Mediated Embodiments|Embodied Meditations

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Embodiment special issue of a|b begins by considering how Johanna Hedva's “Sick Woman Theory” crystallizes current conceptualizations of embodied selfhood and deploys online self-representational practices. The introduction goes on to situate the contributors’ discussions of installation art, 3-D printing, painting, graphic narrative, prose memoir, performance, poetry, personal narrative, and collective embodiment as social praxis within these critical conversations, highlighting connections to a “politics of care” (Hedva) and “brilliant imperfection” (Clare).

Embodied lives, in all their corporeal, social, sensory, affective, political, economic, and technological dimensions, are the primary grounds for auto/biographical production. Building on the groundbreaking work of the 1980s and 90s that brought embodied subjectivity to the fore,¹ research in the field of life writing continues to generate powerful insights into the chronicling of multiple embodiments, including a wide-ranging and nuanced engagement with disability, race, gender, illness, and trauma. Johanna Hedva's manifesto “Sick Woman Theory,” published in the online magazine Mask, crystallizes what this special issue proposes as a newly urgent nexus of auto|biographical production, scholarship, and activism. Composed from the perspective of living with an invisible disability and dedicated to “those who were never meant to survive but did,” “Sick Woman Theory” deploys autopathography—defined by G. Thomas Couser as an “autobiographical narrative of illness or disability” (Recovering 5) in order to rethink what constitutes “capacity as a political being” (Hedva, “Sick”). Hedva, who identifies as “disabled, queer, and gender-nonbinary” and as “a fourth-generation Los Angelena on their mother's side and, on their father's side, the grandchild of a woman who escaped from North Korea” (“About”), prompts readers to wonder how a person whose fatigue and pain keeps them at home, away from the scene of public assembly, might nonetheless mobilize a political voice and contribution. How might this voicing from the sickbed be understood to matter?

“The Sick Woman,” writes Hedva, “is anyone who does not have [the] guarantee of care” enjoyed by wealthy, cis-gendered, masculine white bodies. With this resonant phrase, Hedva's essay combines Judith Butler's emphasis on our fundamental shared vulnerability and interdependency with a call to respond to “the bodies of women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people,” who have been “pathologized,” deauthorized, and systematically denied care and even the very possibility of “survival.” Hedva's essay is accompanied by a series of four photographic portraits of the writer wearing a long-sleeved embroidered red dress reminiscent of Frieda Kahlo's in the self-portrait Tree of Hope. In the first image, Hedva lies prone and upside down, surrounded by, perhaps cradling, a heap of prescription bottles; the photograph's subject remains horizontal, but the photograph is flipped to the right in the second portrait; the third picture shows them sitting up in a wheelchair, feet propped on a pile of books, cane in hand; finally, a wider shot (Figure 1) pictures Hedva resplendent, lying on the bed once again, with even more books and pill bottles amassed, now jumbled together. The captions clarify the collaborative underpinnings of the seeming self-portraits: the art direction is by Hedva, but the styling and photographing are accredited to Marryhia Rodriguez and Pamila Payne respectively. Pivoting on the tension in Kahlo's painting between the artist's wounded body and the ambivalently embraced prostheses, the “Sick Woman” portrait sequence experiments with abandoning the dream of transcendence, and indeed, the necessity of “a discrete concept of ‘self’” (Hedva, “Sick”).² I read the cooperative genesis of the images as encapsulating a fundamental tenet of “Sick Woman Theory”: that the subject cannot make themselves appear in a way that matters without the caring and creative support of others.

Figure 1. Photo 4 of 4 for “Sick Woman Theory.” Photo by Pamila Payne; Styling, hair and makeup: Myrrhia Rodriguez; Art Direction: Johanna Hedva.

Figuratively, Hedva's messy bed, elaborate dress, and archive of everyday life connect this multimodal essay to a longer feminist history of boundary-testing auto|biographical production. In their field-changing essay “The Rumpled Bed of Autobiography,” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson considered how the indexing of unruly embodied life in Tracey Emin's installation My Bed confounded normative ideas of privacy and incited critical consternation about the deployment of “avant-garde” self-reflexivity to “narcissistic” ends (4). However, currently, the artistic practices and critical questions exemplified by Emin are no longer at the “outer limits” of the practice of memoir (2) but are informing a new generation of hybrid texts that combine theory and memoir, such as those by Sara Ahmed, Eli Clare, and Claudia Rankine (to name but a few key examples). And, in the context of what social media scholar Laurie McNeill has termed the “memoir boom 2.0,” boundary-testing, self-reflexivity, and reflections on a “politics of care” (Hedva) are manifesting in multifarious blogs, archive projects, and hashtags (Gilmore; Mani; Tembeck; Travis; Tynes et al.; Warfield).

The multimodal form of these auto|biographical articulations³ is not coincidental but intrinsic to the reconfiguring of embodiment as “complex” (Siebers, “Disability and the Theory” 279) and to the reunderstanding of dis|ability and race as social and political relations. Working across a variety of media, auto/biographers are mobilizing the affective and pedagogical potential of visuality in order to envision embodiment critically, beyond normative “framings,” as Janice Hladki and I have argued in our introduction to Embodied Politics in Visual Autobiography (7–8). Consider, by way of illustration, that in addition to the collaborative visual dimension of Hedva's born-digital essays (which cite web-based sources like Tumblr for sustenance along with key thinkers like Audre Lorde, Judith Butler, and Stefano Harney and Fred Moten), Hedva's web presence incorporates a Twitter account (@bighedva), live recordings of public talks, and a website that prominently features self-portraits looped as gifs—in effect an extended, improvised biographical note|performance. Embedded on the website and in emails as “secrets” to discover, the gifs (some alone, others in the companionship of friends or nonhuman entities) are friendly flickers of greeting that register in terms of presence, absence, and inscrutability. Interpreted as a “critical embodiment” (Brophy and Hladki 4) intervention, Hedva's multifaceted online self-articulation weaves together an emphasis on “transcorporeality,” or the constitutive material ties binding human life, nonhuman-life, and the broader material world (Alaimo 86–87), with a “representational contending” born out of “an instinct of self-preservation: a survivorship reflex” that is characteristic of the use of digital photography by young women artists of color (Murray 512).

Let me suggest that the persistence of such improvised, provisional embodiments in auto|biographical projects that bridge online and offline worlds complicates prevailing pessimism about the near-complete subsumption of embodied selfhood by communicative capitalism in the early twenty-first century. Gavin J. D. Smith conceives, for instance, of “the body as a border site where data are simultaneously emitted and leveraged,” characterized by “disembodied exhaust” (i.e. data trails, highly profitable to corporations but uncontrollable on the part of social media users) and the concomitant feeling of “embodied exhaustion” (110). For Alison Hearn, the ever-intensifying imperative to update our online statuses means that “we are inserted into the global flows of capital in all our specificity and yet simultaneously stripped of our meaningful identities, reduced to our SIM card” (74). Certainly, auto|biography scholarship is alive to the hegemonic constraints of neoliberalism as they play out online in struggles over testimony, memory, identity, and property (Gilmore; Poletti and Rak). In these contexts, attending to multimodal auto|biographical production shows us that perhaps all is not lost, that autobiographers are producing a “more politicized dramaturgy of the lived body” across multiple platforms (Tembeck 3), that “the body is not a thing, it is a situation” (Beauvoir 46), and that it is possible to exceed normative uses of and ideas about networks in favor of “the possibilities for democracy that stem from networked vulnerabilities” (Chun 18). As portrait artist, disability activist, and educator Riva Lehrer explains of her critical practice of attending to bodies in the fullest possible detail, “I simply want viewers to daydream the life of the person before them. To stretch ourselves toward a world where all bodies are exquisite, as they flow between all possible forms of what it is to be human.” “Encounters with the arts,” writes the educational theorist Maxine Greene, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's argument for the primacy of sense perception, “nurture and sometimes provoke the growth of individuals who reach out to each other as they seek clearings in their experience and try to live more ardently in the world” (382). Despite and against the “neglect” of the humanities in a technocratic age, a multidisciplinary arts pedagogy can be mobilized to “reconnect ourselves with the processes of becoming who we are,” to offer opportunities to “reflect on our life histories,” and to “create classroom atmospheres that once again encourage individuals to have hope” (381–82).

The material and multiply mediated dimensions of art, affect, and pedagogy reverberate in the contributions to this special issue. The authors meditate on auto|biographical embodiment across multiple modes of cultural production—installation art, 3-D printing, painting, graphic narrative, prose memoir, performance, and poetry—with reference to a wide range of geographic and political contexts, from Australia, Greece, Portugal, the UK, Nicaragua, South Africa, Canada, and the US, and to migratory routes, often forced, sometimes chosen, within and between nations. The essays gathered together in this special issue bring auto/biography studies into generative dialogue, too, with critical interdisciplinary fields that are asking methodological, historical, material, and philosophical questions about embodied lives, including citizenship, social justice, black studies, Asian diaspora studies, disability studies, crip|queer studies, mad studies, trans studies, women's and gender studies, and narrative medicine.

The two Process essays that open this volume make tangible the political and ethical dilemmas of participatory arts-based projects that recruit individual subjects to larger aims. Quinn Eades and Anna Poletti invite us to reinhabit with them the space of celebrated performance artist Marina Abramović's 2015 In Residence installation in Sydney. Through the parallel columns of their cut-up, Eades and Poletti play with the tension between individual, dual, and collective subjectivities and convey their experience being surveilled and put to work on mundane tasks of counting and sorting rice and dried legumes in a carefully curated detention-like space that both conjures and masks the suffering and political injustice endured by asylum-seeking detainees. It is similarly through an emphasis on textures that Ursula Hurley adumbrates the possibilities and the unevenly distributed risks of subjectivity's mediation in the context of a disability arts project. Dubbed Fab Lab, this endeavor explores the potential of 3-D printing as a new, more inclusive mode of scriptotherapy, one that through a series of hands-on guided workshops yields tangible, personalized outputs that are at once sculptural and textual, a form of multidimensional poetic self-inscription. As I have explored elsewhere, while digital utopianism belies a differential distribution of labor and must be vigorously questioned, even the most overdetermined formations remain open to creative and sometimes dissenting expressions on the part of embodied subject-participants (Brophy, “Stickiness”).

What is the salience of theorizing embodied narratives and self-inscriptions in terms of im|material labor or precarious labor? What is the role of the “lived” everyday—the mundane, the chronic, the atmospheric, the textured, the interior, and the surface—in life narratives, images, practices, and archives of embodiment? And what kinds of embodied relationalities, or kinships, are being imagined and mobilized in auto|biographical projects, and according to what impetuses? Tracing the story of an intracontinental journey, Phanuel Antwi's Reflection essay funnels a broader, historical view of the constitution of embodiment through a personal narrative of a scholar of color's first months and years in the profession as an assistant professor. Bodily crisis, Antwi suggests, is both ongoing and an occasion for reimaging, along with Sylvia Wynter, of “our modes|genres of being human” (331; cf. also Lehrer) and, in turn, for reunderstanding one's relations to others and for living with the specificity of “black sadness” (Cvetkovich, qtd. in Antwi). If Eades and Poletti use collage to register the experience of feeling with and against a specific installation environment, Antwi's long-form essay, structured in seven intervals, seeks to acknowledge and stay close to its debts and to find breathing room at the same time. Consolatory and unconsoled, Antwi's writing also shows that sometimes the best way to register trauma may be, following Christina Sharpe, to redact it (117).

The five research articles that follow engage and recontextualize influential theoretical concepts of embodiment from new materialism, affect studies, queer theory, trans studies, and visual culture studies. Maria Tamboukou's “Painting the Body” combines theoretical commitments to a Spinozist line of thought via the feminist thinkers Rosi Braidotti, Moira Gatens, and Claire Colebrook that prioritizes not what a body is qua identity but what its capacities are, what it “can do” (Deleuze, qtd. in Tamboukou) with a study of expressionism in the oeuvre of the Greek painter Mato Ioannidou. The result of this colloquy is an invitation to heed the possibilities of feeling into (new, more capacious) forms, for as Tamboukou writes, “As women's bodies move against destruction and erasure, they gradually take up space and expand. It is through this ongoing process that ‘transpositions’ occur: lines turn into embodied curves and the female figure on the brink of extinction becomes a source of life and care.”

Contrasting with this vivid sense of felt embodiment, in his essay “Is There a Body in This Text?” G. Thomas Couser examines a tendency to elide the fleshly body in pathographic comics. In the spirit of Tobin Siebers's appeal for a “new realism of the body,” which takes as its principle that “the body has its own forces” (“Disability in Theory” 749), Couser's exploration puts pressure on what Charles Hatfield has identified as the dominant rhetoric of “ironic authentication” in graphic memoir (125). For Couser, it is meticulously detailed images of illness, treatment, and death that most effectively and movingly convey the presence of a “particular person” as well as the “pains-taking effort” of the drawing artist. His essay invites graphic narrative practitioners and readers alike to envisage the potential for looking relations to be activated, through graphic realism, in ways that afford sensuous agency to suffering and witnessing bodies so that they can make claims on our complexly compassionate attention.

Continuing the discussion of how aesthetics can register embodied experience in times of crisis, Alexandra Parsons's article ruminates on the multiple resonances of “blue” in the poetic memoirs of filmmaker, painter, and diarist Derek Jarman and poet-theorist Maggie Nelson. This essay builds on the insights of Anna Poletti into the capacity of queer collage practices to assemble “resources for living” while contesting the “performative norms that underpin consensus values or ideologies” (363). Readers interested in the capacity of autobiographical prose to mobilize philosophical, affective, and synesethetic inquiries will find in Parsons's essay a richly historicized account of the queer tradition of thinking about color perception. The indeterminacy and vibrancy of color, and of blue in particular, supports Jarman's erotic and affective survival as he contends with HIV/AIDS and the loss of his vision and mobility in the late 1980s, before the advent of antiretroviral medications; likewise, blue provides, a vital thinking and feeling matrix for Nelson in her pursuit of queer kinships.

Like Tamboukou and Parsons, Ana Horvat draws on new materialist and Deleuzoguattarian theorizing in their discussion of material-discursive “entanglements” (Barad, qtd. in Horvat). Horvat's particular focus is on the role of material objects and substances in trans auto|biography, with a particular focus on the actualization of intra-action in performance art. Recalling Antwi's Reflection essay and Tamboukou's discussion of Ioannidou's artwork, the autobiographical subject is engaged in a significant amount of labor over time to refashion the embodied self and the host of relations that constitute and sustain it. As Gayle Salamon has written, “To affirm a materiality—or to be less abstract, to insist on the livability of one's own embodiment, particularly when that embodiment is culturally abject or socially despised—is to undertake a constant and always incomplete labor to reconfigure more than just the materiality of our own bodies. It is to strive to create and transform the lived meanings of those materialities” (42). Taking the discussion a step further, Horvat's Barad-inspired analysis of silicone and clay in two trans performances suggests that materiality is never the subject's own but that embodiment is constituted by material discursive “intra-actions,” opening on to a horizon of multiple trans-animating forms of life.

Lisa Ortiz-Vilarelle's essay concludes the sequence on a historical and a politically revolutionary note by providing an account of the subversive elaboration of sexual and reproductive embodiment in women's poetry of the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua. Known as “The Six,” and often chastised for their earthiness, these poets pushed the boundaries of respectable womanhood by centering bodily tropes of menstruation, birth, and eroticism as well as militancy in their works. Countering masculinist domination of the revolutionary (Maoist) imagination, “The Six” succeeded over time in collectively reimagining of a radical “new Nicaraguan woman.” Read together with Horvat's discussion of “auto-birth” in Nina Arsenault and Cassils's trans autobiographies, Ortiz-Vilarelle's essay underscores the stakes of embodied self-representation as a modality of social and political reproduction: its capacity not only to remake the “lived meanings” (Salamon 42) of embodiment in the present, but to make a claim, too, on shaping the future of the body politic. The capacity to manifest new forms and futures does not and need not depend on an essentialized definition of the sexed body, but such projects are conditioned by social class and the distribution of racial privilege.

The shorter essays that round out the volume carry forward the responsibilities of embodied citizenship. The forum, “Collective Embodiment and Social Praxis,” adopts a process-oriented approach to documenting and reflecting on material and online projects that nurture embodied knowledges for social justice.⁴ The contributors contemplate their involvement in collating refugee narratives online (in the essay by Vinh Nguyen, Thy Phu, and Y-Dang Troeung), participating in an academic workshop retreat (by Helene Strauss), curating AIDS oral history archives (by Ryan Conrad and Alexis Shotwell), and pursuing decolonial directions for critical disability arts (by Rachel da Silva Gorman and by Eliza Chandler). Against the “truncated temporalities” of neoliberalism (Strauss, in this volume), these reflective essays foreground how intimate encounters with embodied stories, archives, artwork, and our individual and shared sensoria can provoke “ruptures,” remake “grounds,” and invent new social and political “repertoires” (Isin 18) and thus enact “re-worldings” (Chandler, in this volume).⁵

A concluding set of think-pieces maps out the pedagogies and methodologies necessitated by new directions in auto|bio|graphic cultural production, scholarship, theory, and activism centering on “the body.” In her contribution to a/b’s “How Would You Teach It?” series, Kaiama L. Glover situates the halting revelation of the protagonist Xuela's embodied form in Jamaica Kincaid's Autobiography of My Mother as a black feminist and humanist poetic-politic call, via Wynter and M. Jacqui Alexander, “for an epistemic space unconstrained by the stricture-structures of an imperial world order.” Evanescent and commanding, the protagonist's elusive body in Kincaid's text affords students an opportunity “to try out the risky practice of speculative critique”—of thinking otherwise—in dialogue with foundational Caribbean studies thinkers. Subsequently, Adan Jerreat-Poole's review essay brings the dilemmas of bearing feminist witness into a deeper dialogue with digital culture studies. If Glover asks us to think beyond colonial inheritances, into open spaces of self-creation, Jerreat-Poole returns our attention to the problem of how embodied identities are constituted under communicative capitalism, with social media increasingly “weaponized and deployed against marginalized and vulnerable bodies.” “Discussions of power, agency, consent, and violence,” proposes Jerreat-Poole, now “need to encompass the online world of our avatar bodies.”

Finally, Sasha Kruger and Sayantani DasGupta's commentary on “What's Next?” provides a thought-provoking conclusion to the special issue by making a case for fuller, more critical attention to questions of difference, (non)normativity, and power in the evolving field of medical and health humanities. Kruger and DasGupta note that the popularity of “personal stories” of “marginalized subjects” in fields ranging from “medicine to business to international development” has too often led over the last two decades to their rendering as “background data, which improve professional functioning of advertising agencies, hospitals, aid organizations, or policy think tanks.” To counter such instrumentality, Kruger and DasGupta suggest that recognizing the embodied nature of every auto|biographical telling, or what Paul John Eakin has described as the “somatic deep structure of all identity narrative” (42), can provide a foundation for heeding the “thick” self-narrative and image practices of embodied storytellers, borne out of what are at once different and shared conditions of vulnerability. On this transformed basis, a new respect can be fostered for those tactics, shown here in the example of prominent trans activist and entertainer Laverne Cox's resistance to interview questions, whereby subjects refuse, critique, or work around normative frameworks for conveying their embodied lives.

The contributions to this special issue attend to the material, infrastructural, generic, and discursive conditions of, and obstacles to, embodied testimony. But the essays also show how moving and transformative the production, curation, and study of embodied life narratives can be. More specifically, this special issue suggests that it may be through embracing what Hedva conjures as the “anti-heroic qualities” of “our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies” (“Sick”), or what Clare alternatively describes as the “brilliant imperfection” of “body-mind difference” (xvii), that the manifold forms of embodied life can circulate as a force for change, as a call for a “radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care” (Hedva, “Sick”).

McMaster University

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Ricia Anne Chansky and Emily Hipchen for their astute and kindly support of this special issue. I would like, too, to thank the artists and publishers who granted permission for us to reproduce their images. Many thanks to the contributors for their fine essays and to my colleagues and friends, particularly Nadine Attewell, Christina Baade, Emily Hill, Mary O'Connor, Michael Ross, S. Trimble, Lorraine York, and Andrea Zeffiro, for intellectual vibrancy and sage feedback when I have needed it the most. Heartfelt thanks to my teachers and friends beyond the academy, and loving thanks as always to my family, especially Peter and Patrick.

Notes

1. I am thinking, for example, of foundational feminist contributions, including Audre Lorde's The Cancer Journals and Sister Outsider; Jo Spence's Putting Myself in the Picture; Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera; Sidonie Smith's Identity, Subjectivity, and the Body; Shirley Neuman's Autobiography and Questions of Gender; and Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's edited collections, Getting a Life and Interfaces. In addition, Paul John Eakin's How Our Lives Become Stories provides an illuminating overview of the anti-Cartesian “return to the body” across auto|biography studies and embodiment theory (9).

2. Hedva continues this querying of the very constitution of “self” as necessarily autonomous, functional, and “real” in their essay “In Defence of De-Persons.” Here, as they push back against the compound deauthorizing effects of a psychiatric diagnosis, Hedva is in dialogue with Harney and Moten's radical black studies critique of “self-possession and self-mastery” as “the most legible and preferred forms of selfhood within a society built upon the ideology of possession” (“In Defence”; cf. also Duplan).

3. Not only are the hybrid theory-memoir projects of Ahmed, Clare, and Rankine formally innovative (e.g., in their citation methods, use of the page, and combination of poetic and inter|disciplinary knowledges), but mediation matters here, in that they also have significant pre- and postpublication relationships to online distribution (e.g., blogging, interviews, recorded public appearances), and to on- and offline community building.

4. Seeing a moment of danger in the rise of disability studies in the neoliberal university, Minich underscores that “the scrutiny of normative ideologies should occur not for its own sake but with the goal of producing knowledge in support of justice for people with stigmatized bodies and minds” and that accessible pedagogical practice is one of the key domains in which academics are called to enact this responsibility (emphasis in original).

5. I am influenced here by Engin Isin's conceptualization of an expanded field of “activist citizenship” that encompasses material and immaterial fields of action such as “dissenting, voting, volunteering, blogging, protesting, resisting and organizing” and is premised on the possibility of performative “acts” that produce “ruptures” in normative scripts (148–51).