Embodiment

What Is a Body?

What is it to be a bodily being, sentient, woven into the world? This is a philosophical question but also a practical one. Freudian theories look at bodies as vectors of drives—for pleasure but also for death—in which a body is organized through desire lines that cathect it with other bodies and objects. The poststructuralist development of linguistic theories for subjectivity has an elaborate framework for understanding “bodily inscription” in which the matter of bodies cannot be thought separately from the discursive impressions, self-carvings, and the intelligibility of the ruling episteme. Philosophies of perception such as phenomenology, cognitive sciences, and their elaboration in dance and choreography know-how would say that spatial orientation, rhythm, and kinesthetic sense ground subjects in their bodily flesh. These fields attempt to reconcile how to weight combinations of psychic–corporeal, matter–language, affective thrumming, and felt sensibility. The ontological question of trans bodily knowledge can never be settled, for there is no one way to experience being “trans”; however, the combined attempts at working from the subjective sense of self offer important inroads to grasping what a body is through the trans prism of [Page 230]experience. Trans bodily knowledge is an optic for analysis: the intersectional analysis of sex, gender, race, age, (dis)abilities, linked to analyses of health, vulnerability, care; of sexuality, desire, erotics; of language, discourse, and dispositifs.

Body Politics and Identity Politics

The question of what makes a body “trans”—in the widest possible sense—has echoes in other discussions: What is a woman, what is it to be Black, and how do we think about bodies before colonialization, before modernity, or according to religion? The ways in which embodiment differs, therefore, is not only about considering the single person’s body but how sociality tethers one to their body in shared, collective, but also forceful ways. The measure of difference between embodiments therefore has critical importance.

Since the dawn of Eurocentric Enlightenment thinking, sexo-psychic medical discourses have had a hegemonic grip on trans embodiment. Their ascension into being a proper “science” has been assisted by the creation of taxonomized categorizations that separate the normal from the abnormal. The legacy of proper naming and recognition for sex/gender/sexuality differences—invert, psychic hermaphrodite, transvestite, transsexual, gender identity disorder, homosexual, or autogynephilia—is being actively challenged by the depathology movement, which places value on the wide variety and diversity of sexed and gendered embodiment. These movements for self-determination push back on the presumed authority of “scientific expertise” while challenging its legacy of misnaming, misrecognizing, and misusing differences of sex, gender, and sexuality that so often coincides with racialization/racist epistemological paradigms.

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