J’Lyn Chapman and I settle into a meditation room in Sycamore Hall. I have almost no anxiety arriving in conversation with J’Lyn because engaging with her in previous classes provided so much wit and reality for me to reckon with, that the worlds of critical theory opened to me and structured my learning. I know that asking these questions will be a sort of homecoming for me, and my ideas.
“J’Lyn,” I start, “Can you provide a brief history of the role of the body in feminist theory?”
“Oh…” she voices in a slight trailing-off groan, and a hint of a smile. J’Lyn’s gaze softens as she says matter-of-factly, “...No.” We both laugh. “I can talk about it patchily,” she says. “Go for it, I encourage.”
“This is actually very interesting, now that I think about it.” Her gaze draws across the meditation room and lands with me. “I’m going to start with Wollstonecraft,” she begins, “because she is overtly talking about women's rights [as] inspired by the French revolution. To me, the French Revolution seems so much about bodies -- because people are starving, they’re killing each other and it’s bloody and violent. In some ways, in this indirect way, she’s interested in this bodily revolution and using it for inspiration.
“But then I thought about the Western women writers who wrote before Wollstonecraft. Margery Kemp, and Julian of Norwhich, and Margaret Cavendish, and Christine de Pisan. Some of those are totally about the body. Like, Margery Kemp told her husband she didn’t want to have sex with him anymore because she wanted to be married to Christ. Julien of Norwhich is very sick and having these very bodily manifestations of her love for Christ.
"But, [in my opinion], the body doesn’t become political until much later, around the 60’s. I could be wrong about this, but I think it’s always indirectly there. A lot of women are acknowledging what it means to give birth, what it means to be confined to private space, which is all about the body. I’m thinking about early communist feminists; so much about what they’re talking about is workers' rights, which I think is actually -- as Foucault shows us -- absolutely about the body. Wollstonecraft talks about education as being bodily as well, because at that time women were primarily educated in the home; they didn’t have a public life. But it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the body becomes explicitly politicized. [We see emerging discourse on] the rights to the body, or the right to have an abortion. We also see Black feminists forming their own arguments and assertions. In some ways, it’s very much about the body -- a racialized body. Next, French theory and psychoanalytic theory did something very interesting to feminisms, which is to talk about language as embodied and sexualized, and desirous. There it becomes abstract and more theoretical, in some ways, but it also becomes more about the body. [Around this time,] feminists are starting to talk about the difference between gender and sexuality. I think Foucault is so influential in that regard, about how ideaology and how the State influences the body, and makes the body conform to it. Maybe that’s where we’re at now -- thinking less about women’s bodies, and more about just bodies.”
“I definitely take that stance also. Next question: where can we see body marginalization in Western culture?”
“Haha! Well, that’s actually very interesting also. To be honest, I haven’t answered that specific question for myself. I have been reading a lot of this guy Charles Eisenstein who writes about suffering in the body, which of course is not a new topic. [His assertion] is that suffering is the body repressing it’s pain, and I thought that was really interesting. I’ve heard other people talk about the necessity of pain, and that pain is this important part of life; it’s a measure the body has of it’s comfort, and its environment. In Western culture, we’ve become really adept at repressing that and desensitizing it, and the result is not necessarily the absense of pain, but the presence of suffering. I’ve become fascinated with this perspective; he’s not just talking about physical pain but psychological and emotional pain as well. This is one way I’ve been thinking about the marginalization of the body. We’ve had so many scientific advances, and we use them; but, it does feel a bit like we’re marginalizing our humanity, in some ways. We intoxicate pain through medication, [or] we often outsource it -- we make others feel pain so that we can avoid it. That’s something that Western culture is doing a lot right now -- other people will feel the pain of environmental degradation, they’ll feel the pain of what comes to us as luxury.
"[Finally], there’s an ecological perspective that has gotten pretty marginalized as well. It says,” gesturing to her own, “that [my] body is the same as [your] body, is the same as [that other body over there.] We’re all connected, and I feel that if we understood our bodies better, we would understand that. But we’ve so objectified the body that we can’t see it as connected to ourselves, or each other.”
“So,” I ask, “let’s talk about who is defining the ‘we’ here. How does the Western Canon define culture? What does it predominantly reify?”
“The Western Canon was built to support Western culture. In the 20th century, it became necessary with the development of nation-states, and the rise of colonialism, to have an accepted body of texts that define a culture. Establishing the Canon allowed the promotion of genres and themes [in writing] over periods of time. In a sense, it is a tactic of defensiveness against time and [encounter].
“Derida talks about writing as presence; meaning, it is the privilege of who is allowed to ‘show up.’Canonical writing reifies presence, and in some ways reifies embodiment. By it’s nature, embodiment in the cannon is writing, it is production of that which is conceivable. There is a lot that exists that’s not conceivable. Language is always grasping at the world and at articulation, expression … The writing that gets privileged [in the Canon] is that which has seemingly been able to articulate something…. Language both recalls and creates experience, and in doing so defines [reality]. Because there are these standards of what is conceivable, that say ‘This is what writing looks like, this is its logic, and this is the reasonable.’ I believe there is lots that is beyond conception, but that still exists. And that has a hard time making it into the Canon, [and is so marginalized].
“It makes a lot of sense how this definition is exclusive, and has marginalized many people and kinds of experiences,” I say. “I recently came to some conclusions in my interview with Christine Caldwell; we established from her perspective, that culture is created between bodies. There’s the idea that [our human environments] are designed by people to construct function. We also established that culture create bodies, but also bodies perpetuate culture. I’m just trying to wrap my mind around how massive the implications of that are, and that from the flesh everything we relate to -- every way, every mannorism that I project and that you receive, every aspect that I know to be about your role and mine, about the setting that we’re in, and so on -- all of it came from a body. It’s most familiar to say, ‘Oh, someone thought of these laws and someone thought to design this classroom in this particular way; but the idea behind somatic psychology is that the mind is a function of the body, not the other way around. It suggests further that even the thoughts I’m sharing with you right now are a function of my body interpreting my experience, and giving me clues about how to respond.
"Let’s keep going,” I say with appetite. “Who has a stake in the issues brought about by body marginalization studies? Is the marginalization of the body a ‘women’s issue’?”
“Definitely not. Foucault and the post-structuralists remind us that awareness is an act of nonconformity. Although women have historically been assigned the body and socialized around it, the implications of reintegrating the body into culture are global consequences that [apply to all people. How rarely we think about how] the smog in China affects [the air quality for all] people; similarly, cultural behaviors [particularly of the dominant culture have similar] repercussions.
“Sometimes I feel powerless. Charles Eisenstein says in The Ascent of Humanity that we live in this culture of separation --”
“which is intentionally constructed, yes?
“Definitely. Everything in our culture is about separation from other people. But, he also has a lot of lovely things to say about living in community and seeing ourselves as interconnected. Maybe we don’t have to [transition to a totally collectivist state]; but maybe we could start to see ourselves as connected, and to start understanding each other. Maybe we don’t have to have the same political beliefs. Maybe it could be as simple as, you don’t put shit in my water because you realize someone is going to drink it. Maybe that would just be enough.”
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With Western culture premised largely on exponential growth with consequence, the lack of a cultural self-reflective capacity in the West is perhaps the biggest challenge and threat to global well-being today; creating space to promote this new aspect of Western understanding must among our top priorities.
Erin Likins’ artistic research endeavor, PROJECT:BERLIN, investigates how Germany has achieved progressive, inclusive sustainability – both economically, environmentally, and socially – by examining the narratives individuals carry in their bodies about their culture. The research endeavors to study the German example by opening the floodgates of sensation which construct the individual constructing culture.
By investigating the felt sensations of the post-Wall era, PROJECT:BERLIN will provide the compelling pair of qualitative artwork (written and performed) and quantitative data to illuminate the themes Germany has address that institutions in the US must prioritize. PROJECT:BERLIN is a critical study to undertake if the younger North American nations are to experience the hard-earned wisdom of their now-peer, Germany.
In collecting and disseminating the individual stories that construct culture, we will take a profound new look at the values and experiences that have transformed a crushed, industrialized Western nation into a thriving, global leader of cultural self-reflection. With access to this content, PROJECT:BERLIN will collectively offer a values-based presentation of the scaffolding needed to catalyze North American social transformation. If properly resourced, this research can evolve into a service-based social enterprise with consultancies, film screenings, and speaking engagements.
Accessing this content and uplifting its relevance is one solution to creating the direly needed quality of cultural self- reflection in the United States. We all share a stake in a global superpower’s ability to self-regulate. If we don’t investigate this now, our future selves will wish we had.
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