Our Bodies, Ourselves: Agency, Autonomy, and Embodiment
From its earliest days, the women’s liberation movement emphasized embodiment. Nothing highlights this more clearly than the evolution of the ground-breaking book Our Bodies, Ourselves:
Cover of the first edition of “Our Bodies, Ourselves”
In May of 1969, as the women’s movement was gaining momentum, a group of women in Boston met during a “female liberation conference” at Emmanuel College. In a workshop on “Women and Their Bodies,” they shared their experiences with doctors and their frustration at how little they knew about how their bodies worked. The discussions were so provocative and fulfilling that they formed the Doctor’s Group, the forerunner to the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, to find out more about their bodies, their lives, their sexuality and relationships, and to talk with each other about what they learned.
They decided to put their knowledge into an accessible format that could be shared and would serve as a model for women to learn about themselves, communicate their findings with doctors, and challenge the medical establishment to change and improve the care that women receive. (https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/our-story/)
It is hard to explain, in this age of social media, ebooks, and instant access to any information, right when one needs it, how ground-breaking this book was. It was the first time, for many of these women, to learn about their bodies, their desires, their choices, without a gatekeeper withholding information or framing possibilities or judging; to understand the possibilities of the body, and to make choices about what is best for that body. For a woman? In that time and place? Revolutionary.
Come to think of it, in this current moment and time, it may not be inexplicable after all. Because we are in another moment of restrictions of possibilities and choices and knowledge, and now abortion itself, made illegal. From a spate of book banning in public libraries, to banning the study of critical race theory at universities, to restricting knowledge about LGBTQIA+ lives in K-12 education, to prosecuting families for nurturing their trans children, to suing women for terminating pregnancies, to the overturning of Roe v. Wade and 50 years of legal precedent, we are in a sorry state as a nation, where discourse across the country equates knowledge with grooming, nurturing with abuse, and bodily autonomy with felony. The regulation, exploitation, and punishment of certain bodies–assigned female at birth, trans, queer, brown, black, and poor bodies–is endemic to cultural norms. In a fundamental way, your body is not understood to be yours. It is for others to regulate: teachers, doctors, police officers, husbands, and fathers.
Imprisonment starts in the mind. We cannot have what we cannot imagine. We cannot desire when we don’t know our own desires, and know how to fulfill them. We cannot change an injustice until we can name it and see it.
Liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s–anticolonialism, women’s liberation, gay liberation, the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, environmentalism, and more–understood this. So many of these movements theorized the root of the problem as Western thought itself. For many thinkers, the mind-body split was the culprit, part of a Western tendency to organize knowledge and experience through a series of binaries, with one pole privileged and the other devalued: male-female, black-white, straight-gay, human-animal, mind-body. Western thought, critics argued, privileged the mind over the body; the ability to reason was the basis of privilege and power, and those deemed incapable of reason were to be “ruled” by those who had it. Women, people of color, people in poverty, queer folks, trans folks, neurodivergent folks, and “deviants” of every stripe–all have been denied life, liberty, agency, and citizenship because they were defined by mainstream culture as ONLY bodies, ungoverned by the moderating power of the intellect. White men were not understood to be dominated by their bodies, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.
Susan Bordo’s groundbreaking book, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, captures this larger conversation in feminist theory. Bordo analyzes how ideology and popular culture discipline and shape actual bodies. Heteropatriarchy, she argues, constructs women’s bodies as deviant and other, in need of ‘improvement’ and correction, based on abstract ideologies and distinctive cultural norms.
What is the relation of gender to this dualism? As feminists have shown, the scheme is frequently gendered, with woman cast in the role of the body, “weighted down,” in Beauvoir’s words, ”by everything peculiar to it.” In contrast, man casts himself as the “inevitable, like a pure idea, like the One, the All, the Absolute Spirit.” . . . The cost of such projections to women is obvious. For it, whatever the specific historical content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and if woman is the body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggress, failure of will, even death. (Unbearable Weight 5)
Bordo’s most famous work is on eating disorders, but she also wrote presciently about Roe v. Wade and its implications in her 1993 book.
What gets obscured when abortion rights are considered in abstraction from issues involving forced medical treatement, legal, and social interference in the management of pregnancy, and so forth, is the fact that it is not only the women’s reproductive rights that are being challenged, but women’s status as subjects, within a system in which–for better or worse–the protection of “the subject” remains a central value. What also gets obscured are the interlocking and mutually supporting effacements of subjectivity that are involved when the woman is perceived as a racial or economic “other” as well. So long as the abortion debate over reproductive control is conceptualized solely in the dominant terms of the abortion debate–that is, a conflict between the fetus’s right to life and the woman’s right to choose–we are fooled into thinking that is only the fetus whose ethical and legal status are at issue. The pregnant woman (whose ethical and legal status as a person is not constructed as a question in the abortion debate, which most people wrongly assume is fully protected legally) is seen as fighting, not for her personhood, but “only” for her right to control her reproductive destiny. (U of California P, 10th Anniversary Ed. 2003) 93-94)
You can see the relevance of this in the current moment–in the ways that certain bodies are not understood to have agency. Mainstream culture maintains that women do not have the right to a sexuality that isn’t moderated and regulated by men’s desires; they do not have the right to decide how, when, and whether to bear children. Queer people are not allowed to express desire outside of heteronormative forms; trans and nonbinary and gender nonconforming folks are not granted agency to experience and transform their bodies as they wish, as seen by a deluge of anti-trans bills across the nation. People of color are denied certain neighborhoods and certain clothing and certain ways of expression; the license for police to damage their bodies seems without limit, despite the intense awareness campaigns of Black Lives Matter. Even learning about that history has been made illegal across the nation, as part of an anti-Critical Race Theory campaign.
And yet, embodiment is not simply a cautionary tale. If the body is a site of trauma and punishment, it is also, potentially, the site of liberation. Early women’s liberation focused on embodied knowledge and embodied theory, rejecting the notion that the body is inferior and positing that bodies had their own kind of knowledge and wisdom. The slogan “the personal is the political” went beyond individual experience to the embodied specificity of raced, gendered, and sexualized bodies. Early anthologies, like This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and Home Girls, framed the experiences of women of color within culture and community, and that insistence on particular embodiment continued in the queer of color critique in queer studies.
At the core of this theory is an understanding of the ways we experience reality through our bodies, and any system or theory that devalues or humiliates particular bodies is harmful. Our culture accepts and recognizes only certain kinds of bodies, in particular places, and demands disidentification, deformation, and denunciation from those who are accepted by the mainstream. Resisting that cultural hegemony is central to any liberation politics. It is central to standpoint epistemology in Gender Studies research.
Gender Studies has created a brilliant body of work that foregrounds embodiment, and the right of multiple kinds of bodies to survive and thrive in the world. This legacy of embodiment helps everyone. When queer communities argue that “love is love,” they push back not only against homophobia but against the right of any society to police or surveil one’s sexual desires, to mark some as legitimate and others as deviant. Larger conversations about consent and agency guard against harm, not by imposing one particular version of morality, but by recognizing the agency of all people to determine how and when and with whom they will, or won’t, engage in sexual behavior. When the Americans with Disabilities Act passed, it not only made our society easier for a specific population to engage with the larger community; it also made allowances for a variety of folks who need accommodations, temporarily or permanently. Universal design benefits everyone; creating access for differently abled bodies allows everyone to acknowledge their own limitations and need for accomodation. Embracing nonbinary and trans and genderqueer identities frees all of us from the prison of the gender binary. Celebrating multiple forms of embodiment liberates our own.
One learns to imagine otherwise outside of the mainstream. That is why Our Bodies, Ourselves began life as mimeographed, stapled pages, and why the Women in Print Movement sought to create an autonomous print ecology outside of corporate control. Early feminist bookwomen referred to New York publishers as LICE (Literary Industrial Corporate Establishment), and they understood that publishing corporations were more invested in maintaining the status quo than in transforming culture and economics. Radical ideas, empowering counternarratives, essential and suppressed knowledge–all of these were too important to let corporate gatekeepers decide on the boundaries of knowledge.
We are in a similar moment today, when the state and the marketplace attempt to regulate knowledge as they discipline and punish certain bodies. In the 1970s, feminists used do-it-yourself technologies to create new networks and forms of embodied knowledge. In the challenge of the current moment, the Gen Z will create its own networks of knowledge and resistance. Some may include social media; immediately after the Dobbs ruling came out, for example, social media posts about “camping” and deleting period tracking apps, were notable. Whatever the means, new grassroots systems of resistance and support will doubtless emerge.
One strategy may be updating and expanding some of those early strategies of women’s liberation. In 2022, the second edition of Trans Bodies, Trans Selves was published by Oxford University Press. Like Our Bodies, Ourselves, this book is published by a collective, which in both title and mission builds on the legacy of that ground-breaking publication.
MISSION: The mission of the Trans Bodies, Trans Selves organization is to improve the world for trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people in all our diversity through offering reliable information and education, connection and discussion, visibility about the diversity of our community and our issues, and activism about needs of our community.
As a project by trans and gender-nonconforming people for trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people, we hope to empower us and give us the tools we need to be experts on our own lives. We also recognize that our world is improved by educating those outside our community, and so we hope to be a resource for educators, medical and mental health providers, academia, legislators, family members, partners, and everyone else.
VISION: The Trans Bodies, Trans Selves organization is devoted to creating a world in which all gender identities and expressions are embraced and where all trans, nonbinary, & gender expansive people can safely and happily be themselves.
(http://transbodies.com/about/)
By trans people, for trans people–it is a simple formulation, as essential a concept now as it was over fifty years over. Questions of embodiment can easily veer into essentialism and anti-trans rhetoric, but they don’t have to, as Trans Bodies, Trans Selves demonstrates; recognizing particularity, agency, and context is essential.
This year, through our programming, we want to explore this question of embodiment–not only the ways that others discipline and shame and try to control bodies, but also the ways the embodiment becomes a site of resistance, of renewal, and of joy. We will investigate the ways that embodiment provides us both new language and expansive empathy, allowing us to imagine a world in which our full embodied selves are embraced, supported, and celebrated. In a time when respect for bodily autonomy is under direct assault, this conversation has never been more important.