Learning to Read Bodies Differently in Education

• In Event: What Is the Body Doing in Educational Theory and Justice-Oriented Pedagogy? Taking the Body Turn

Abstract

Purpose
American consumerism has historically taught women and girls how to live in what I refer to here as bodily-not-enoughness—the idea of not being enough of something, due to the bodily practices we learn that discipline us to locate areas of imperfection, both physically and lived, and improve them; as well as teach us how to read the body as visual text (Hagood, 2005)—as enough or not enough. To disrupt prevailing notions of what is considered “normal” in the ways educators read the bodies in front of them, for this paper I asked: In what ways did the seventh grade girls of color who participated in this phenomenological study experience their teachers reading their bodies as visual texts?

Theoretical Perspectives
Using phenomenology as both a philosophy and a research methodology, I drew on Merleau-Ponty (1962) and feminist and poststructural scholars (Ahmed, 2006; Bordo, 1993, 2003; Lesko, 2001; Orbach, 2009) to open up a bodied-phenomenon that has been buried over so extensively in American culture, it is still quite undiscovered (Heidegger, 1962): how we (mis)read bodies in education and in education research.

Methods
Drawing on weekly writing group meeting transcripts, research/observation notes, and written poetry samples from “Buttercup,” an eleven-year-old African American girl who participated in this study, I used writing as my method of inquiry (Richardson, 1995; van Manen, 1990) to identify the multiple, partial, and varied meanings and contradictions of how Buttercup experienced teachers reading her body as not enough.

Data Sources and Results
In her talk and written poetry, Buttercup’s astute awareness of how teachers often (mis)read her physical and lived body as not enough of something (e.g., white, middle-class, smart, friendly) was widespread; and in those moments, she seemed to resist those (mis)readings in order to be enough. In her poetry, for example, she wrote about teachers reading her as someone she knew she was not, and she used her poetry to resist those (mis)readings: “I am not what they say/I am slowly learning not to take it to heart/I am not mean/ I am sweet and sensitive/ I am not dumb or slow/ I am smart and funny, in my own ways/ I am not what they think/ I am what I know.” According to Ahmed (2006), bodies remember their histories, even when we forget them; and those histories can surface on the body, or even shape how bodies surface. Buttercup’s experiences of being (mis)read by her teachers sometimes surfaced on her body, but the work she did to resist those (mis)readings helped her reshape how her body surfaced as enough.

Scholarly Significance
Students are incredibly perceptive when interacting with teachers who read their bodies in certain ways; and if we continue denying bodies in education, we cannot begin the work of learning how to read, or re-read bodies differently—learning how to see the incredible resilience our students embody within all of the implicit and explicit disciplining of bodies in popular and educational discourse.

Author

• Hilary E. Hughes-Decatur, Virginia Commonwealth University