Teaching with Tenderness: Toward an Embodied Practice (Transformations: Womanist studies) by Becky Thompson

Author:Becky Thompson [Thompson, Becky]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2017-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

Faces in the Granite: Stone and Flesh

My hope is that the classroom can be a place where we can be witnesses to when bodies are missing, where we find ways to re-member ourselves together. As poet Elizabeth Alexander writes about people who have experienced great loss, “Survivors stand startled in the glaring light of loss, but bear witness.”16 While it may be possible on one’s own to find a way back into one’s body after having left it, the chances and promises of doing so within community give me hope.

Survivors of trauma teach us that steps for remembering one’s body mirror the process of the original injury. Because it typically occurs in isolation, healing requires its opposite—coming into wholeness through community.17 This is where the language of the body can be a bridge—can create understanding and community among vets, people with HIV, sexual abuse survivors, intersex students who were surgically violated as infants or children, and others whose embodiment has been threatened. The more specific we can get about how embodiment varies, depending on your life experience, the better, perhaps especially for people whose lives are often pushed aside or ignored.

While, thankfully, the multiracial feminist movement has spawned a critical mass of research, poetry, and novels that can help us teach about trauma and embodiment among women, when it comes to teaching about disembodiment among men, the literature I can draw upon is less well known, still largely hidden from view.18 That dearth doesn’t mean that disembodiment is not a struggle for men but rather that there is little social permission for men to talk about it. It is no surprise that narratives that are most likely to reference a precarious or interrupted residence in the body come from war veterans, gay men, men of color, and men with disabilities (including HIV). They are men whose embodiment has been challenged, threatened, prohibited, under question.

Among the veterans I have worked with over the years, Marco stands out in terms of teaching me about the challenges of staying in one’s body after war. A Native/Hispanic vet in his late forties, Marco came to my morning office hours early in the semester, saying he didn’t want to bother me, would only take a few minutes of my time. I told him that office hours are the high of my week, that I wanted to get to know him, find out what brought him to the university, to this class. He said that he thought office hours were for people who needed extra help, which he didn’t need. He just wanted to tell me that he wasn’t in class last week because he was withdrawing from Oxycodone and morphine prescribed by his doctor for degenerative disc disease he developed in the military.

He explained that the medicine was stopping him from being able to concentrate. He described being in a fog, not being able to put his thoughts together, that the drugs were making it impossible for him to keep up with his assignments. He

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