Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules

Afterword

225 Afterword Barbara Katz Rothman What would it be like to be in a different body—for an hour, a day, a year, a lifetime? How much does the body you are (are in?) shape your life, your experiences? Some people play at this, create online personas, act “as if” in another body—but that will give you everything but the embodied experience. We have astonishingly varied bodies—all so remarkably the same, all so equally remarkably different. Human beings range routinely from under seven pounds to over three hundred pounds and from about twenty inches tall to almost seven feet, and they have skin and hair in a well-remarked variety of colors and textures. As adults, we have all moved from somewhere near the smallest body size to somewhere closer to the largest. Other kinds of human variation remain forever foreign to some, ordinary to others: What does it feel like to have wind blowing through your long fine hair? Wind blowing through a tight bush of hair? Across a bald head? Some of those features we can play with—shave the head as one of the contributors did. Some we cannot —only a small minority of humans can ever feel the wind through long straight hair. There are other differences we hardly know how to think about: What does a food taste like on another’s tongue? How do colors look through other eyes—or what would it be like never to have seen color at all? To be “color blind”? To be totally blind? A few hours with a blindfold—an exercise designed to raise awareness of the experience of blindness—cannot answer that. The world of scholarship has a long history of almost disembodied thought, acting as though scholars were pure minds, engaging with each other in bodiless worlds. Only recently are we confronting the body—its limitations, its lived experience, its consequences—and turning our attention to how people, embodied people, step in and out of their experience to confront the body. This book focuses on not just the body but the body as a site of resistance, on the ways that people—sometimes in anger and sometimes in play, sometimes in community and sometimes all alone—make use of the body as a way of resisting social expectations. Gender weaves its way through every one of these pieces—sometimes as its central theme, sometimes less so, but never absent. Is this showing some strange essentialism of gender, its place as an orienting point for confrontation with and through the body? Or is the prominence of gender in this book just a limitation of the state of scholarship, so heavily and recently influenced by feminist critiques of a male-assumed body? My phrasing of the question implies my answer: Feminist scholarship, I would argue, has in the past four decades forced an academic confrontation with the body. 226 Embodied Resistance In calling the past four decades “relatively recent,” I bring to the fore another universal, perhaps essentializing body difference, that of age. A person in her sixties, as I am, can think of four decades of feminist scholarship as “relatively recent.” A person in her twenties or younger, as so many readers of this volume are likely to be, might not see it that way. The pieces in this volume that do deal with age, do that too through the lens of gender, looking at menopause and at the members of the Red Hat Society’s play with sexuality and aging. Race is sometimes used as an essentializing body difference, but it is far harder to do that: the “race differences” are so often rather random—hair type defining race in one culture, nose shape in another, skin color in yet others. In the piece on body hair, for example, so deeply focused on gender, race/ethnic differences come through a very odd and (again in the context of a sixty-plus-year life span) relatively recent American lens in which “Latin American” women are a race group, contrasted with “white” women. Locate the project in a different community or moment, and “white” women would include fair-skinned, light-haired Irish women and dark-skinned, black-haired Greek women, and the awareness and presence of body hair would be strikingly different. So what do we learn from this? That there are no universals? That it makes no sense to essentialize the body? Sure, of course. But more profoundly, I think, we learn that people...