OCCUPYING THE BODY, or

Oppression of Form to Uplift Thought:

THE ORIGINS OF BODY MARGINALIZATION IN WESTERN CULTURE

Adam and Eve by Titian

In considering the origins of Western culture, scholars mostly agree in attributing “civilization” to two major progenitors in nearly every field --  ancient Greece and the Bible. Descartes, the illustrious Greek philosopher, is remembered predominantly for painting the first illustration of disconnect between the mind and the body. What we now call the Cartesian dualism has had a fundamental impact on how Western ideology frames the body -- as an object that the brain controls.

The Hebrew Bible, known also as the Old Testament, has had a similarly profound impact on shaping Western cultural conceptions of the body. The Judeo-Christian creation myth begins with God creating the world, animals, then man and his maiden. When Eve crossed God and ate the forbidden fruit, God punished Eve with the curse of painful childbirth, and so humanity fell from grace and was cursed to be repentive sinners all through eternity. This story numbers among the original sources of body marginalization in Western culture -- a theme which runs much deeper and more penetrative than we as Westerners are made to understand.

With Christian ideology framing a) the body as a locus of punishment and control, and b) asserting that reproduction is a woman’s sin, deducing that the body and sin are correlated is not much of a stretch.

Numerous field of study today focus on examining the fundamental “Otherness” Western ideology is build upon -- the body as Other (post-colonialism), women as Other (feminism), and sin as Other (theology).  Exploiting Otherness has emerged as a basic tenant in the dominant narrative of Western culture. When we further consider the constructors of this cultural ideology to be white males who dominated with the intellect and the privilege to assert themselves as God’s chosen few, the Othering of the Body -- it all its forms -- becomes painfully clear.

The body has lived oppressed for centuries in Western civilization. One key narrative that describes Western culture is that it follows the story, “the world belongs to man” (Quinn 1992). Since the Mind has the ability to frame the Body as Other, so Mankind quickly leapt to ownership over the natural world, too. Life itself has become secondary to the accumulation of power, wealth, and intellect. Because of the mind-bogglingly vast nature of this pedagogy, body marginalization is not confined to a single gender. No, in fact body marginalization is equally a challenge to every being enculturated into the West. Body marginalization is not a women’s issue, nor a trans issue; it is an issue more fundamental to our understanding of life than any other qualifying label imaginable.

We have been tested, told to think and forced to exist in a landscape of disembodiment. Beyond nation, beyond language, and beyond gender, we share the experience of living in flesh. Our bodies are the one indiscriminate tie between every human being in existence. It is both shocking and expected that our connection-point of embodiment should go so ignored and negated in the West: marginalizing our lived experience and the magnitude of feeling we have in common with the tremendous world around us is likely to be the most profound tool for oppression ever derived.

At 24, I know my generation has a massive task ahead of ourselves if we are to shift the cultural paradigm of the West into a more holistic one -- to investigate all the ways to make our narratives inclusive of that which we’ve been told to Other. And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that the task of integrating our lived experience of embodiment -- together, and as a culture -- will require the commitment of our all humankind.

I am on a pilgrimage to spread that sacred message: to shake the rust off our sensations, to look around and realize our unity, and to act with swiftness, compassion, and clarity as they well from the spring of our beating hearts.