No Place to Live: The Uninhabitable Body

Abstract

Identities, subjectivities, and personal and social agency are, as Homi Bhabha (1994) says, negotiated sites of many interdependent influences, some identifiable, many not. In this article I present a poignant case of a young woman unable to “inhabit her body” or mind in any sustained meaningful way. This project focuses on the theoretical work of Homi Bhabha and his ideas of cultural hybridity whereby individuals survive most productively and creatively at the margins or peripheries of culture, tolerating ambivalence and transgression. How might we think about histories, time, geographies, traumas, both locally and globally, and their impact on the individual developmentally and interrelationally? Whose history and narrative is allowed to be continuous and emphasized and whose is negated or absent? What happens to one's sense of identity when a subjectivity is imposed?