Forgive me for so speaking: towards a hermeneutics of wounded embodiment and an ethics of contingency

ABSTRACT

I begin here, at my wounds, writing to reach out and touch, writing to find a way of being with you. Drawing on Julietta Singh’s conception of the body archive, I conceptualise my body here as marked by wounds, in particular relation to my embodiment as a person that is queer, racialised and experiences a physical impairment. I give my account of these wounds as traces of a history of being hurt, where I have been impressed upon by what I come to feel as the surfaces of the world. I argue this leads my body, in the repetition of its misfitting, to come to inhabit a position of bodily instability, which orients my perception towards the anticipation of pain. While this might read this as a re-inscription of a deficit narrative about the othered body, or a hypochondriacal logic, I argue this embodiment and its anticipation in my work of interpretation to be the beginning for a way of living and seeing differently, justified in the way that its’ contingent touch it might bring us closer together in relation, as a means to survive.

KEYWORDS:

• Embodiment
• contingency of touch
• racialisation
• intersectionality
• misfits
• body archive

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the community at Southside House who have helped them to feel seen through this work and who continue to help shape their growth as a scholar and as a person. They would also like to thank their supervisors for their feedback and support, in particular Dr Bryan Mukandi, for their many conversations over Vietnamese iced coffee, and for the space he affords them in attempting to begin again and again and again.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As my primary supervisor has often said to me in the most gracious advice – ‘sometimes you act like an entitled white boy’. Here, the sometimes reading of my body as ontologically white may serve as defence – though there are other effects of ‘passing’ as white that I must reckon with (supremacy, ontological expansiveness), here I focus on ‘passing’ in Ahmed’s (2015) sense of not being found to be suspicious, of not being found to be already different, as a way of avoiding being wounded as frequently.

2 Though I cannot be of here in regard to a so called ‘Australian’ identity, I can never be of here in regard to the fact of being a visitor on these lands, which were stolen under the fiction of ‘Terra nullius’. Here, I mean to attentive to the distinction that Moreton-Robinson (2015) describes when she contends that migrants may not possess, but may come to ‘belong’ in White Australia, contrasting this with Indigenous belonging. That is, there is some space that may be afforded to us in this place as a post-colonising space, but we can never possess the land, be of the land (both in a colonial engagement with the land and also with regards to an ontological connection with it). I am here as a visitor, and while I am looking for a space to call my own in this place, this is contingent on an invitation from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as the sovereign owners of these lands.

3 This was a comment I received from a white medical student peer after giving a part of a guest lecture, where I talked of my pain as a queer Asian person with a physical impairment in navigating the world. The weight of my pain on my body that I described in this lecture is disavowed in this statement, reduced to the level of something merely ‘actually quite interesting’, the actually noting that my pain is normally not even of interest to someone, and when it is, it is only to the extent one can still be detached from it, to find it interesting as opposed to the basis for deeper empathy. Taking being wounded to be the most vulnerable state, thinking here of vulnerability as porousness, the one who assumes the position of the universalised subject fails to use these porosities as footholds to even recognise my othered, misfit body in its pain.

4 Cathy Park Hong (2020) in Minor Feelings offers some incisive insight on the worth of writing pain, noting ‘Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain? I don’t think, therefore I am – I am hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it’s 2, maybe it’s not worth telling my story. If it’s 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller.’ (p. 49, emphasis in original). Though I know for some this paper will inevitably re-inscribe the deficit lens often associated with the ‘wounded’ racialised or othered body, I engage with my wounds strategically here as a way of living and being differently, of relating differently. My wounds are not a weakness, but the source of how I might learn to live, to find a way of being with others.

5 Ahmed (2002) would agree with this, in the way that she argues that to transform the wound into an identity is to isolate the wound from a history of ‘being hurt’, and that in doing so the wound becomes something that simply ‘is’ as opposed to something that has happened in a specific space and time. This, Ahmed (2002) argues, obscures the encounter between the ones who injure and the ones who are injured, concealing the very event which produces such identity claims. Rather than ‘forgetting’ the wound, the task here is to ‘‘remember’ how the skin, the surface of this body or that body came to be wounded in the first place’ Ahmed (2002, p. 26). This is a call to attentiveness to situation – space, time and bodies.

6 Again, I think Hong (2020) offers some valuable insights on this idea when she says ‘In Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, when the characters go blind, their vision doesn’t go dark but turns white as if they ‘plunged with open eyes into the milky sea.’ I see whiteness everywhere I go’ (p. 85). However, for me, it is not just whiteness that I see everywhere – I cannot disentangle this lineage of seeing from the messy embodiment of my pain as lived through the ‘infinity of traces’ that mark my body. When I speak of seeing from my wounds, it is never solely in terms of my racialised embodiment, but from the perspective of my embodied intersections of race and gender and class and sexuality and dis/ability, and all their contradictions that make my pain my own.

7 In the shift from listening to speaking, I appear, and I appear with all my body and all its pain and boundaries. As Ahmed (2002) says, ‘the ungraspability of her pain calls me back to my body, even when it is not in pain, to feel it, to explore its surfaces, to inhabit it’ (p. 24).

8 George Yancy, in an interview for The Philosopher’s Zone, quotes James Baldwin in saying ‘any change, any real change rather implies the break-up of the world as one has always known it, and the loss of all that gave one an identity, and the very end of safety’. For him, the loss of safety is to be vulnerable, in which he says, ‘to be vulnerable etymologically is to be wounded’ (Rutledge, 2020). Yancy later refers to Peggy McIntosh’s (1989) work when he says ‘one’s moral state is not completely dependent upon one’s moral will, rather one’s moral state is precisely determined by the ways in which one is interpolated or defined over and against their will.’ Taking the state of being wounded to be one such way in which one is defined, Yancy argues that this forms an important site of critical elaboration.

9 George Yancy in the same interview says in the context of suffering, ‘to hold onto that innocence, is a form of, if you will existential bad faith’ (Rutledge, 2020).

10 Here, I turn to Ngo’s (2017) analysis of Merleau-Ponty’s flesh ontology and the reversibility of touch. In Merleau-Ponty’s account of touch, one can both experience touching and being touched simultaneously – they are not contingent states as Sartre would argue, but instead are both dynamic parts of the same action, the tactile sensation. Ngo quotes Weiss (2010) in saying ‘It is because I touch that I can be touched, and if I am not touched, I will not be able to touch; neither experience is reducible to the other, and yet each makes the other possible.’ (p. 81). However, though Ngo (2017) notes the potential for one to get ‘stuck’ in a certain mode of touching or being touched – she argues we can never fully inhabit both modes simultaneously, though we may come close. Rather, Ngo (2017) argues that needs to room for ‘ones’ historical and political milieux’ (p.162), here becoming apparent in the form of the power that I inhabit in relation to academia and the researcher-participant dynamic. There is potential for me thus to be unable to dislodge myself from the position of touching, where instead of being necessary to each other, I might inhabit the role of the knower and enact violence in the form of unbridled touching.

11 Yancy in his interview with Rutledge (2020) ends his discussion of wounds as a point of engagement of change by referring to the act of wounding as a form of ‘parrhesia’, which he describes as brave speech. I think however, that this framing might be too noble, too heroic – while I would agree with his position in so far that it adheres to the broad oeuvres that I have discussed to this point, it reads too similar to me to Huang and Lee’s idea of ‘doing a favor’. I am just not that good or innocent. Instead, I prefer this Silva Rhetoricae (2016) definition of parrhesia, which suggests it is ‘Either to speak candidly or to ask forgiveness for so speaking. Sometimes considered a vice.’

12 It would be remiss here to not acknowledge that my reading of contingency as a form of relationality is undoubtedly influenced by the field of critical Indigenous studies, as well as my own embodiment and experience. Though I the form of relationality I understand is wholeheartedly different to the types of Indigenous relationality such as that described by Moreton-Robinson (2013, 2017), I have no doubt that my thinking in this space has undoubted been opened by the insights and ethics that is modelled by Indigenous scholarship, particularly female Indigenous scholarship in this place. Their scholarship calls me to think more deeply about my own knowledges of relationality and how I might live them. In this regard, I am also reliant on my upbringing for this approach, being taught that I am of my family, that my responsibility is to my family. My understanding of belonging to someone from this experience tells me that being responsible to someone is sometimes both necessity and nuisance.

13 I borrow the phrasing ‘aligning our bodies’ loosely from Ahmed (2002, p. 31).

14 I would like to thank the community at Southside House introducing me to this documentary and for the communal discussions which helped shape my thinking around this work. In particular, I would like to thank Mr Ali Drummond, for reaching out his hand in conversation with me around this quote, which helped shape the way in which I have come to see it. I am grateful to have been touched by him and to have his trace on this work. I am forever indebted to him for ‘straightening my thinking’ (Drummond, 2020, p. 7).