“it’s too bad she won’t live! but then again, who does?”

14 Saturday Jan 2012

Posted by in Illness & Disability, Media and Representation

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This ain’t living had a post up recently about disability and science fiction. The post makes some excellent points about representations of disability in the genre. While I’m reluctant to paint all SF as a monolith (and am now inspired to create a list of neutral-to-positive representations of disability in SF), I’d say that the general observation of trends matches up with my experience as long time fan of speculative fiction.

Though SF in general is bad at representing disabilities, you can’t say politicized bodies are absent from the genre. While this doesn’t make up for lack of positive representation of actual disabilities, to suggest that the genre is barren of opportunities for people with non-normative bodies to find themselves in narratives is a bit simplistic. You have to read at the level of metaphor, but the opportunities absolutely are there.

The example that springs most readily to mind for me is the cyborg. The definition of cyborg varies depending on who you ask about it. At its most basic, a cyborg is a being with both mechanical and organic components, “a melding of the organic and the machine.”* Some theorists will call any network of communication and control a cyborg, such as a city, or the internet. The idea of cyborgs is very tied to cybernetics, which is the study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cyborgs are linked to systems and ideas about systems–but that’s a philosophical perspective that I don’t know much about. Personally, I’m more interested in cyborgs at the level of bodies: the fusion of the mechanical and the organic in the human form.  Technically, many people living with disabilities or illness are cyborgs. I’m a cyborg–I have a metal ring and a prosthetic valve in my heart. Even people who wear glasses are cyborgs. It’s actually an expansive category that captures a lot about the way humans are bound up in technology.

In science fiction, the cyborg is an artifically created human or a robot made to look like a human. So both the Cylons of  Battlestar Galactica and the Terminators of Terminator are cyborgs, though Cylons are made entirely of organic material, while Terminators are mechanical humanoid robots with human skin. Cyborgs often raise questions about what it means to be human. Broadly speaking, science fiction has two kinds of roles for cyborgs: Cyborgs can represent an attempt  by a homogenous system to erase human diversity (as in Battlestar Galactica or Terminator) or they can represent the oppression of biodiversity and non-normative bodies by a coercive society (as in Blade Runner or Janelle Monae’s Metropolis Suite). Sometimes narratives can mix and match these roles, as in the Sarah Connor Chronicles, but generally cyborgs are one or the other. My favourite cyborg narratives, as is probably obvious, are ones in which the cyborg is oppressed and reviled by the same system that created it.

Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian noir film, is still, to my mind, one of the best examples of this narrative. It’s not the only one, but it codified a lot of the genre and I feel it’s worth dealing with at some length. The cyborgs in this film are replicants, “more human than human” creations who are smarter, faster and stronger than humans, but they live only a few years and constitute an enslaved underclass of offworld menial labourers. How wonderfully ambiguous a phrase is “more human than human”–verging on nonsensical, really, while at the same time gesturing powerfully towards meaning. It gets at something about humans, our limitations and our technological anxiety. In a lot of ways it’s a distillation of the essence of what the rest of the film is driving at, encoded in language that points at but never quite achieves its meaning.

I have seen this film probably a dozen times, but the moment I really connected with it was the most recent time I watched it. It was about six months after my most recent open heart surgery. I broke down crying in the middle of it in a kind of empathetic horror. While replicants are both hyper-abled and infinitely more frail than humans–and therefore not an exact analogue of a real life person with mechanical parts, the situation of replicants as politicized bodies spoke to my experience as a person living with chronic illness–and yes, as a cyborg. The violence done to the bodies of Zhora, Pris and Roy as created beings spoke specifically to my own medical traumas and my experience of being the product of medicine and the product of a problematic system. The violence to which they were subjected was an image of the violence I felt had been done to my own body through the process of surgery but didn’t have the language to express.

The tragedy of Blade Runner is the attempt of oppressed individuals to actualize themselves that is brutally repressed by a violent system. The system that created the replicants seeks to control them: when they attempt to assert their autonomy, the system retaliates with extreme violence on the bodies that it created. Replicant bodies are deeply politicized and contentious ones, even as the replicants themselves seek an embodied autonomy beyond their roles as mere “skinjobs.” The problem isn’t biodiverse bodies; the problem is an oppressive system. At the end of Blade Runner, Deckard, our ostensibly-human protagonist has his world rocked by the implied revelation that he himself is a replicant. Deckard has been made complicit in his own oppression and the oppression of others like him. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any worse, the horror of the system is revealed: it turned you against yourself, and you never even knew.  Even super strength can’t save the cyborg from the system that created him.

The cyborg is a metaphor, but as I outlined in my intro to this post, the cyborg is also real. While real life cyborgs don’t have super human strength and shortened lifespans, they do exist as created bodies that fuse the mechanical and the organic. Insofar as real-world cyborg bodies are disabled bodies, they are subject to systematic oppression. Blade Runner quite effectively captures the nature of that oppression, though it is illustrated in extreme stylized violence. The cyborg is both  real and metaphorical; the very idea of the cyborg is dependent on literature and metaphor for its existence, even as cyborg individuals move through the world. Donna Haraway, the person who coined the term in her 1985 “Cyborg Manifesto,” intended it as a metaphor for feminist discourse. But the cyborg also exists in reality: it is both a descriptive term for the relation of humans to technology as well as a specific label that applies to the lived experiences of individuals. Cyborgs exist not only at the level of a philosophical understanding of the relationship between humans and our technology, but as actual specific individuals who are physically part mechanical.  Just as the cyborg is a fusion of the mechanical and the organic, so too is it the fusion of the literal and the figurative.

It’s not an out or an excuse for the lack of representation of real disabilities, but the cyborg does say something about bodies, technology and society that is otherwise difficult to get at. Even though fictional cyborgs don’t look anything like real cyborgs, they can articulate the experience of real cyborgs. As politicized bodies with an inherent link to ideas about systems, cyborgs express something about the experience of non-normative, politicized bodies and the relationship between those bodies and the systems in which they are embedded.  Watching Blade Runner told parts of my own story back to me, parts that the dominant narrative about my illness didn’t give me access to.  There’s something real in the fiction; there’s something organic in the machine.

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* The Cyborg Handbook ed. Chris Habels Gray, et al. New York: Routledge, 1995. This is a great text if you want an introduction to cyborg theory. It’s a bit more accessible than Haraway’s original essay, which is impenetrable if you’re not a voracious reader of eighties feminist theory.

how to go to the gym

21 Monday Nov 2011

Posted by in Body Acceptance, Illness, Illness & Disability, Personal

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Content warning: This post deals with exercise, fitness and contains passing mention of body image issues and disordered eating habits.

Two months or so ago I had my yearly checkup with my cardiologist. I had open heart surgery last summer to replace my pulmonic valve, and this was to be my one-year recovery checkup. I did a stress test, which is a super fun test where technicians hook you up to some machines and make you ride an exercise bike until you give out. The resistance increases every two minutes until you literally can’t pedal any longer–it’s a test that’s designed to bring you to your limit as quickly as possible. It’s an unwinnable game, an unpassable test. For a slightly perfectionistic overachiever such as myself, this is akin to torture.

From a subjective standpoint, the stress test is very difficult to gauge in terms of one’s performance. It only happens once every couple of years and bears no resemblance to any other kind of exercise one might engage in, so it’s very hard to tell whether it’s going well or not.

Mine did not go well. Despite having surgery and being in improved health, my stress test stats did not look good. My results were worse than they were pre-surgery. This was partially due to a bacterial infection I had been subject to for almost two months and was still recovering from at the time of my appointment. But upon asking about my exercise routine (basically nonexistent), my cardiologist frowned and made one thing very clear: I had to get my butt in gear and do some exercise, or I was going to be in some serious heart function trouble down the line.

I dislike sports and I loathe running abjectly. I did yoga for many years, but I am more than a little unemployed and extremely specific about the environments in which I practice yoga. I do, however, have free access to a gym with cardio equipment through my university.

I’ve been to the gym before–I went a lot in my first year of university. It’s something I’ve always had difficulty with from a mental health standpoint. Like most other ladies, I was raised with a very specific beauty ideal that I, of course, fell short of. Going to the gym has frequently been a catalyst for distressing thoughts around body image and food for me. I am fortunate in that I have not struggled with an eating disorder per se, but like many other women I have had a tumultuous history with food and exercise. I would always guilt myself about going or not going and the number of calories I burned and how long and hard I went for. And then I would guilt myself for feeling guilty because I’m a feminist and I’m supposed to be above all that. So for a long time, I simply stopped going because it made me feel weird and anxious and bad.

When the word came down from on high that I needed to improve my anaerobic threshold, I knew I had to sort my brain out and get back to exercising. Between my gym-going days and now I’ve spent some time reading up on Health At Every Size and consciously working on developing a positive body image, but this pushed me right up against the limit of how much I’ve changed. It forced me to bring everything I’ve learned about body positivity to bear on a situation I previously found upsetting.

I started by looking up HAES recommendations for exercise. HAES and body-positive discourse by and large focuses on eating and healing the wounds of a culture that teaches us to hate ourselves. This is good and necessary work! When exercise is mentioned, it’s usually in passing. The idea is to do fun movement when you feel like it and to exercise intuitively, in the same way one eats intuitively. This is an excellent suggestion–for most people, but not all. If, like me, you have some kind of extenuating health circumstance, “fun movement when you feel like it” may not be enough to maintain your health. Not to mention the fact that access to movement activities can be seriously limited by finances and location. For me, going to the gym is the best choice because it’s free and close to me. But these kinds of considerations don’t seem to enter into the discourse, and it’s very hard to find resources on doing structured gym exercise in a loving, body positive way.

More significantly, living with illness or being in recovery from surgery can do a serious number on the “intuitive” end of things.  If your bodily intuition has broken down surrounding physical activity, you may not understand how to read your body’s cues surrounding physical stress and strain. This was the situation I found myself in. Due to a lifetime of stress tests and a pre-surgery year of living in a scarcity economy with regards to my own energy levels, I had absolutely no idea how to exercise. My first instinct in the face of physical exertion was to back off–which, when I was living with a reduced capacity, was a smart move. But it’s not a helpful tactic for trying to improve my cardiovascular health post-surgery.

For me, I took what HAES was saying about being kind to yourself, relearning intuition and practicing self-care and spliced it into a workout routine. I go to the gym and wear a heart rate monitor because those are the things that make me feel safe exercising. The heart rate monitor is helping guide me back to an understanding of what good exertion is by giving me a number I understand through which I can contextualize how I feel moment to moment.

I’ve been in a routine for about six weeks now, and I thought I’d share what I’ve learned. This is geared towards people who have already done some work on body-positivity and self-acceptance. If you’re  struggling a lot with body image/ body hatred, I would recommend you familiarize yourself with body positivity and develop some self-care mechanisms before starting at the gym. It can be a weird and upsetting place to be if you’re in the grip of bad feelings about your body, and that is not a place you want to be in or work from.

That said, the gym doesn’t have to be a den of self-hatred! Self-love is a process, and exercise can be part of that process.

- Framing is important. Why are you doing this? Frame your exercise as something positive and keep reinforcing it. I exercise because want to improve and safeguard my cardiovascular health. I want to feel that glowy endorphin rush. I want to make small, sustainable changes to my lifestyle to be as healthy as possible. Good cardiovascular health now means I will get more years out of my valve replacement, meaning I can delay future surgery. I don’t go to the gym to lose weight–I do it to gain health benefits and feel good. Every time I go to the gym, I explicitly remind myself of why I’m doing this and why it’s important. I congratulate myself for going and for taking care of myself. Don’t let the weight loss narrative suck you in: be clear about your own goals and desires.*

- Reaffirm. If negative thoughts intrude, refocus swiftly and without mercy and spend a little time talking yourself up. When unpleasant thoughts intrude on my exercise, I pause and consciously reaffirm my own worth, my strength and my own knockout hotness. I refocus on improving my cardiovascular health and the importance of taking care of myself. There’s no such thing as too much positive self-talk, especially if you have a complicated history with your body image. Don’t berate yourself if negative thoughts do slip in–we’ve been conditioned to hate ourselves.  Refocus on why you’re exercising and how it makes you feel rather than what you “should” be doing or feeling.

- Take the long view. I consciously approach my exercise routine as an attempt to cultivate good practices that will help me maintain my health long-term. Improving my cardiovascular fitness, learning to be in tune with my body and building strength are all important things that will help me maintain my health and will help me stabilize in the face of future changes to my health status. Taking the long view also means that if I miss a day or a week for whatever reason, it doesn’t matter, because it’s not about this day or this week–it’s about my life.

- Set your own goals. Work with an achievable goal and scale up from there if you want to. If it’s going once a week and walking on the treadmill for twenty minutes, you get on with your bad self. My doctor wanted me to do the thirty minutes three times a week, but I didn’t feel up to that. Instead, I go twice a week for about forty minutes, because that’s what works for me. Feeling like you must do thirty minutes of cardio three times a week is the fastest route to feeling like a failure and giving it all up in despair. Find what works for you and what makes you feel good. You don’t owe it to anyone to do certain things or go a certain number of times a week for a certain number of minutes. You’re an adult and you can make up your own mind about what works for you.

- Treat yo self. If you can embed your exercise in your existing self-care routine and associate it with other self-love behaviours, you’ll go a long way to healing some old hurts. So maybe you go to the gym and then give yourself a manicure or have a bubble bath or write in your journal. Whatever makes you feel good–link your exercise activities to that. When you recontextualize exercise as self-care, it’s a lot easier to keep coming back to and it loses its power as something that can hurt you. It can make you feel good! So let it.

- Screw calories. Seriously, screw ‘em. The calorie counters on machines are wildly inaccurate anyway. They exist solely to make you feel bad. I just set the calorie counter to a setting that is incomprehensible to me, though if calories are really triggery for you I would recommend covering the display entirely. One thing I would not recommend is covering the display with any kind of glossy magazine. People is not body positive reading. If you’re feeling fancy, tape a piece of paper over the display with something awesome written on it. It can be anything–”Hey beautiful” or “RIOTS NOT DIETS” or “everybody knows I’m a motherfucking monster.” Whatever makes you feel amazing and empowered. So when your gaze wanders down to that judgy little readout, you get affirmations of your own extreme radness instead.

- Do what you need to to feel safe. For me, this means wearing my heart rate monitor and only using one type of machine. If you’re afraid of other people thinking it’s goofy, just remember that you need to take care of yourself first and everyone else can screw off.

- Pay attention. If you’re new to exercise, pay really close attention to what’s happening in your body. Observe it. Most people like to exercise with music, but I find it rather unhelpful–I spend more time in the music’s rhythm than my own, which leads to me ignore my body’s signals. Don’t do that. If you feel pain, stop immediately. Knowing the difference between good stress and bad strain is hard and may take some trial and error. Consult your doctor and always err on the side of gentleness and caution.

- Find something you like. Try a bunch of activities or machines and focus on something you like. If you really don’t like anything but you want or need to keep going try to focus on the side benefits–endorphins are always a good time. I find the idea of plodding away on the elliptical for half an hour to be unbearably dull. But I kept at it and soon discovered that it’s actually a great time for me to think. It’s a time away from distractions where I can chew things over in my brain.  I do my best thinking in the shower, but I’m finding the gym is a close second for thought quality, creativity and problem-solving.  I’ve begun to think of my exercise routine as “thinky movement time,” which is much more fun for me than “going to the gym.” That sounds like a thing I want to do, and I’ve discovered that, in fact, it is.

So there you have it–a basic list of body-positive gym recommendations. This is far from comprehensive; if you have any more suggestions, add them in the comments!

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* That said, I think it is possible to use exercise to manipulate one’s physical appearance in a way that is loving and affirmative, but that is a subject for another post.

movember & masculinity

10 Thursday Nov 2011

Posted by in Gender, Illness, Illness & Disability

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November is always a tricky month—especially in my city, populated as it is with hipsters and students. Everywhere I go I am accosted by offensively ugly facial hair on the upper lips of otherwise upstanding-looking gentlemen. See, November is “Movember” or “No Shave November,” in which men pledge to grow moustaches to raise awareness for prostate cancer and men’s health. From the Movember website:

On Movember 1st, guys register at Movember.com with a clean-shaven face. For the rest of the month, these selfless and generous men, known as Mo Bros, groom, trim and wax their way into the annals of fine moustachery. Supported by the women in their lives, Mo Sistas, Movember Mo Bros raise funds by seeking out sponsorship for their Mo-growing efforts.

The thing about Movember is that not only is it aesthetically offensive, it’s, well, just straight-up garden variety offensive.

I remember seeing promotional materials for Movember last year. It was a little brochure that focussed, with no small amount of satire, on the old-school masculine cachet of the moustache. It was about drinking whiskey, smoking cigars and sitting in leather wingback chairs being the luxurious, upper-class kind of “manly” you only see on Mad Men. Their tag line for last year’s campaign was “Every man deserves to grow a little bit of luxury.” Obviously that kind of campaign is only going to appeal to people with certain class aspirations–and enough self-awareness to cloak those class aspirations in irony.

I’m (sort of) happy to see that Movember has chosen a different tack for this year’s campaign. Their website is done in tasteful greys, with an emphasis on a rugged, outdoorsy masculinity—take, for example, the declaration that “Moustache Season is Now Open,” and the rustic wood motif used throughout the website. Once again, Movember is relying on a nostalgia-tinted notion of masculinity to market itself; the only difference is the particular flavour of that nostalgia.

From a feminist or critical standpoint, this is kind of…gross. Movember, in its advertising and positioning, seeks to hearken back to a time “when men were men.” The structure of the campaign emphasizes homosocial male relationships and male bonding through the “Mo Bro”/team approach to the project, and it relies heavily on tropes of masculinity like ruggedness or refinement to promote itself. By positioning itself along the lines of traditional masculine ideals of either the refined, luxurious businessman or the rugged, solitary outdoorsman, Movember offers its participants a way into these exclusive identities through participation in the project. Movember is saying: you don’t have to be a Don Draper or a lumberjack, but you can feel like one.

Despite this apparent democratization of these masculine ideals, Movember  is invested in keeping the sphere of what is considered masculine very tightly defined. Masculinity is still exclusive: this is what makes it desirable. This masculinity is tied to sexual conquest: the major role of women in the campaign appears to be to sleep with the men participating in it.* Movember is positioning itself as a gateway into the world of “real men,” in which sex is plentiful and men are powerful, either socially or physically (or both).

The only problem is that these traditional masculine ideals are incredibly limiting and shortsighted visions of what it means to be a man. They come with a metric tonne of cultural baggage concerning the definition of masculinity over and against femininity. The way we construct masculinity in our culture is heavily reliant on a distancing from anything perceived to be feminine:

Male sexuality, and maleness in general, are socially enforced by requiring men to be Not Women. Men who transgress and exhibit characteristics that are traditionally associated with female-ness–passivity, gentleness, willingness to be sexually penetrated–have their masculinity questioned. The most obvious example is gay men, who are routinely characterized as “effeminate” for transgressing the boundaries of gender and the act of sex itself. **

This kind of masculine ideal must always, always be defending itself: masculinity requires constant re-commitment, which itself requires the distancing of oneself from anything that is feminine or effeminate. It requires that men always be proving themselves, and any misstep (being gay, wearing pink, etc.) will be countered with swift–and often violent–retribution. This defensive masculinity leads, in a broad cultural sense, to things like intimate partner violence, gender policing and homophobia. It’s a highly binarized understanding of masculinity that belittles and derogates the feminine as well as constrains the identities and expressions of men.

This kind of highly binarized thinking is incredibly damaging and hurtful to a whole bunch of people. For men who are effeminate or gay, this leads to gender policing and homophobia. For trans men and women and genderqueer folks, this can be a matter of life and death. Binary thinking about gender reinforces the social structures that make it okay to write violence on the bodies of trans people. It’s a reinforcement of exactly the kind of toxic cultural stew we need to be questioning and taking apart, not building up.

This would be merely a dark cultural undercurrent to Movember, except this kind of thinking is damaging both the movement’s credibility and the advancement of prostate cancer support more generally. Here’s the thing: by linking nostalgic masculinity and the ability to grow facial hair together, Movember is betraying the prostate cancer survivors it claims to be helping.

In order to explain this, I’m going to have to take a detour into Science. I’m not a scientist or a doctor, so if you are one of those things and have more information, chime in!

In order to get prostate cancer, you need three things: a prostate, cancerous cells and androgens.***  Prostate cancer is when cells in the prostate grow out of control and form a tumour. The thing about prostate cancer is that it tends to grow slowly and does not quickly spread outside of the prostate itself.  Tumor growth is driven by androgens, the male sex hormones. Not all prostate cancer growth is androgen-driven, but a lot of it is.

The first line of treatment for prostate cancer is “localized therapy”—the removal either of the cancerous cells or the whole prostate itself. This often results in a bunch of side effects, including incontinence and erectile dysfunction. That doesn’t really fit in with the masculine ideal, now, does it?

Should those treatments fail, and the cancer advance, the most common treatment is androgen deprivation. Since prostate cancer feeds on androgens, choking off the supply of androgens effectively shuts down the cancer’s growth. Androgen deprivation therapy can shrink the prostate by 90%. Its effectiveness is unpredictable–in some men, it’s good for upwards of ten years; in others, it works for only a few months.

So what the heck is androgen deprivation therapy? ADT can be achieved in a couple of different ways: either by blocking all androgen production in the body, or by blocking androgen reception. Androgens, and particularly testosterone, are responsible for the development and maintenance of male secondary sex characteristics. Some of those characteristics, such as voice pitch, are permanent after puberty. A prostate cancer patient on ADT does not suddenly start singing in a higher register. Other secondary sex characteristics, such as muscle mass and lower percentage of body fat, require a constant stream of androgens in order to be maintained. Take the androgens away, and the prostate cancer patient loses muscle and gains subcutaneous fat. Libido and the ability to get an erection are also dependent on androgens. Once again, the prostate cancer patient fails to live up to the standards of masculinity espoused by Movember.

Androgens are responsible for another significant male sex characteristic: the growth of body hair. ADT patients lose much of the hair on their arms and legs. Facial hair growth is also arrested. One ADT patient of my acquaintance has a full beard, which he said grew very slowly and which he never shaved. Prostate cancer patients cannot grow moustaches, and they most certainly cannot grow them in the period of a month.

Movember’s entire project is the growth of facial hair in a month for prostate cancer research and awareness–a project in which advanced prostate cancer patients cannot participate. This is an unacceptable oversight from a campaign supposedly dedicated to “changing te face of men’s health.” Part of the psychosocial distress associated with prostate cancer is the perceived loss of masculinity that accompanies the loss of erectile function.  In focussing on facial hair growth and attempting to sell itself through the tropes of masculinity, Movember is abandoning the people it ought to help most. Caring for the health of the already healthy is no great challenge, and if the cost is throwing current patients under the bus of masculinity, you better take a good long look at what the hell you think you’re accomplishing.

You are never going to “change the face of men’s health” if you don’t first question and take apart–rather than buying into and relying upon!—the ideals of masculinity that demand men be invulnerable sex machines. The face of men’s health remains as it ever was–only now it’s got a dirtstache.

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* This video, from the official Movember campaign is an excellent illustration of this. There was also the video that went around–which I can no longer find the link to–made by Mo Sistas imploring other women to sleep with Mo Bros, because it’s for charity. Delightful.

** From Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World Without Rape. Ed. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (Seal Press: 2008). If you want more information on gender, gender policing and rape culture, this is a good introduction.

***Androgens are the male sex hormones testosterone, dihydrotestosterone and androstenedione. My information on Prostate Cancer comes from Prostate Cancer Canada. I have no idea what the risks are like for people with prostates who take estrogen. I imagine the estrogen would reduce the risk significantly, but unless the prostate is removed, it’s not zero. Unsurprisingly, there is not a whole lot of research on the topic.

the body has an intelligence of its own

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

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Bodies matter.

That our bodies matter to us is the sort of obvious fact that nonetheless bears examining. Our bodies carry us through the world.The world presses against us just past the barrier of our skins, and somehow our bodies move through that unholy mess and make a life out of it.

Biologically speaking, the whole great edifice of the human body exists to keep our brains alive and to ensure we make more of them. But your skull isn’t just a bone bucket to carry your brain around in. Bodies are more than brain-feeding machines, more than a mere interface with the world around us. They’re us in a strange, difficult and essential way. We feel our bodies so intensely and immediately. Our bodies are where our personal identity is located, but they also form that personal identity. I am not trying to suggest an absolute identification of self and body–we’re not only our bodies–but I am trying to gesture at the weirdly interlocked nature of body and self. To supply a somewhat silly but nonetheless illuminating example: we don’t reflexively say “you punched my face,” we say “you punched me.”

Bodies are also social: they are fraught with meaning constructed by our society and culture. Gender is the best example here. In dominant western culture, certain combination of genitals, secondary sex characteristics and hormones mean “woman,” and another combination of genitals, secondary sex characteristics and hormones mean “man.” Those categories come prepackaged with a set of social norms and expected behaviours. Anything or anyone that doesn’t fall into one of those two very, very narrow categories is deemed “deviant.”* This causes all kinds of problems, oppression and violence for people who don’t fit into those categories. It also illustrates a larger point: that our bodies carry social meanings. Often, those meanings are accompanied by value judgements. Dominant western culture says that some bodies are good, and some are bad. The good ones are white and thin and young but not too young, and healthy and not disabled. Bad bodies are black or brown or fat or old or too young or disabled or queer.

I hate to spoil the end for you, but I think you can guess what I’m going to say next: this is bullshit. The relation between being fat and being a bad or undesirable person is no more necessary or incontrovertible than the relation between having a penis and being a man.**  Those social intrusions and categories can stifle us if we’re not careful, can write our bodies into social meanings we didn’t ask for and don’t agree with. They can make us feel less-than for being who we are and who we feel ourselves to be.

This blog takes as a given that bodies matter, and seeks to investigate the matter of bodies. It’s about the intersection of the personal, the social and the physical. I’m going to be cutting a broad swath through body acceptance discourse, gender theory and disability activism with a stance that is accessible, welcoming and experiential. I want to break apart those social meanings and peer inside; I want to hold up to the light the muscles and bones of our identities and find out how we make ourselves.

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* I am oversimplifying a huge amount of gender theory and activism right now for the sake of expediency and clarity. For some interesting Trans* and Gender 101 pieces, try this post, which has a bunch of useful definitions as well as some good links.

** If this statement is confusing to you, I would heartily recommend the above link!

About

21 Friday Oct 2011

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Anatomically Incorrect is a celebration and an examination of bodies: what they mean, how they work (or don’t) and who they are. It’s about the intersection of bodies, health, society and technology. It’s about me, and it might be about you too.

I’m Julie, the anatomist in residence.  I have an academic background in early modern philosophy, but my interests span all kinds of genres and disciplines. I’m interested in feminism, in cyborg theory, in social justice, in gender and in disability. I’m not formally trained in any of those disciplines or their languages. I’m interested in theory, but not at the cost of accessibility. It’s my aim to write about theory in a way that is comprehensible and concrete. Theory is interesting, but it is not and cannot ever be, for me, primary. It must be grounded in the lived experience and spoken about in plain language in order to have force.

I was born with a congenital heart defect; that’s part of the experience I bring to bear on my writing. It’s  the messy, lived counterpart to my cerebral imaginings. I hope to turn a critical eye on my own experience: to pick it apart and find out what and how it means.

Thanks for joining me! I’m excited

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