What is the body? To explore this provocation I start first with “normative” assumptions about bodies. Normative assumptions about “our” bodies could include the idea that bodies are static and predictable and are protected by and end at the skin. That taking care of one’s body is separate from how we care for our environments, water, food, and as such, we have complete control over what chemicals we consume either through eating, drinking, or through the skin. It is assumed that we have control over the state of our health and are responsible for the success or failures of treatments of diseases. In short, it might be assumed that a body is individual and bounded/encased by skin. Because I am chronically sick I might have a different understanding of the body. A body for me, chronically ill or not, is a porous and open entity that is affected by surroundings: other bodies human and nonhuman, chemicals, or the environment. Bodies (human and nonhuman) are inherently relational simply by existing in the environment and I think that chronically ill bodies can highlight these relations. Using a personal example, I am often surprised at my excessively embodied reactions to seemingly normal situations like attending a performance where there are lots of scents or randomly feeling nauseous at inopportune times (due to medication), or feeling exhausted by things that “shouldn’t” be exhausting.
Bodies are relational entities. They are affected and changed by their environments and subsequently, environments are changed by the bodies who inhabit them. In the text Staying with the Trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway sees human bodies as relational in order to propose her idea of “staying with the trouble.” “Staying with the trouble” is a relational response proposing a way to face the situation of our impending ecological catastrophe head-on with the recognition that “we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations,…we become-with each other or not at all” (Haraway 4). To “become with” as Haraway states, means to take seriously the fact bodies are open and porous to the world and impact and are impacted by its environments, and because of this our survival depends on the survival of our environment. “Becoming with” is a metaphysical state grounded in connections to each other, that challenges notions of individuality and separation. Drawing from ideas that Haraway proposes about relationality and the body, Stacy Alaimo uses the term “trans-corporeality” in the text Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self to illustrate the ways in which the human is always intermeshed with the “more-than-human” world. Alaimo writes, “…by underscoring that trans indicates movement across different sites, trans-corporeality also opens up a mobile space that acknowledges that often unpredictable and unwanted actions of human bodies, nonhuman creatures, ecological systems, chemical agents, and other actors” (Alaimo 2).
The body is always in a process of becoming. Instead of being stagnant, solid or stable the body, affected by its environment is always in flux. For Deleuze and Guattari in the text A Thousand Plateaus the process of “becoming” has two main components: 1) there is no origin or destination– one does not start at one thing and become something else, they are always in flux and 2) becoming is imperceptible because it is in between the past and the future and always moving between those two. The process of becoming is a process of removing the expected relationships of an element in order to open up process-based thinking which creates potentialities.
What does this mean for a dancing body? Or disabled dancing body? How might thinking of bodies as relational shift perceptions about care, caring for others, receiving care, or ideas around public and private health? This is especially important to me because in Riverside, CA where I live many people refuse to wear masks to limit the spread of COVID-19. Taking the body as relational and affected by other bodies kind of undoes assumptions about weak and strong immune systems or ideas that “good health” is a result of individual or moral choices. A body is a proof that we are moving with each other and responsible to care for each other.
Needed to read this thank you for sharing. I appreciate deeply the notion of how the body does not end at the skin, the body extends out to infinity in time and space, from breath to loved ones to land to ancestry and beyond, and also extends inwardly at infinity as well- our bones our blood our generational traumas etc.
thank you for these thoughts about “staying with” and “becoming with” and our porous relationality. I hum with these…
The idea that the body is always becoming and is always relational I think is theoretically appealing to me. And that I often feel like the notions of body gets stuck between normative and someone’s idea of disabled and an awful lot of grey space in between. Seeing the body as being in the process of construction therefore allows Me space to recognize the influences that form the body as body. On the other hand, the relationality and instability of the interpretive practice of the body decenters my own understanding of my physicality. That is, if physicality must always be constructed in relation to external forces, the excessive or under performance of my body My understanding of it I don’t never get the chance to grow my own frame. To understand my own breath sweat and smell, for example. Here I am reminded of Kristeva’s abjection and the breakdown of meaning around “abject” bodies. Your use of care I think is a strong theoretical antidote (antibody?) to this kind of thinking. And yet part of me wants to recognize the materiality of the body as a source of pleasure and substance in itself Dash that possesses something From and of itself, and not in relationship to anything else. The substantiality or in some context materiality of the body without a relational context is an area of deep inquiry. Must it be private? Can it only be private? And why do I feel so called to preserve this space?
Calling on the robust critical theory around “Becoming with” from the two theorists mentioned here is generative in considering how that idea might be embodied in the form of dance. Reading this text makes me wonder how we can theorize anew bodies in the time of this pandemic as in relation to or “Becoming with” the living body of the virus that inhabits our human bodies and with which– or maybe with whom– we are coexisting in some sort of entangled struggle for ascendancy. Of course, we might also consider representing this new coexistence between the virus and the human through the newly expressive costume of a mask. I hope we/you can develop together a aesthetic vocabulary that represents an honors the differences– especially in scale — between the body of the virus in the body of a human as we consider our new human relationship with this new entity within us during this pandemic. I imagine we will make pandemic dances.
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