Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules

Foreword

xi Foreword Rose Weitz In 1968, at the age of sixteen, I talked two of my girlfriends into wearing slacks rather than skirts to school one frigid winter day. At the time, I knew nothing of the nascent feminist movement—let alone of “embodied resistance”—but at a truly visceral level it seemed unfair that only girls should have to suffer the cold and seemed wrong not to protest that unfairness. Unfortunately, I also knew nothing about creating effective resistance: threatened with suspension, and with neither an ideological grounding nor supportive others to turn to, the three of us caved immediately. That same year, I decided to lose my virginity. Frankly, pleasure had nothing to do with it. I was (and remain) a deeply logical person, and at some level, I just couldn’t figure out why a natural physical act should be so freighted with meaning for my parents and other adults. Nor could I understand why adults’ fears about my body (or, more specifically, my virginity) should justify constraining my life so much more than the lives of my male peers. Combined with the realization that boys really wanted sex and the (not quite accurate) belief that having sex would cost me little, I decided to get the issue off my personal table by choosing my own time, place, and partner. Which I did, though not particularly wisely. After that (and a bit more “after” than I’d care to admit), I sought out the one place that would give birth control pills to a minor and thus support my somewhat inchoate resistance. (Thank you, Planned Parenthood.) Six months later, after experiencing a slew of side effects from the high-dosage pills then prescribed, I fought Planned Parenthood—whose central mission was controlling population growth, not protecting women’s health—to get a (far-safer) diaphragm instead . By this time, I was a freshman at Lehman College in New York City. I became a feminist during my second semester, when, as a try-out for the school newspaper, I covered the first meeting of Lehman’s Women’s Liberation Group and discovered a way of looking at the world that helped explain my previous experiences of embodied constraint and resistance. Feminism also helped me articulate why some of my professors would not call on me even when mine was the only hand raised in the room, why my (former) mother-in-law brought me a broom and mop as a house-warming present, why I was so angry about her choice of “gifts,” and why I swallowed that anger. The next semester, I began taking the subway from the Bronx to Manhattan, where, every Monday night, thirty or so of us would discuss a (mimeographed) chapter in what eventually became the book Our Bodies, Ourselves. The next year, I rode the subway for two hours to the other side of the city to hear Carol Downer and Lorraine Rothman, two of the founders of the U.S. women’s health movement, explain the health and political benefits of viewing one’s own cervix and vagina and to watch them demonstrate—in front of four hundred women—how to do so. I returned with a sense of exhilaration and my own speculum, as well as a new awareness xii Embodied Resistance of how, with resources, commitment, and a coherent political perspective, individual embodied resistance could lead to broad social change. Around the same time, I first learned of female orgasms (of any sort, never mind “vaginal” versus “clitoral”) in my consciousness-raising group. All these experiences led me to decide on a career as a sociologist focusing on women’s health. My interest in researching women’s health has continued throughout my career. But by the late 1990s, like numerous other scholars, I found myself increasingly drawn to research that went beyond issues of health and illness and looked more broadly at women’s experiences of the body. My subsequent reading and research eventually inspired me to publish a collection that would reflect this emerging area of study. In the proposal for my anthology, The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, I argued that the book would find a wide audience in the emerging field of “body studies” and the growing number of courses in that field. I was bluffing. Although I hoped the field would grow, I certainly wasn’t counting on it. My fears, however, quickly proved unfounded. The Politics of Women’s Bodies...