Embodiment

Embodiment is a term used to describe the experience of living in and as one’s body, and negotiating its psychological, physical, and social identity and the power, pleasures, and limitations that shape bodily experience. Those who study LGBTQ embodiment understand the body as equally and simultaneously the home of individual personhood and a site of shared political, cultural, and social meaning. Understanding embodiment as both private and public is necessary for understanding and analyzing embodied LGBTQ life, since LGBTQ identities are experienced as both personally real and socially consequential.

There is no singular LGBTQ mode of embodiment. LGBTQ embodiment, like LGBTQ identity and all identity, is thoroughly intersectional. This means that the particular embodied experiences an LGBTQ person has over a lifetime will be inflected by ...