On the Body
About a week ago, I made a post on my Instagram account about my thoughts on the body after an all too familiar encounter. It was sparked by (yet another) comment about how “confident” I am to be wearing the things I wear and dancing the way I do online, followed by an an assertion that “they could never do that”, and finished with a self-critical statement from the commentator. The oxygen suddenly stiffened into something melancholic.
The reason for this is because the space that existed between my minimally clothed body and this person’s judgement of it was strewn with shame crystallized from social conditioning on what the femme body is and should be. They laughed with discomfort when they saw that I did not react with humor or acquiescence, but instead with a simple question “why did you say that?”
As I wrote my post, I was reminded of the gift that Maya Angelou gave us which states:
“Words are things. You must be careful, careful about calling people out of their names, using racial pejoratives and sexual pejoratives and all that ignorance. Don’t do that. Some day we’ll be able to measure the power of words. I think they are things. They get on the walls. They get in your wallpaper. They get in your rugs, in your upholstery, and your clothes, and finally in to you.”
Words are things. Indeed they are Maya. Indeed they are.
Words illustrate epistemes and they exist within a dialectic of discourse, power, and institutions. They feed on each other, become mutually reinforced, and are disseminated into us as ideology. When unquestioned, they become truth. They touch every facet of our lives, our thinking, and our being. When it comes to the body, especially that of a femme body, they become tools of surveillance and discipline to remind us to stay in line, or else. It becomes internalized, festering into shame, and (un)consciously detonated when a body dares to be unruly. Words are a prism for how we understand the body, and they are always imbricated in power.
Back to my encounter.
My question was met with brief silence before the inevitable “oh, I was just joking.”
Whether or not they believed this to be true was of less concern than the fact that they so readily felt the need to insult themselves. In fact, my mother used to, and still does always remind me to speak life into myself. Not even as a joke should one ever engage in disparagement. As I grow older, I am beginning to have more moments of pause with these interactions as it relates to what it is we carry with us as beings living in our bodies. The things that do not belong to us, but we have been taught to bear and focus on in lieu of other more meaningful endeavors of existence.
…TBC
xx
Eden
