Embodying the Leaky Self

• In Event: 336 - Section on Body and Embodiment Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 07. Theorizing the Body

Abstract

‘This is my body’ or ‘this is my body’ are phrases that are not self-evident. A lot of conditions have to be fulfilled to make it possible to express each of them; most importantly, the condition that I have a body or that it is my body – which are on the everyday level we are engaging (and we are somewhat courageously flirting with disaster in calling it the flat-local ontological level) two versions of the same experience. We are interested here, primarily, in the fact that while our actual everyday experiences of the body and our ability to communicate our body are always also political, because they are always also embedded in practice do they involve the body as a (f)actuality – that means simply that without bodyliness, as the fact that a body is a necessary component, these practices could not occur. More importantly, in our analyses of the experiences, including experiences that are social in nature, this (f)actuality of bodyliness as a necessary component is something we should not be allowed to neglect, which includes, for example, the (sociological) study of practices that occur in the field of health care and (bio)medicine. Bodyliness, we argue, is an important component of mindfulness, and we believe that the exclusion of the dimension of the body, both in Western everyday practices as well as in Western scholarship, has contributed to mindless behaviour and mindlessness in academic debates.

Authors

• Alexander I. Stingl, Drexel University

• Sabrina M Weiss, Rochester Institute of Technology