- Striving for a Breathable Life:Marginalized Bodies and Corporeal Justice
The U.S. Constitution was written to sanction governmental body oppression. When the Bill of Rights was signed, relatively few Americans had voting rights. Among those excluded from suffrage were African Americans, Native Americans, women, White men with disabilities, and White males who did not own land. Voting rights for women . . . nope. Blacks . . . nope; they were only counted as three-fifths of a full person. Using a wheelchair? No. . . . These political, economic, and social issues are about our bodies.1
Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology
the othered body
In the above excerpt, Sonya Renee Taylor captures how discriminatory body politics are embedded in the foundation of the United States, and how the myth of American exceptionalism validates the white heteronormative male body as the superior and dominating force over supposedly lesser bodies and weaker nations. This corporeal hierarchy makes nonnormative bodies perpetually subject to necropolitics—i.e., the power and capacity to dictate which bodies should live, die, be exposed [End Page 278] to death, and be considered disposable and expendable.2 These discriminated bodies are "living in a state of suspension between life and death."3 A rupturing feminist methodology is needed to resist such corporeal hierarchy and see these bodies as new possibilities.4
In this article, I argue that honoring diverse bodies is fundamental to rectifying injustice in the American healthcare and law enforcement systems. This is a multifaceted educational task that must happen at different levels—through elementary and higher education, hospitals, clinics, police forces, media advocacy, and intergenerational cultural awareness—in order to structurally empower communities that have inherited trauma. To advance this goal, I offer here my own story: an autoethnographic account of how I lost my infant due to racist medical violence. To live a life after witnessing the killing of one's own child is already a heavy burden, and when seeking legal justice is a far cry, it becomes unendurable. What feminist alternatives can liberate and bring some relief to a bereaved mother in such circumstances? There is neither a definitive answer to this question nor a singular notion of radical motherhood to be practiced by women of color. However, as a mother of color whose newly born infant was killed due to medical racism and obstetric violence, I write this feminist autoethnography with an urgency to rupture medical white supremacy and make space for untold maternal stories of somatophobia. My story illuminates how the biopolitics of visibility, protection, and care remain largely uninterrogated in their complicities and convergences with the racist and sexist dimensions of the healthcare system.
In this account, I open my raw wound of terror and vulnerability as a feminist method that refuses to hide truths, and that addresses moments that will likely be uncomfortable for white healthcare and law enforcement systems. This method is not meant to clarify questions such as "This can happen to anyone, how is it racism?" Rather, my autoethnographic method aims to evoke the humanity within each of us to reflect [End Page 279] on why those bodies identified as Black, brown, disabled, female, immigrant, or queer are othered. What are the deep insecurities and fears in normative bodies that provoke them to sadistically kill and erase othered bodies?
Black feminist scholar Christina Sharpe calls this method of unfurling the trauma and shaking the core of humanity "staying in the wake."5 Sharpe theorizes that autobiographical narratives of death and violence are "hard emotional, physical, and intellectual work that demands vigilant attendance to the needs of the dying, to ease their way, and also to the needs of the living" because "medical and other professionals treat Black patients differently: often they don't listen to the concerns of patients and their families," and by default, healthcare workers assume that, "relative to whites, blacks feel less pain."6 Therefore, this writing by an immigrant mother of color aims to nudge readers into a consciousness-raising practice of mourning the injustices done to bodies of color and their struggle to breathe and exist. My intention is to push for a restructuring of our healthcare systems.
Because I...