By Christine Caldwell
The word identity sits at the intersection of multiple lines of thought concerning how we work for equity and inclusion in society. The word is often used in developmental psychology because most theorists assert that finding and establishing one’s “sense of self” constitutes the primary means by which we grow, mature, and live a meaningful life.1 Critical theorists use the word to introduce arguments about who gets to define selfhood and how the abuse of power robs certain peoples of their right to self-determination.2 Psychotherapists work with clients on their identity development, as well as toward personal healing that modifies outdated self-concepts and assists with finding a permeable sense of who one is—a self that is neither too rigid nor too unformed.3 The word identity holds many meanings, but it often boils down to connoting a coherent sense of ourselves, coupled with our ability to describe who we are to ourselves and others.
Beginning in the 1960s, various challenges to identity theories have emerged. Feminist theorists began critiquing developmental theory, pointing out that it had been created by and normed on men yet was assumed to apply to all people. Noting that women’s development could be profoundly different, with different values and trajectories, these theorists took particular aim at the notion that separateness and individuation formed the pinnacle of maturity and moral development.4 At the same time, race theorists noted that the parameters of identity development had been formed by whites and were constructed in such a way as to ignore and degrade people of color. William Cross advocated for black identity development, particularly as it related to how African Americans are forced to deal with institutionalized racism as part and parcel of daily life.5
Alongside these important movements, identity as a construct also came under fire. People challenged the idea that it rolled out in stages, particularly stages that began as primitive forces and progressed to more complex levels.6 The notion that a single, mature identity was achieved in adulthood and remained in place for the rest of one’s life was questioned.7 The idea that we possess a single, unified identity came under fire and was replaced with the concept of multiple identities.8 Identity has also come to be seen as situated not just inside an individual but constructed and maintained in social contexts, especially those related to race, gender, culture, ability, and sexual orientation.9 Identity can now be seen as constructed via personal and social narratives, such as the stories we tell about ourselves and are told about us by others.10 Buddhist psychologists have noted that possessing a solid and fixed sense of self can be problematic and often leads to personal and social suffering. Within these newer frameworks, people who hold non-normative identities have found more room to recognize and value their self-experiences. All these confrontations and modernizations have resulted in a richer and more inclusive way to look at identity and our sense of self-concept.
However, another confrontation is in order and has to do with the body’s role in identity development. Historically, virtually all identity theorists saw development as beginning with the primitive body, in which an infant is seen as little more than a bundle of sensations and reflexes. Development in this sense begins with the body and progresses over time to the peak of development—the mature and thinking mind. Certainly, the brain does develop from back to front, progressing from areas like the cerebellum at the base of the skull that preserve bodily integrity, to the prefrontal cortex, which sits behind our foreheads and arranges our thinking and planning. The brain also develops from inside to outside, from deep structures that organize survival-related emotions all the way to the cerebral cortex, a thin layer of tissue encasing most of the brain that organizes complex behavior and that forms a brake against unbridled emotion. The problem lies in how this developmental sequence is interpreted, and the push back on this interpretation is similar to critiques from feminist and race theorists, namely that the marginalized entity, in this case the body, is seen as more primitive and that the crowning glory is the entity in power—the mind—which is heralded as more evolved, more complex, more trustworthy, more moral, and more intelligent.
An alternative and more socially just explanation stems from the notion that what develops first in us does so because it is the most important and the most central, not because it is the most primitive. It doesn’t matter what we are thinking if we cannot breathe, if we cannot move, if we cannot sense what is happening within and without. Traditional developmental theory, as well as many modern identity theories, relegate the body to a separate and “less-than” status.* Identity is typically equated with what we think and say, such as our attitudes and beliefs. However, current neuroscience and behavioral medicine research quite clearly agree that the body is not just operating when we breathe and move, but it is also intimately involved in the generation of and ongoing activities of thought.11 Our bodily self is a thinking self, and vice versa, and together they form the core of our identity. Yet, just like racism and sexism, the deeply embedded and erroneous idea that the body is somehow separate, different, and “less than” persists in most modern cultures.
Oppression in any form does violence to identity development, and the violence that results from the oppression of body identity development is no exception. In traditional, more mental constructs of identity, “oppression can be seen as involving the appropriation of an individual or groups’ identity narratives, whereby the dominant group gets to define and disseminate what did or didn’t happen to various peoples, in ways that legitimize the oppression itself.”12
Dominant groups get to define which identities are acceptable, and therefore included, and which ones are not, and summarily excluded. In most cases, acceptable equals people who look like, think like, and act like the members of the dominant group. This particular enactment of oppression has already been well articulated, yet in the realm of body identity we are still struggling to understand the complexities of this physical terrain. To remedy this imbalance, we first need to understand body identity more deeply so we can construct methods for resisting body oppression, understand how it intersects with other forms of oppression, and recover healthy body identities.
Multiple disciplines have begun to tackle concepts related to the construct of body identity, including philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and sociology. They tend to circle in on the following important themes.
As we can see, the idea that our bodies hold and shape our identity in substantive ways can no longer be dismissed. Many race, feminist, and other critical theorists hold that, to recover identity and equity that has been stolen by ongoing, systemic oppression, marginalized peoples need to spend time with each other, away from those who are constructing and maintaining the norms, as a way to define, articulate, and support their own development on its own terms. Only then can a “full-bodied” restructuring of identity unfold and be integrated with the dominant group, a positioning that includes previously non-normed identities. This may also be the case with body identity. By using the term body identity and by foregrounding its separate development, we give it a name, a self, a history, and a place in the world on equal footing with more mental constructs of selfhood. Only then can we stand up to and move with a more inclusive notion of who we all are and who we become. From this position, we can begin by saying:
. . . body identity is our core identity, out of which other identities are built. It is generated, preserved and enacted by the body, via our explicit and implicit relationship to sensation, movement, physiological processes, relationships, interactions and bodily awareness of emotion. Bodily identity occurs lifelong, and is changeable, multiple, nonverbal, relational, situational and social. Cognitive identity is constructed within the infrastructure of body identity, and involves reinforced verbal narratives that may or may not harmonize with body narratives.16
How is body identity cast into the shadows, or “de-materialized” as Judith Butler might put it?17 What might be the reasons for doing so? Two main pathways are taken to disrupt body identity: making the body itself wrong or less than and making specific, different bodies wrong and less than. These categories almost always overlap, creating a double whammy for nondominant peoples.
Making the body itself wrong has a long and storied history and will be the main focus of the rest of this chapter. Making particular bodies wrong, which I will call somaticism, will largely be unpacked in Part 2 and involves targeting the physical culture of a group, as well as doing violence to their bodies, whether the motivation is based on, for example, ethnicity, race, gender, disability, age, or poverty. In this act of oppression, specific body parts, ways of posturing and gesturing, ways of moving, how space is used, eye contact, voice tone, body size and shape, and other markers of the body are singled out as evidence that the person is a member of a nondominant group, and that evidence is used to lower their status, lessen their physical safety, diminish their rights, and exclude them from resources. For instance, when the norm is a thin, young, fit, light-skinned, symmetrical body, one that is clearly marked as male or female, then anyone who does not fall into those categories will experience some kind of exclusion. This exclusion typically rounds up and segregates people of color, the disabled, the young, the poor, and the gender nonconforming. In some cases, this exclusion will cost certain individuals their life, either through violence or self-harm. Some of the less lethal and ongoing results of this exclusion will likely involve a lifetime of self-criticism, working to control one’s body appearance and activities, chronic health issues, projecting one’s “deficiencies” onto others, and exhausting attempts to either fit in or resist the dominant body narrative.
The long and storied history of making the body itself wrong involves looking through many different lenses, too many to adequately cover here. The following paragraphs articulate some of the more salient ways of approaching what I call somatophobia, or a fear and distrust of the bodily self. Somatophobia is both internalized as self-criticism of one’s body and externalized by critiquing others’ bodies for deviating from a restrictive norm. It is both implicit (operating below conscious awareness) and explicit (consciously enacted). Largely learned within specific cultural and social contexts, the habit of somatophobia may have roots in the human brain’s wiring, which for survival purposes is always alert to and assessing even small differences among people, places, and things in order to assess threat or access resources.18 The problem begins when this brain mechanism is repurposed from appraising safety to applications that involve the abuse of power and the maintenance of unexamined privilege. Somatophobia constructs itself via moment-to-moment valorizing that may involve some of the following implicit mental assumptions.
While based in some very pragmatic realities, the most obvious being the death of the body, the arguments above are popular narratives that both construct and maintain the marginalization of the body. Many of them likely feel very familiar and sensible, but so do many of the arguments for other forms of oppression. They are simply unexamined rationalizations at best and at their worst are stories that delegitimize the body and legitimize the oppression and violence we enact on it.
How do we deconstruct these harmful narratives and work to develop equity and inclusivity for the body, both personally and socially? In the following, I suggest ways to begin this process, a process of challenging somatophobia and repositioning body identity development.
Organized religion historically holds and addresses our fears of death and dying, via pastoral and community support and the sharing of narratives about the eternal soul. Some people have abandoned the notion of an eternal soul as a means of unraveling a myriad of problems associated with organized religion. Organized religion is a social system like many others and one that can engender and perpetuate oppression in all its forms while at the same time working to provide comfort, connection, and a sense of meaning. While all religions need to look more deeply at issues of equity and justice, especially as it pertains to our bodies, it is neither necessary nor advisable to advocate for atheism or a kind of nihilistic abandonment of our human longing for purpose, meaning, and worth.
Modern Western counseling and psychotherapy also work to address our fears of death and impermanence, often by talking about these fears in an atmosphere of acceptance and caring as well as by examining our fear of dying as a proxy for other issues. Counseling and psychotherapy are also human systems, and, as a result, they also carry unexamined beliefs, attitudes, and practices that can marginalize difference, including erroneous assumptions about the less-than status of our body.* Many people rightly feel suspicious of these healing methods, citing their prohibitive cost and their uneven record for delivering what they claim. Yet, again, it is neither necessary nor advisable to abandon the systems we have created to address mental and emotional health.
Rather, we can leverage the aspirations carried within spirituality, religion, and psychotherapy and reposition the body within them. One possible means of doing this is by creating and using the word bodyfulness.19 Coined as a pushback against the word mindfulness—a hybrid word that straddles religion, spirituality, and psychotherapy—bodyfulness helps us reclaim the body’s role in generating meaning and purpose as well as facing our fears. Being bodyful involves attention to the body via the senses, a kind of appreciative listening to the various signals our body generates as a way to report its status, focus attention on something important, warn of problems, and celebrate pleasures. Often, we judge, misinterpret, or try to ignore body signals, which is, as seen here, a method of internalizing body oppression. Bodyfulness works to increase our somatic listening skills as well as allow sensations to occur without bullying them via verbal rationalizations. Bodyfulness also involves the conscious moving of our bodies in response to sensory signals. By pairing our movements with the information we gather from the senses, we can behave in ways that emerge from a sense of responsive connectedness to what is happening inside and outside of us, rather than reinforce our body’s domestication. Conscious sensing, breathing, and moving might be seen as a form of bodily prayer. Lastly, bodyfulness arises not only when we sense and move consciously but also when we stay awake to and reflective of the somatic system we are continuously generating called our body identity.
While it is incontrovertible that humans are a type of animal, we no longer need to see non-human animals as dumb, neither in the sense of levels of intelligence nor in the sense of ability to speak. All animals, human and non-human, possess an intelligence that allows them to thrive in their environment. All social animals use their own forms of communication. Animals that live in groups have their own conventions and cultures, including moral values consonant with their survival as a group. All animals work to avoid pain, and many do so by feeling emotions that motivate them to maximize their well-being.20
While it is also obvious that human animals do and create things that other animals cannot do or create, these differences are a matter of degree rather than a matter of kind. Bodies are no different. All animals are members of a large family, and in this sense we can see what we call human rights as related to what we call animal rights, as well as the rights of the natural environment that sustains us all.
Within systemic abuses of power, members of the group in control often will position themselves as different in kind from the victims of their abuse, in this case seeing themselves as not animals and seeing those they subjugate as animals. This position was often the justification for slavery as well as for domestication. Domestication involves the control of an animal’s food, reproduction, and freedom of movement. The violence perpetrated on marginalized groups can be seen through the lens of the domestication of the body in general and the specific bodies of non-dominant human and non-human animals.
All life forms are embodied, and all bodies share basic processes and instincts. Advocacy for the centrality of the body and the development of body identity must include these basic facts and impel us to confront the complexities of this level of inclusivity. Otherwise, we run the danger of failing to examine the all-encompassing and socially constructed binary of humans as non-animals, one that can be seen as the root of many other binaries that plague us.
One of the other arbitrary separations that plague us is the mistaken notion that very different types of pain exist and that they are somehow unrelated. Physical, emotional, and mental pains are all related, often interwoven. Common sense also illustrates this interrelatedness of pains every time we feel angry when we hit our thumb with a hammer, fearful when the dentist’s drill approaches, or relieved when the toothache stops. Research also validates the deleterious effects of emotional pain on physical health and thoughts about a negative experience on physical stress.21 The same principle applies to pleasurable states and their networked relationship to each other. Increasingly, we are being asked by healthcare experts to exercise and eat better for mental and emotional health, to do fun things and be social for physical health, and to work with physical pain via behavioral methods more than or alongside painkillers. Seeing any pain as completely unrelated to other pains creates segregations, and these segregations create inequalities and injustices. The physical body is usually the victim in these separations because we tend to see it as more controllable.
Naturally, we all want to avoid or minimize any pain. But when we marginalize the body and its sensory signals in general, we work to kill rather than listen to the messenger. In an oppressed body, pain can be seen as a disruptive, “uppity” voice that we delegitimize and sedate with drugs, alcohol, and technologies without listening to it and valuing its voice but pushing it to the margins where it belongs.
Any pain is a signal that something is amiss. Pain can be a very simple flag waving to tell you to move your foot because it has gone to sleep. In some cases, however, pain signals are a kind of protest, and chronic pain could be seen as a protest movement. This type of pain can be a more complex signal, possibly a protest when the body lives inside an oppressive system. It can take the form of internalized oppression (when we hate our bodies), or it can form as a result of living in a society that constantly delegitimizes the body in general or our body in particular.
Resisting and restructuring this oppression involves changing our relationship to pain and pleasure. It involves many of the same activities that social justice activists accomplish in communities—listening deeply to the marginalized voices, valuing and legitimizing their pain, and allying with them to produce change. In an embodied iteration, it begins by developing body listening practices, ones that develop the ability to sense the body in complex and non-judgmental ways. The process can be challenging because body signals are similar to crying babies—they are not using words to communicate. We address the challenge by first examining our “word privilege.” Unexamined word privilege occurs when we don’t like the form of communication we are getting (body sensations), and we insist that the body adapt to our privileged, lexical culture to be legitimized as having something to say. We force ourselves to construct a verbal explanation for our sensations as the only way they can be legitimized. Body identity development matures when we return to our bilingual nature and are able to be comfortable with listening to both verbal and nonverbal language systems, both as we listen to our own bodies and as we relate to the bodies of others. Often, body identity development involves spending more time simply experiencing the bodily self directly.
Body identity development next includes body actions and bodily speaking that can be valued and included in a diverse society. This process not only involves valuing the way different people posture, gesture, and move about, but also includes legitimizing one’s own nonverbal expressiveness on its own terms, without needing to put it into words. In this respect, we may be challenged to alter our lives and relate to our bodies and others’ bodies more directly and more consistently, without the constant intervention of nonliving technologies.
All of us have been on the receiving end of a rude or hurtful remark about our body or its appearance. It’s also a sure bet that we have indulged in comments or gazes that communicate our judgments about how someone else’s body is constructed or how it looks. We can’t deny that we evaluate each other and that this evaluation often centers on physical differences as well as aesthetic norms. We also can’t deny that the body is at least partly a social construct; institutions, genders, cultures, and families all create templates for the acceptable body and compare people to that template. But just like a map is not the territory, a body ideal is not a real, living body. Most theorists will note that this tendency to create body ideals has sensible roots in our evolutionary biology, arguing that a bad-smelling body can be a sign of disease and therefore should only be approached with caution, for instance. Thus, standards of beauty and ability are born. In the hands of anyone (and everyone) who abuses power, this evaluation of our own and others’ bodies can and does go too far and in the wrong direction. Making the perceived body (as opposed to the body experienced from within) conform to rigid, arbitrary, and abusive norms created by those in dominant social groups is likely a factor in eating disorders, poor body image, the objectification and commodification of the body, obsessive interest in a particular appearance, persecution of the “differently abled,” violence against the gender nonconforming, delegitimization of people of color, and subjugation of women.
The answer to this universal abuse of power lies not in abandoning the body or how it appears. To shun any interest in the social body would create an opposite and equally harmful binary and go against our natural joy in body decoration, clothing art, and other forms of individual and collective celebration of our physicality and our body identity. Two key concepts emerge to effectively address this issue: our body as we experience it from within and somaesthetics. Our first counter to the constant, insidious, and highly commercialized obsession many cultures have with the “proper” appearance of the body is to create a balance between how we look to others and how we feel inside. To create a binary between the perceived and the experienced body is to create an alienation from it. But, because the body as experienced from within has often been the oppressed party in this equation, our task is largely one of centralizing how we feel as much as and in some cases more than how we look—or letting how we feel inform and influence how we look just as much and often more than how others see us.
Somaesthetics, our second strategy, is a term coined by philosopher Richard Shusterman.22 Shusterman believes that improved body consciousness can both push back against modern, consumer-centric forces and increase our artistic self-fashioning. He notes that consciousness of the body, as we typically use it, is mostly in service to highly profitable “body-look” industries bent on social domination by seducing us to feel badly about how we look. He seeks to liberate body consciousness from this negative enactment and reposition it toward the enjoyment of simple sensory pleasures (such as a soft touch or the wind on your face), the ability to use body awareness as a means of knowing ourselves better, and the natural joy we experience when we use our bodies as a site for creative expression. While he only passingly relates somaesthetics to social justice, he rightly notes that the body as it is experienced from within, as well as the body as a site of creative self-expression and community identity, can be liberating and more productive of overall health and well-being.
The body cannot avoid being the site of exploitation, domestication, and enslavement due to the concreteness of its form and its actions. Any abuse of power will sooner or later land on the body and seek to incarcerate it in some way. Although it is sensible to isolate people who have done harm to others and may continue to do so, our definition of harm bears constant examination. In this context, we can see the abuse of power as involving an assumption that certain people harm or threaten us by their very existence, by their “uppity” actions, or even their different form and appearance. This assumption grows from the twin roots of somaticism and somatophobia.
By disentangling the concept of harm from the experience of upset at challenges to one’s beliefs, habits, and assumptions about self and other, we mature as a society and work toward a greater good. The argument here is that developing one’s body identity might be one of the essential methods of investigating the difference between true harm and the rattled feeling we get when our comfortable positions are challenged. By being able to track our bodily reactions and feel our impulses to move in habitual rather than responsive ways, we can uncover these important distinctions and use our body differently to unravel bias.
The domestication of animals, while in some cases creating mutual benefit (think of our beloved pets), is often a matter of convenience and comfort. Instead of going to all the trouble of chasing down a wild pig, we put it into a feedlot or a dairy farm. The human body as a site of domestication is no different. We do, as individuals, control our reproduction, our movement, and our food. Yet when we do so to control ourselves or others as a matter of unexamined body privilege or exploit others for our own physical comfort, we create an animal/non-animal binary that legitimizes domination. Body comfort can be an exchange among equals, and examining the complexities of that idea can be included in our body identity development.
Typical definitions of the word body include its existence as a material, tangible structure. Where we get in trouble is when we oppose it with a non-tangible self, whether it be called a mind or a soul. This assumption is made on a baseless binary. Rather, we can see multiplicities and interdependencies. Our minds are the part of our bodies that think. Parts of us, like our thinking, move at high speeds, and parts of us move at slow speeds. All speeds are useful in different circumstances. Parts of us dream, and parts of us wake up and get out of bed, and both nourish each other. We carry multiple identities, and their cooperative relationships with each other generate an inclusive community within. That works to mature body identity and creates a template for attitudes and actions in social communities.
Going forward, we can see several general themes regarding body identity development that may work toward releasing the grip of somatophobia and somaticism. First, we can identify and challenge body binaries. Examples of body binaries include male/female, black/white, fat/skinny, abled/disabled, and young/old. When we locate ourselves along continua, we validate both the connections between and the uniqueness of each human body. Next, we can balance the social and the self-experienced body. Likely on their own continuum, these bodies can span the sometimes arbitrary distinction between private and public body locations and create connection between how we feel and how we look. This connection speaks to the distinction between conformity and identification. When we conform to a social group’s dictates, such as how to sit properly, we obey the rule. When we identify with a social group, such as using a cultural gesture, we choose and celebrate an affiliation. The social body can be a vivid and effective way to make statements, from the artistic to the political to the personal. When those statements are connected to our body identity as much as or more than to social convention, we create a continuous connection between our private and social worlds.
Lastly, an examined and experienced physical life, one that involves sensory awareness as well as conscious moving and breathing, may help us not only resist body oppression but also enrich and enliven our time here on the earth. Conscious work to develop one’s body identity, both in the company of supportive and understanding others as well as by oneself, may be strongly related to other forms of personal and social liberation and, when used in conjunction with other forms of activism, may lower the cost of self-reflection and social involvement. Perhaps the return of body identity can also help us laugh, play, and connect along the complex continua of this animal life.
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Pain
By Victoria Henry
Let me tell you a story of feathers and fractured feet.
the flattened tips of toe bones, the delicate, disturbing arch of each rib.
the stretch of skin across the forehead
the bulge of joints
lungs squeezed between satin and whalebone.
Epsom salts and handfuls of hair on the bathroom floor.
nails brittle as chalk, the fine flaps of skin over our small, bloody toes, and the nails green
and oozing. The way they grow back thick, slow, rounded above alien skin.
Whole spoonfuls of cartilage worn away. Tendons ripping slowly from the shinbone with
every jump, soothed with the cold indifference of ice and Ibuprofen. The crack of the
knee, if you are lucky, the pop of the kneecap if you are not. Hip sockets like a shallow
dish. Blood in all the wrong places, and
tendons in shreds. Ankles numb, swollen, purple as plums. Let me tell you how I watched
a girl—14 like me—run a needle through a lighter’s flame.
Every flower wilts
every snowflake falls
every swan crumples
in the wings—
The audience doesn’t pay to see you breathe.