Week 7: Jeffreys, Bost, Alaimo (Disability Studies; Body/Eco-feminism)

Assignment: In this creative-critical piece, write an analysis of your body and/or embodiment that is informed by the ideas discussed in this week’s readings.

The readings from this week talked about embodiment, identity, and disability/visible difference.  Mark Jeffreys wrote about the frustrating ways in which culture constructs the body: bodies are either normative or different (the Visible Cripple). Bodies are constructed at the site ("seam") where the body meets culture; bodies are cultural artifacts.

Suzanne Bost wrote about potentialities that emerge when using "the unexpected identifications and relationships forged by illness as an alternate foundation for politics: a foundation that is not exactly post-identity but that is no longer invested in the boundaries of identity (342). Bost writes that Chicana feminists like Anzaldua and Moraga developed politics from shifting, fluid materialities: their politics are unbounded. Illnesses and disabilities can create new relationships and associations that would not have formed through racial/sexual identities alone: race, sex and class "are not always accurate markers of difference. We must then accept other corporeal aspects as equally important frameworks for political coalition-building." This allows for simultaneity. It seems, too, that hetergeneous political frameworks have the potential for world-building: "these alliances produce new alliances, moving out toward the future."

Stacy Alaimo discusses the tendency for corporeal and environmental feminist theories not to intermingle, and argues that it's not desireable—she instead calls for a "trans-corporeality," "where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from 'nature' or 'the environment'."  The environment, Alaimo says, is not just an empty space or "resource" for human use, but a material world all its own, composed of bodies.  Alaimo goes on to survey feminist theories in materiality (how can the body resist its cultural construction), agency (what would nature's agency look like? We need a more complex understanding of agency), epistemological space ("wilderness" of the body), transit (how is the body in motion? How is it continually [re/de-]composed?), and toxic bodies (which have the potential to de-romanticize corporeality and expose inter-connections in new ways—similarly, perhaps to the ways in which disability studies examine new connections and relationships).


Taking my cue from the Bost article about Chicana feminism, I decided to write about how my body is both inscribed with racial difference and inscribed with a fluid racial identity.

Bost says that the traditional model for identity politics—that is, identity is seen "only in terms of existing sociopolitical categories" (340)—and artificially categorizes bodies.  She says, "some identities are not always identical to themselves are sometimes visibly disabled and sometimes enabled" (361).

My racial differences are visibly inscribed, but not always obvious: I seem white enough that most people don't peg me for a minority right as soon as they see me; the most memorable comment I've gotten when telling someone that I'm half Filipina is, "I thought there was a touch of ethnicity about you."

At my college, checking the box for being a minority meant that you were automatically a member of "The Multicultural Club" and that when it was college brochure season, the photographers emailed you to be in the college's promotion materials (seriously).  They didn't tell us this, of course; we only figured out the reason why we were "specially selected" to be in photographs when we showed up and looked around at each other.  The college wanted us to be the visible minority: to make their campus look like a diverse, happily-assimilated place.  (This can also be tied into the college's diversity initiative. Interestingly, the college's idea of diversity was limited to visible markers of difference—how many black students can we entice onto campus? Considering students from different socio-economic or religious backgrounds, for example, wasn't thought of as diverse.)

I usually didn't attend Multicultural Club meetings or events because I didn't feel like I shared the core experience of being Other-ized.  I grew up in a rural town that, according to Wikipedia, is 97.7% white.  While you might think that such an overwhelming majority would oppress me, the opposite seemed to occur in our town: those of other minorities became more "white." When only 0.53% of your population is Asian, you don't build an identity based on an Asian community because, essentially, there isn't one. As a result, my racial identity has always felt fluid; sometimes I feel Asian American, but more often I feel white. I choose the checkbox for my ethnicity on forms based on my mood.

Perhaps this means that I feel that my identity has been more culturally constructed than racially. When I came to a Multicultural Club meeting in the fall of my freshman year (my first and, possibly my last, if memory serves), I finally felt like the Other. I hadn't overcome difference, I hadn't felt marginalized, and I hadn't had experiences like those that my peers talked about that day. (Unlike my partner, for instance, I don't have to repeat my name over and over or spell it out when I meet someone.)  I felt like I identified more with the dominant group than with the group of similar racial bodies the college thought I should join as a result of checking the "Asian American" checkbox on my application.