daughter understands and supports him. Adults need time to heal, and our children can be surprisingly powerful advocates for our healing.
Omer El Akkad’s novel What Strange Paradise is the story of a young boy who survives a wildly dangerous boat trip across the Mediterranean to an island where a local girl helps him in surprising ways. Many of the conversations I’ve had over the years about the migration crisis (as the EU sees it) have been around the perilous journey people undertake along the way. The moving forward without a clear destination, the families who carry only plastic bags, and the eternal and pointless questions about why migrants have such mobile phones.
But a migration like that is an enormous physical undertaking. The walking or sitting on trains or busses or in boats are exhausting. The idea that families live in temporary housing for weeks, months, or even years at a time today, when they can build a house on the lot two over from mine in just a few weeks, in a Canadian winter, is shocking. In What Strange Paradise, because it’s told from a child’s perspective, the physicality of the experience is front and center. The sun, the water, the boat, cuts on feet, hunger - all these forces on the body have a prominent role in the story. And while the story focuses mostly on the migrant boy Amir and the island girl Vänne, it’s the mean military man, Colonel Kethros, who draws our attention to the body.
He’s as big man, an older man, someone who has seen battle and violence and lost a leg to a land mine. In one of the final scenes of the novel, he sits and reflects;
He's read somewhere that the makeup of the human body is such that wounds never truly disappear, and that certain diseases of malnourishment, when extreme enough, will cause the skin to spit old scars back up to the surface, the body is a secret archive of harm.
-Omer El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
To think that a woman feels her vulnerability from the time she is a girl and that this man, powerful in body and station, needs to lose a leg and live with that to reflect that he read once that wounds never truly disappear, to internalize a physical loss as an emotional one. To feel his vulnerability and the fact that he cannot, will not, escape his body.
The hope in all this came in a passage from Run by Ann Patchett, one of several books my neighbor has left at my house while she clears her bookshelves and stocks mine. It’s a gorgeous story about a family, several, up-ended by one event over the course of a cold, snowy Boston weekend. In it, Father Sullivan, uncle to the twin boys at the center of the story, an old man who is sick, reflects that perhaps there is no next life. That perhaps life is to be lived now. And that;
Maybe that was the definition of life everlasting: the belief that the next generation would carry your work forward.
-Ann Patchett, Run
Which gives me a moment where I can share some of my own writing. I’ve joined an incredible little writing workshop that meets online and the first time I gathered with them, the prompt was “Unsweetened Authority.” I was the only person in the group to write specifically to the prompt, and the following emerged as I searched for a way in…
Unsweetened Authority
“Who’s in charge here?”
What kind of question is that?
Who’s in charge where?
Where have people been in charge?
Where have they not?
What about the bitterness of authority?
The bitterness of authority.
The responsibilities are yours.
The choices are yours.
The consequences are yours.