Prologue for A Book on the Body that I Didn’t Write

Looking for a quote about the body among the discarded proposals, half-written essays, early book drafts buried in the recesses of my “files” folders, I came across this piece, labeled “Prologue?”

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I had completely forgotten about this set of random yet connected thoughts on my body/ “The Body” that I wrote a few years ago, during the height of the pandemic, playing around with ideas for a possible book. My agent didn’t like it, so I never followed through. He was probably right about its potential as a book. But I want to share it. Please, please do share your own experiences. And don’t hesitate to write at length—in my chat room or at the end of this piece. We all have secret histories of our bodies, and perhaps my sharing some of mine will unlock some of yours.

I was on the floor doing downward dog when this book began.

Judy Collins was on my IPad; I was in that kind of mood. My little Havanese, finding no available lap or shoulder, was lying on my hands; his body was like a muff, warm and soft, and occasionally I rested my forehead against it. I was feeling sorry for myself.  My back had been aching for a few weeks when one day the pain shot fiercely from a spot just under my waist, down my left leg, and into my foot. After advil and ice, the sharp pain had gone away, leaving a trail of tingling and numbness down my leg and foot, and when I stood up, my left leg had altered it’s previously compatible relationship with the left. “Shit,” I thought, imagining stair lifts and motoring through the supermarket, “I’m really an old person now.”

The chiropractor diagnosed several not-very-unusual problems for a person of 74, prescribed regular sessions, massage, and at-home stretches several times a day.

So—the downward dog. It apparently shifts some nasty gunk oozing from between compressed discs back where it belongs (“Think of the jelly in a jelly donut being squeezed out,” the sciatica guru on the internet had said. It was all a mystery to me, but it did feel good.) 

“Alexa, play ‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’ and others like it.”

I’m sure Judy, dreaming with her love before the winter fire, and my dog, who adored and wanted to merge with every part of my body, had something to do with it. But my hips and bottom, made unyielding by years of sitting and writing, allowing my brain to take control, sent a stream of emotion upward, away from my numb legs toward my heart, which—amazingly—was not yet in lockdown. My elbows were on the mat, my back arched, butt high and reaching out, not to obey the instruction booklet (“exercises for back, sciatica, ec.”) but for the pure joy of it—and then suddenly I was weeping, as a secret history stored in that part of my body came unpacked.

We’d been together only a short while, and were obsessed with each other. My body yearned for his so badly that even when we weren’t together, I’d feel him physically. Sometimes at night, half-asleep, his naked chest would be against mine, and I was shocked to realize that he wasn’t actually there. It wasn’t a dream, I’m sure of that, but some kind of psychic/body conjuring I can’t explain. I can’t explain, either, how it was that during one ecstatic coming-together on my bathroom floor, my legs wrapped around this man who loved them, thick ankles and all, I knew—absolutely, definitively knew—the moment I got pregnant. A soundless “ping.” My doctor scoffed—“You can’t feel the sperm penetrating the egg”—but he was wrong, totally wrong.  

A bit later after my Judy Collins moment, my back resting against a huge blue ice pack, I thought about all that my body knew, all the times it had said to me: “See, you can’t ignore me, control me, or escape me. I’ll catch up with you, for better or worse.” It was for better the night at Arthur Murray’s when I discovered that my big-bottomed, big-legged pear of a body could do Cuban motion as if born to it (where did that come from, in this shame-ridden Jewish girl?), while the slender reeds across the room struggled. For better, too—and as authoritative, in their own way as my pregnancy “ping”--were the labor pains I felt when the birth mother of my daughter-to-be, across town, was experiencing the real thing---at the exact same time.

The body doesn’t let us forget that it has what academics call “materiality”—as when I threw my 50-year-old leg over the baby-gate, forgetting for a moment that I wasn’t the limber 16-year-old who had actually given birth to my daughter, and injured myself in exactly the same place as my current injury, come back to haunt me as I aged. But it also speaks metaphorically: Years earlier, having tried to get pregnant without success, my ears got blocked, and it developed—as has happened several times in my life, though taking root in different parts of my body—into a somatic phobia so preoccupying that it necessitated taking a leave from teaching. I experienced my ears as filled with tunnel-like tubes travelling from outer to inner and back out again. And yet it came with a jolt when, explaining the sensation to my therapist, I referred to the malfunctioning working of my inner ear as fallopian tubes. 

All of this, on the face of it, seems merely autobiographical. But only on its face. In fact, my body—all of our bodies—contain knowledge that although intimate and shaped by the particulars of each individual life operates, like all languages, within a larger lexicon of meanings, meanings that themselves branch out in myriad directions.

A “Jewish” body performing “Cuban motion” is not just about Susan Bordo discovering an ability she didn’t know that she had. It’s about the sexual organization of the body, biologically as well as historically, it’s about ethnic shame over body parts (not exclusive to Susan Bordo, certainly), and it’s about, as well, the unexpected forms of human connections that our racially divided culture doesn’t allow for. I have a butt like a Black girl, and in many ways that have nothing to do with skin color, I don’t think of myself as “white.” But while In theory, we recognize that “white” is a historically shifting designation of political and social power and privilege—not a biological category—if I dared speak (on MSNBC, say) of my identifications with Black women, I’d be harshly scolded for not recognizing the privilege my skin color confers. I’d have to qualify and explain (“Of course, I’m not saying that a policeman wouldn’t treat me differently than a person with brown or black skin,” “Of course, I’m not saying that I know what it feels like to be a Black woman,” etc. etc,) I’d have to backtrack and pander, and we’d never get to explore the complexities of race together, or the possibilities for a deeper coalition than putting a “Black Lives Matter” sign in my window, and being a good—but silent—“ally.”

Poet Carolyn Williams , in the middle of heated controversies about the taking down of Southern monuments glorifying the Confederacy, published a piece called “You want a Confederate Monument? My body is a Confederate Monument.” It begins: “I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the cause of the Old South. If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.”(Williams, 2020) There couldn’t be a more perfect example of displacing the “objectivity” of the conventional color-palate with complexion as “written” by history—in this case, a history that is both racist and patriarchal.

Williams’ essay is powerful, and gifted readers with the jolt of what in the old days of feminism we called the “click” of recognition that the “personal is the political”--possibly the most famous slogan produced by what has been called (sometimes derisively, sometimes nostalgically, but rarely with the intellectual credit that is it’s due) the “second wave” of feminism. In those days, it referred to the “aha!” insight that encouraged women to understand their individual wounds, angers, desires, and difficulties in relationships , jobs, and school as far from unique, but systemic to the situation of being a woman in a patriarchal, sexist culture.

Your boyfriend refuses to do the dishes? Click! Such chores are an arena for “the politics of housework.” You can’t reach orgasm except through masturbation? Click!! Your privates are a colonized territory, and patriarchy has deemed penetration of the vagina the only “real” sex, the clitoris just an immature little vestige of pre-grownup femininity. You are ashamed to talk about the date who raped you (after all, you were drinking, and wearing a mini-skirt)? Click! We live in a “rape culture” in which boys are taught sex is owed them and girls learn they themselves are responsible for the sexual violence done to them. Your shoulder is on the verge of dislocation from waving to answer questions in class, as the professor’s eyes glaze over you until he lights on the half-raised arm of a boy? Click? Welcome to Sexism 101. So you get a little more pushy, and then they call you a bitch, a ball-buster, a bull-dyke. Click, click, click, click!

A lot of great feminist writing emerged from that insight, writing that firmly kept in mind the “is” yoking the individual to the systemic. And much of it was about the body—not as the dictator of biological reality but—as Carolyn Williams described it in her powerful essay--as a storehouse of historical, political and cultural meaning. Germaine Greer wrote a whole book unpacking those meanings through a tour of female body-parts. But that kind of nuanced exploration isn’t the stuff of rallies, and in 2021, it’s largely been left to memoir and sharing among close friends (or with therapists,) as “political action” turns to the generalizing language of marches and manifestoes.

Sadly (from my point of view), feminist “personal politics” has become almost entirely ideological, even about those experiences that are intensely intimate and individualized. As a result, complexity, ambiguity, context, and the “intersectionality” that we tout in theory rarely operates “in action.” So, for example, #MeToo has rapidly devolved from a long overdue revelation of how many women have been raped or seriously abused to a glomming together of all “unwanted touching” and “inappropriate advances” without regard to context, interpretation of gestures, differences in ethnic and racial meanings (of hugging, touching, etc.) or the fact that power can be abused without any touching of the body at all—as the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill example demonstrates.

The actualities of who has power over whom are often much more complicated than the formulas allow for. When I was a 26-year-old sessional lecturer I had an affair with an 18-year-old student, and briefly referred to it on Facebook, where I was pelted with sanctimony and horror. “What kind of a feminist are you????” “I’m blocking you right now.” “You’re disgusting!” “How could you? I would have expected so much better from Susan Bordo” The fact is—and I will write more about this in the book—that 18-year-old held plenty of power in the relationship; more than I did, actually. But to understand that, you have to understand “power” not as something one either possesses (or doesn’t) but is distributed socially along a variety of axes, not just “boss/employee,” “teacher/student” or “male/female.” Power is….well….intersectional.

Nothing demonstrates this so well as the lives of our bodies—but only if we let them “speak” freely, without regard for embarrassment or condemnation. And that’s where this book comes in—not as manual for healing trauma through body-work and exploration (we’ve got plenty of those already) or as a treatise about “The Body” as conceptualized in different historical/political eras (see Foucault—and some of my own work—for that) but as an experiment in freeing up the limits put on what can be spoken of—or even thought about—by following the body’s trails of meaning. As a “theorist of the body,” that’s  something I’ve done in all my writing—but only in the briefest of moments (asides, really, and always in the service of illustration, then quickly moving on) have I taken my own body as my guide. It’s unfamiliar, exposing, and unnerving, and I keep asking myself if I really want to do it. But it’s been lurking there, in the wings of the theatre of my public writing. And maybe now, as the isolation of the pandemic has forced me to go more interior (also known as “thinking”?)  is the time to give a shove onto the stage.