Gendered Bodies as Architects of Experience: Creating Selves

• In Event: BodyWorks: (Pre)scriptive Embodiment in Diverse Educational Spaces

Abstract

I explore how medical and illness narratives (re)present contested concepts of bodies and how those various bodies create selves. When bodies become sick they provide an educational space in and through which we can become conscious of how we move in/within the world, how we relate with each other-- in the sense of living with and for each other and how the world acts agentially with us in constituting the matter of our lives, bodies, and selves as learners, teachers and workers.

Theoretical Frame: Seemingly disparate areas of scholarship in feminism, classical pragmatism, phenomenology, and new materialism share insistence on the body’s agential co-constitution of body/works in our experience of the world—on the body as the architect of experience. I establish the relationality of the body to experience and self drawing on pragmatist William James’ assertion of a “really real” empirical reality in which relations between things in the universe are just as real as the things themselves (1950), the phenomenological work of Drew Leder (1990) who conceptualized the “dys-appearing body” as the body we experience in discomfort and/or illness that brings our bodies to our conscious attention, and the illness narrative work of Arthur Frank (1995), who proposed that bodies create selves within varieties of narratives. I diffract these male scholars’ assertions about bodies and narrative and the relations between them through a new materialist lens (Barad, 2007; Coole & Frost, 2010) to examine how we come into consciousness of gendered and/or ill bodies as educational sites. I then use Ahmed’s (2017) “sweaty concept” of “willfulness” to look at how those bodies gendered female create selves that learn to be feminist because of the gendering of their bodies. I draw illustrative examples from Audre Lorde (1987, 1997), Roxane Gay (2017), and my own experience with a brain tumor.

Mode of Inquiry: Diffractive Analysis, Narrative

Data Sources:
Sources of data include the theorizations of the body in Drew Leder’s The Absent Body (1990), theorizations of illness narratives in Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller (1995), Audre Lorde’s illness narratives in Cancer Journals (1997), and Burst of Light (1988), Roxane Gay’s memoir of her body in Hunger (2017), and narratives of my experience a brain tumor and its surgical aftermath.

Conclusions: Reading with pragmatist and feminist materialist concepts confirms the certainty that language cannot contain or stabilize the excesses of the materialities of the body or prevent its gendering or medicalization. Despite that, this approach allows for, maybe even requires body narratives as an ethical obligation to living with and for others, and illustrates the vulnerability of contingency in the agential cuts and selective attention to our bodies as educational sites constructing embodiment narratives.

Significance: This research demonstrates how various theoretical perspectives can be put to work in embodiment narratives in educational spaces. It addresses the ethical imperative to share body/illness narratives as a way to reveal how everyday moral and ethical struggles are shaped by physical and material conditions, by bodies that become present and active architects of experience.

Author

• Becky M. Atkinson, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa