Bodies
Anna Agathangelou16
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a “body” is the “physical form of a person, animal, or plant” and also “the main portion; the trunk.” The latter meaning stems from the Old English “bodig” and Old High German “botah,” meaning the trunk or chest of a human or animal. “Body” was extended to mean “person” (e.g., “somebody”) during the late thirteenth century after a series of famines, plagues, and wars generated fears about how to protect life. In German, for example, “life” is replaced by “lived body” (“leib”). “Body” has been contrasted with “soul” since the mid-thirteenth century, and since the late thirteenth century it has been associated with “corpse.” Using “body” to refer to matter (“heavenly body”) occurred in the late fourteenth century. By the sixteenth century, “body” also began referring to those emerging political forms that would become the nation-state (“body politic”).
Given this history, it is not surprising that tensions exist between various meanings of “body,” which is cast variously as a soulless phenomenon capable of “mechanistic explanation and manipulation” (Kirmayer 1988, 59), as the medium of self expression, language, feelings, and connection, as a fleshy corpse, and as a site of political struggle. These tensions make the body—in both word and matter—a pivotal site of radical engagement today. In radical movements and the social sciences, and especially in studies concerning race, gender and sexuality, class, and disability, references to “the body” and “bodies” have proliferated since the 1990s (Sanbonmatsu 2004; McNally 2001). Following from the nineteenth-century Romantic insights of Walt Whitman, who could not help but to “sing the body electric” (1855), these contributions have often worked to unsettle mind-body and soul-body dualisms. By Whitman’s account, “was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves?”
And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul?
And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? . . .
The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones,
The exquisite realization of health;
O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul,
O I say now these are the soul!
Tackling the conceptual partition between body and soul from another angle a century later, Malcolm X highlighted the philological connection between “Negro” and the Greek words “necro” (death) and “nekros” (corpse). In this way, he helped to underscore how white supremacy entangled Black bodies—and following W.E.B. DuBois, the very “souls of Black folk” (1903a)—with death. Between the publication of Du Bois’ groundbreaking work and Malcolm X’s pivotal “Ballot or the Bullet” speech of 1964, this entanglement found vivid expression in Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit” (1939). A protest against lynching, the song conjures “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze” while conjoining the smell of magnolias to that of burning flesh. In a 1969 interview, Nina Simone (who had recorded a famous rendition) recounted that “Strange Fruit” was probably the ugliest song she had ever heard: “It is violent and tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country. I mean it really really opens the wound completely raw when you think of the man hanging from a tree and to call him strange fruit” (Combe 2012).
Around the time that Simone was revisiting the rawness of the wounds endured by Black folks reduced to “bodies,” Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton began to confront the contest surrounding the Black body as well. For Newton, however, the body was not solely a target for racist violence. It was also a “number of persons regarded as a group” (i.e., the body politic). Pressing against the limits of the mind-body dualism, he outlined his program as follows: “We give white people the privilege of having a mind and we want them to get a body.” Concretely, this meant: “arm yourselves and support the colonies around the world in their struggle against imperialism” (1968, 8).
Such a struggle was necessary since, according to Frantz Fanon, “there are times when the black man is locked into his body” and subjected to a “crushing objecthood” as a result of colonialism (1967, 110). Influential for Newton and the Black Panthers, Fanon’s account of the colonial encounter stood at odds with theories of democracy presaged by the 1679 Habeas Corpus Act, which associated the body with political representation. According to Giorgio Agamben, the modern democratic states that emerged in the wake of this legislation could distinguish themselves from ancient and medieval regimes because, at their inception, it was “not the free man and his statutes and prerogatives . . . but rather corpus that [was] the new subject of politics” (1998, 124). Still (and along with other contradictions arising from the modern democratic framework), the histories of racism, slavery, and colonial rule ensured that some bodies were not the subject of politics but rather its dead matter.
But even as embodiment became the foundation for legal and political representation for Europeans, the new situation did not apply to all. Indeed, workers were still often viewed as the objects and not the subjects of politics. According to the 1714 British Vagrancy Act, “All Persons able in Body, who run away, and leave their wives or Children to the Parish, and not having wherewith otherwise to maintain themselves . . . and refuse to work for the usual and common Wages . . . shall be deemed Rogues and Vagabonds.” For Marx, the vagrant body amounted to a “specter outside its domain” (1964, 121) since capitalism acknowledged the body only inasmuch as it labored and reproduced. Today, this struggle continues through slogans such as “the body must be ours. It is not the state’s or the market’s” (Agathangelou forthcoming).
The fight for bodily self-possession builds on feminist movements that have also oriented toward the body as a site of protest, highlighting how control of women’s bodies through domination has been a central dynamic of modern societies (Federici 2004). “In our culture,” said Andrea Dworkin, “not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. No feature or extremity is spared the art, or pain, of improvement.” According to Dworkin, this constant requirement was not cosmetic but disciplinary; ultimately, it prescribed “the relationship that an individual will have to . . . her motility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body” (1974, 113–14). Around the same time, Audre Lorde began to describe the Black body as an anachronism. With this insight, she challenged the feminist movement to take account of the particular experience of feminized Black embodiment. “We have been sad long enough to make this earth either weep or grow fertile,” she stated. “I am an anachronism, a sport like the bee that was never meant to fly. Science said so. I am not supposed to exist. I carry death in my body like a condemnation. But I do live. The bee flies. There must be some way to integrate death into living, neither ignoring it nor giving in to it” (1980, 13).
According to Cherríe Moraga, feminists like Audre Lorde and June Jordan helped to give lesbians “a body, a queer body in the original dangerous, unambivalent sense of the word” (quoted in Gumbs 2010, 14). Similarly, 1970s health movement activists brought abortion “out of the closet where it had been hidden in secrecy and shame” (Sullivan 2006, 158). With slogans like “my body, my choice,” feminist movements made bodily autonomy and sovereignty the very site of politics. In 1973, the Boston Women’s Health Collective published the first edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves, a book whose title effectively erased the formal conceptual distinction between embodiment and subjectivity. By 1989, however, the degree to which women’s bodily sovereignty was under attack became clear when feminist artist Barbara Kruger designed her famous “Your Body Is a Battleground” image to support the March on Washington in defense of reproductive choice. Since then, ecological justice movements have stretched the feminist “my body, my choice” paradigm to protest the broader social conditions that force women to confront “the results of toxic dumping on their own bodies (sites of reproduction of the species), in their homes (sites of reproduction of daily life), and in their communities and schools (sites of social reproduction)” (Merchant 1995, 161; Shirley Thompson 2003).
Toward the end of the 1980s, activists in ACT UP challenged the widely held belief promoted by arch-conservatives like Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) that being HIV-positive meant being a contagion in need of quarantine within the national body politic. For Helms, quarantine was justified to prevent AIDS-infected inmates from taking “revenge on society” upon release from prison (United Press International 1987). ACT UP members responded in a variety of creative ways, including updating their iconic “Silence = Death” poster to read “Helms = Death.” Jon Greenberg, an ACT UP activist who died of AIDS, used to say to his friends, “I don’t want an angry political funeral. I just want you to burn me in the street and eat my flesh.” At a 1988 demonstration against the Food and Drug Administration, AIDS activist and artist David Wojnarowicz wore a black leather jacket emblazoned with the words “If I Die Forget Burial Just Drop My Body on the Steps of the F.D.A.” The Marys, another AIDS activist group during this period staged open-casket funerals to politicize AIDS deaths as well as the dead body itself (Debra Levine 2009). Under the slogan “LEAVE YOUR BODY TO POLITICS,” they placed an advertisement in the August 1992 PWA Coalition Newsline that recounted how, “throughout the AIDS crisis, furious activists with advanced HIV disease have been saying they want their deaths to help further the fight against this country’s neglect and incompetence in the face of AIDS” (Debra Levine 2012).
Whether motivated by xenophobia or purported altruism, public health movements have tended to emphasize “well-being” over individual liberties; however, the conceptual distinction between these two concerns is not always clear. In response to the question “Why is cancer a feminist issue?,” biologist, activist, and cancer survivor Sandra Steingraber highlights how “the parts of women’s bodies that have been affected—our ovaries, our uterus, our breasts—are the parts of the body that have been despised, objectified, fetishized” (quoted in Tarter 2002, 200). More recently, health and reproductive rights activists grappling with the medical industrial complex have drawn inspiration from theorists like Latour, for whom “the body is . . . a dynamic trajectory by which we learn to register and become sensitive to what the world is made of” (2004, 205–6). Rather than “theorizing the body directly,” Latour has instead advocated what he calls “body talk.” He asks, “Under what conditions can we mobilize the body in our speech [without reiterating] the usual discussions about dualism and holism?”
Similarly, feminist materialists have begun to push understandings of embodiment beyond discursive construction (Barad 2007) to explore the means by which bodies both resist and conform to normative gendered and sexual scripts. According to Anne Fausto-Sterling, “labeling someone a man or a woman is a social decision. We may use scientific knowledge to help us make the decision, but only our beliefs about gender—not science—can define our sex. Furthermore, our beliefs about gender affect what kinds of knowledge scientists produce about sex in the first place” (2000, 3). Proclaiming that “genitalia isn’t destiny,” actress and activist Laverne Cox has similarly underscored how “lots of lived experience defies that trapped-in-the-wrong-body narrative” (2014).
On December 14, 2012, Canada voted Bill C-45 into law, thus amending the Fisheries Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act, and the Navigable Waters Protection Act. In this way, they removed thousands of lakes and streams from federal protection and made it easier for economic development projects—including tar sands mining and oil pipelines—to be approved. In response, Idle No More leader Chief Spence challenged Bill C-45 with a hunger strike. Under the slogan “Bodies of Water, Not Bodies of Women,” Chief Spence aimed to redirect media attention, which “began to conflate the Idle No More movement with Indigenous women’s bodies, focusing on objectification, discrimination, and violence” while neglecting to consider the struggle around water that initially prompted the mobilization (Rutherdale, Dolmage, and Podruchny 2014). Nevertheless, as Anishinaabe grandmother and “water walker” Josephine Mandamin reminds us, “We are all water. We are born of water. We are all water people. We are all water carriers. We carry water within us. . . . We have a duty to care for the water” (King 2014). Such observations force us to reconsider Chief Spence’s distinction between water and women’s bodies. From the struggle to secure autonomous integrity to the challenge of recognizing fluid co-implication, the “body” remains a battleground.
See also: Accessible; Agency; Care; Crip; Experience; Gender; Labor; Nation; Oppression; Politics; Race; Trans*/-
16. I would like to acknowledge the considerable assistance I received from Kelly Fritsch and AK Thompson in crafting this entry.