I am white and cisgender and gay. I am a first-generation American but only on one side of my family. I grew up poor. Because of my whiteness, I received the message that all spaces were for me and that I belonged in them. I can move through most spaces in my world with relative ease, without having to change myself or the way my body looks or acts, and no one questions why I am there—whether in a restaurant, a graduate school, or any particular neighborhood. My whiteness has protected me from much of the oppression discussed in these chapters, and I will therefore never fully know the depth of what many of the authors describe.
In retrospect, it should have been pretty obvious to everyone that I was gay from a very young age—for example, I wrote a detailed love letter to my German babysitter, complete with red stationary. Despite my liberal and accepting parents, however, when it finally dawned on me at age thirteen that I was different, I was filled with shame. I’d spent my life until then trying to be the same as everyone else, rehearsing and performing the part of the “perfect, nice white girl” while hiding my parents’ poorness and my upbringing in a strange, hippie community that served adults with developmental disabilities. I turned the shame I felt inward and blamed my body. My body became a fleshy, hateful animal, an object so intimately associated with all my faults and yet also so inexplicably not mine. My body was a battleground. I knew there was something wrong with it, something shameful and dirty, and I was going to punish it and control it. I was going to forcefully mold it into something that wasn’t shameful and that would actually deserve love. I thought that maybe if I turned into one of the TV women I so admired, I would love men; that maybe the reason I had no interest in them was that I wasn’t “female enough”; and that maybe if I turned myself into Nicole Kidman, I would also feel gentle and feminine and docile. Subsequently, then, possessing these characteristics would somehow elicit proper feminine desires and behaviors.
I’m still really gay, but now I’ve figured out how to not store all that shame and blame in my body but, rather, to leave it where it rightfully belongs—with the people and society that tried to shame and blame me in the first place. In so doing, I am able to reclaim my body for myself. That’s why this book is so important; in it, so many of our authors are naming how oppression has affected their bodies or the bodies of folks close to them. They’re acknowledging the impact societies have on our bodies, our identities, and our self-concepts; deconstructing the insidious effects of discrimination; and discussing how to reclaim a relationship to our body.
During most of my life, I have enjoyed a tremendous amount of body privilege. I was born able-bodied, white, cisgendered, lower middle class, and “not too big, not too little.” Without realizing it at the time, these descriptors afforded me tremendous advantages. I moved through my childhood feeling relatively safe, relatively normal, and quite oblivious to the idea that it could be any other way. My first conscious thoughts concerning my body status occurred during my teen years when I began to experience doubts about my looks (I understood my face to be “homely”), and I began to realize that as a girl I could be preyed upon, necessitating a physical conservatism involving how I dressed, where I went, and how I moved and gestured.
In college, I had an African American boyfriend, and my pale skin and straight hair were regularly teased by his black friends, sometimes in fun, sometimes not. I always felt physically safe with him, but I directly witnessed his lack of physical safety in most public spaces, both as a young black male and as a young black male with a white woman on his arm.
Like every woman I know, I have been sexually harassed and exploited by men of all ages and races my whole life. From my teen years onward, I have experienced my body as both political and personal, as both mine and not mine. This realization so moved me that I have devoted my life to the study of the body, as an academic, a researcher, a therapist, and a writer. I have also devoted myself to dancing, to giving and receiving massages, and to valuing my physicality as much as I can.
I am now sixty-five years old, still white, still well educated, still relatively able-bodied, and still middle class. These sociocultural locations still afford me tremendous privileges. I have also come to see that I am bisexual, that my decision to marry my husband was not about gender but about love, and that my youthful sexual “experiments” were not to be dismissed but included. I still struggle with my homely face. Now I add in my struggles with size because I weigh more than the norm says I should. It amazes me how much shame I feel about my size, given how long I have been at the business of examining internalized body biases. In public, I regularly experience a kind of somatic invisibility that older people report, a sense that we elders are not accounted for or physically appreciated.
Writing for and coediting this book has afforded me many opportunities to keep challenging myself, both from the standpoint of my body privileges and my locations as marginalized. I have remembered stories not thought of in decades, cringing at my cluelessness and grinning at my pushbacks. It all jumbles around in my large, white, older, creaky female body. At this point in my life, my political and my personal bodies feel like allies to each other.
I personally know most of the authors in this book. What I mean is that their bodies are quite literally palpable and real to me. Most of them have endured and still endure situations both large and small that make any complacency or ignorance on my part a kind of sin. Yet, for folks like me, feeling guilt or shame is a cop out, a comfortable indulgence among the privileged. The body itself holds the answers to what we can do next. We breathe, we listen to our sensations, and we move with what we feel. We do this as a personal act of dignity and as sociopolitical activism. What these authors show us is that in the complex geography of the body, we all can get lost, and we can all be found.
Throughout the course of this project, we extensively examined how our locations affected our writing for and editing of this book. Of particular significance was our shared whiteness, able-bodiedness, educational histories, and female, cisgendered identities. We questioned whether we should do this project. We talked about “well-meaning-white-lady syndrome”; we considered the irony of two cis, white women asking people of color and gender-nonconforming folks to share their stories of oppression with us, which can be in and of itself a reiteration of oppression. In the end, we affirmed that this project needed doing and that privilege is reinforced when we stay comfortably silent and don’t risk speaking up or when we forgo taking action toward justice and equity in whatever way we can at the risk of many mistakes along the way. For, in the wise words of Audre Lorde: “When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”*