<![CDATA[ASA Section on Body & Embodiment

<![CDATA[ASA Section on Body & Embodiment - Blog!]]>Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:51:22 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[“Robocops” in the Making: Reframing Police-Citizen Interactions through the Lens of Body Cameras]]>Mon, 10 Aug 2020 15:29:05 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/robocops-in-the-making-reframing-police-citizen-interactions-through-the-lens-of-body-cameras

Holly Campeau
Assistant Professor of Sociology and Criminology
University of Alberta
Culture; legal cynicism; organizations; policing; qualitative methods; sociology of law

As videos of police officers using lethal force continue to go viral, such as the deaths of Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Michael Brown in Ferguson, and most recently George Floyd in Minneapolis, calls for greater transparency in policing prompt nationwide discussion about recording technologies. Body-worn cameras have quickly become a frontrunner “solution” to police reform, and hundreds of police agencies across North America have already equipped their frontline officers with video surveillance devices.

However, behind the collection of viral videos are millions of unshared recordings of police encounters: some equally shocking and offensive, most mundane and uneventful. This paper aims to contribute to our understanding of what police think about in the course of their routine encounters given the presence of a video camera on their bodies, and how the presumption of scrutiny reframes the officer’s approach to interacting with citizens. That is, how do frontline police make sense of the technology’s impact on their interactions in daily work life?
To explore this question, this paper draws on 30 interviews with frontline officers of the Calgary Police Service – the first department in Canada to reach full deployment of body-worn cameras across the entire city. All respondents work in patrol division, in a variety of city districts, and have a minimum of 3 years served on the frontline. Interviews were audio-recorded and typically ran 60 to 90 minutes. Interviews were later transcribed and analyzed (in Nvivo12) using both axial and selective coding techniques.

Findings suggest that video recording technology such as body-cameras levy an instrumentarian power: they not only monitor, but actuate. Specifically, anticipating review of their actions, officers reframe both their role and the subtleties of their approach in dealing with members of the public as “more robotic”. This reframing unfolds in two ways.
First, respondents share an overall sense that body cameras dehumanize their interactions: they curb their ability to exercise discretion and build rapport with citizens in a manner they deem most effective. For instance, many describe a particular style of communication they believe is more consistent with the needs and preferences of certain residents. Unable to “match” people at their level made officers feel less human and more robotic in their dealings because they are not able to engage in a way that feels natural to that particular exchange. Some even claim that de-escalation efforts are disrupted. As one officer explained: One of the best ways for deescalating people is talking to them regularly, and the farther down you go on that ladder, more in the ghetto, their world is like, ‘F this, f that’, right, and so you talk to them how they’re used to talking. But if you have that body camera, and it’s being reviewed… then that comes back on you if you’re saying ‘Fuck this, fuck that’. So now you have to talk like a robot… it changes the interaction. Like it de-humanizes the interaction. Which then makes it easier for an assault to carry out. Like, ‘Is this is a robot talking to me? Fuck this guy.’

Second, officers report the need to operate in a more mechanical fashion when it comes to following legal protocols. Increased reliance on body camera footage in court means more emphasis than ever on “process”, and demonstrating unequivocally that all prescribed steps were taken. Respondents described their conduct as more formulaic and reiterative. For example, prior to wearing cameras, officers were less meticulous about when and how they read a citizen their rights during arrest. Now, as one officer admits, she and her colleagues approach the interaction with a mental checklist, ensuring things are “on there” – that is, in the footage. They even bring the script, or the “card”, rather than rely on memory and risk even the slightest deviation: “Sometimes you arrest someone, and you haven’t [read their rights] quite, like, right away because they don’t have access to a phone anyways, and you’re still trying to figure out who they are, and then there’s this long delay, and then you go do it. So now I find it’s more, like, you just read that card ‘cause you have to make sure that’s on there, and then you start trying to figure out what’s going on. I find people do that a bit more. A lot of officers used to memorize the card – or just tell people, ‘You can call a lawyer – ‘, blah, blah, but now everyone’s reading it word for word, and that’s ‘cause it’s on camera.”

Despite the many ways in which the technology imposes a script and limits what they consider “the craft” of policing, 100% of respondents report preference for the continued use of cameras. As one officer explained, “I like having it because it protects us 99% of the time. And on a one percent it holds police officers that do make mistakes accountable, which really protects the rest of us anyway. Because I don't really want to be working beside somebody who is doing things incorrectly. So, I'm okay with that. I'm just kind of sad that it's come to that.” In an era of high visibility, more avenues for public complaints, and pressures for increased accountability, frontline officers believe body cameras offer much needed protection. By their accounts, it is better to live with the technology than without it, and there is safety in embodying “a robot” behind the lens.

]]><![CDATA[Black Girls’ Knowledges and Resistance to School Discipline]]>Sat, 08 Aug 2020 17:20:37 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/black-girls-knowledges-and-resistance-to-school-discipline

Brittney Miles, MEd
University of Cincinnati
PhD Sociology Graduate Student
Research Areas: Black Girlhood, Embodiment, Disability, (A)Sexuality

Using focus group data from 18 Black girls in 7th-11th grades in the Greater Cincinnati Area, Black girls’ knowledges of school discipline are considered along axes of race, gender, dis/ability, and sexuality. Black girls’ educational experiences are under-researched, particularly their school-based experiences with gendered racism (Ricks 2014; Blake et al. 2011). As research on the school-to-prison pipeline typically highlights Black and brown boys, punishment disparities exist that show that Black girls move through these pathways, as well, and experience differential treatment and exclusionary enforcement (Morris and Perry 2017; Morris 2016; Crenshaw, Ocen, and Nanda 2015). Black girls are frequently punished by educators for subjective rule violations, where rules can be interpreted such as disobedience, rather than objective reasons like drug possession (Annamma et al. 2016; Blake et al. 2011). The intersectional experiences of Black girls serve as a critical site of learning in the quest for educational justice.

The purpose of this study was to understand the collective meaning-making, feelings, and responses Black girls have to school discipline. I asked three central questions aimed at centering Black girls’ voices. First, how do Black girls make sense of school discipline? Secondly, how do Black girls respond to being disciplined? Finally, I explore how Black girls position themselves in relation to school discipline to illuminate conversations about who is disciplined, for what offenses they are disciplined, and experiences of self-policing among students. Subsequently, my research questions critically interrogated Black girls’ knowledges of structural inequality and how they understand their educational experiences through an intersectional lens.

Using a qualitative interpretivist framework, this project used focus group interviews as its primary method. I worked with 18 girls in 7th-11th grade from the Greater Cincinnati Area to complete 3 focus groups, with 4-7 Black girls in each group, that lasted between 1.5 and 2 hours. All of the girls were members of a girls’ empowerment organization. I used convenience sampling as a nonprobability strategy that allowed me to rely on my networks and proximity to find potential participants (Clark 2007). My sampling strategy allowed me to access this population outside of formal school structures, as a means to avoid potentially violent or toxic school environments that could be traumatizing to the girls in their reflections.

Focus groups allow the research process to reveal the collective narratives, experiences, and meaning-making of Black girls regarding school discipline; it is a reminder that no girl is alone in her experiences even as those experiences may not be identical. I interviewed girls regardless of their direct experiences with discipline because the threat of discipline and being a witness to it are both valuable to understanding how they make sense of their educational realities. From a feminist perspective, focus groups help minimize the power imbalance between researcher and participants, helps contextualize social processes related to co-constructed meaning-making, and can empower populations usually silenced like young girls (Hymas 2004; Wilkinson 1999; Wilkinson 1998). Further, focus groups mirror sister circles, a Black women’s tradition the deconstructs barriers between women, and in this context, draws on the intersections of gender, race, and culture within a historical legacy (Neal-Barnett et al. 2011a; Neal-Barnett et al. 2011b; Gaston, Porter, Thomas 2007). 

Black girls understand their discipline experiences as primarily being shaped around their relationships with peers, guards, and teachers, rather than their actions alone. Girls in the study identified passive-aggressive forms of policing and antagonization from teachers as central to creating a culture of hostility and them being defined by their discipline history. In response to this, Black girls perform resistance strategies to defend and protect themselves from the stratified harm they face - including employing sass, arguing their case, and directly describing and confronting the injustices they witness. These strategies allow them to reclaim some power in disempowering school spaces. They recognize the unjust racial and gendered disparities associated with discipline but negotiate around and through these violent realities by shifting their behaviors in response to how they understand these institutions to function, and identifying allies and adversaries among security staff, teachers, and within the administration.

The most common offenses that lead to classroom removal - laughter and talking. When articulating how they are policed differently, Black girls highlighted the ways that Black talk, Black sass, and Black laughter is policed differently but also used as a tool by students to reclaim their voice. As school discipline targets Black girl joy and Black girl sisterhood, girls rally among each other to use their bodies and voice to subvert their silencing and proclaim their power. Black girls challenge educators, administrators, their peers, and the curriculum. As primary stakeholders in their educations, they work to hold their educational institutions accountable at various levels through the ways they maneuver school discipline.

References
Annamma, Subini Ancy, Yolanda Anyon, Nicole M. Joseph, Jordan Farrar, Eldridge Greer, Barbara Downing, and John Simmons. 2016. "Black girls and school discipline: The complexities of being overrepresented and understudied." Urban Education 54(2): 211-242.
Blake, Jamilia J., Bettie Ray Butler, Chance W. Lewis, and Alicia Darensbourg. 2011. "Unmasking the inequitable discipline experiences of urban Black girls: Implications for urban educational stakeholders." The Urban Review 43(1): 90-106.
Clark, Roger. 2007. "Convenience Sample." in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. New York: Blackwell Publishing.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé, Priscilla Ocen, and Jyoti Nanda. 2015. Black girls matter: Pushed out, overpoliced, and underprotected. Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, Columbia University.
Gaston, Marilyn Hughes, Gayle K. Porter, and Veronica G. Thomas. 2007. "Prime Time Sister Circles: evaluating a gender-specific, culturally relevant health intervention to decrease major risk factors in mid-life African-American women." Journal of the National Medical Association 99(4): 428-38.
Hyams, Melissa. 2004. "Hearing Girls’ Silences: Thoughts on the politics and practices of a feminist method of group discussion." Gender, Place & Culture 11(1): 105-119.
Morris, Monique. 2016. Pushout: The criminalization of Black girls in schools. The New Press.
Morris, Edward W., and Brea L. Perry. 2017. "Girls Behaving Badly? Race, Gender, and Subjective Evaluation in the Discipline of African American Girls." Sociology of Education 90(2): 127-148.
Neal‐Barnett, Angela, Robert Stadulis, Marsheena Murray, Margaret R. Payne, Anisha Thomas, and Bernadette B. Salley. 2011a. "Sister circles as a culturally relevant intervention for anxious Black women." Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 18(3): 266-273.
Neal-Barnett, Angela M., Robert Stadulis, Margaret Ralston Payne, Lori Crosby, Monica Mitchell, Lakisha Williams, and Crystal Williams-Costa. 2011b. "In the company of my sisters: Sister circles as an anxiety intervention for professional African American women." Journal of Affective Disorders 129(1): 213-218.
Ricks, Shawn Arango. 2014. "Falling through the Cracks: Black Girls and Education." Interdisciplinary Journal of Teaching and Learning 4(1): 10-21.
Wilkinson, Sue. 1999. "Focus groups: A feminist method." Psychology of Women Quarterly 23(2): 221-244.
Wilkinson, Sue. 1998. "Focus Groups in Feminist Research: Power, interaction, and the co-construction of meaning." Women's Studies International Forum 21(1): 111-125.

]]><![CDATA[Harassed: An Interview with Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards]]>Tue, 18 Jun 2019 14:13:58 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/an-interview-with-patricia-richards
In this blog post, ASA Body & Embodiment Section council member Kelly Underman interviews Rebecca Hanson and Patricia Richards about their new book, Harassed: Gender, Bodies, and Ethnographic Research (University of California Press, 2019).

Author Rebecca Hanson, PhD
Assistant Professor, Dept. of Sociology, Criminology & Law and Center for Latin American Studies, University of Florida

Author Patricia Richards, PhD
Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, University of Georgia

Congratulations on such a provocative and much-needed book. One aspect of it that makes it so compelling is that it is all at once an in-depth study of sexual harassment and responses to it in the field, a feminist theorization of epistemology and the body, and a practical how-to guide for researchers and their mentors. In chapters analyzing researchers’ experiences of sexual harassment in the field, you weave in both rich theory on embodiment and boxed questions for reflection. How did the book come to have this kind of structure? You discuss how the research came to be in the introduction, but how did the book itself develop in this way? Why was incorporating how-to advice so important?

It was really important for us to foreground the experiences of the researchers we interviewed, and we can’t emphasize enough how the stories that women told us informed both the structure and the narrative of the book. After listening to women’s critical reflections on what they had experienced and what they wished they had known before going into the field, much of the book flowed rather seamlessly from their analyses and understanding of problems within academia and how that translated into fieldwork practices.

Writing the boxed-off questions was probably one of the more difficult parts of the book, however, partly because we never thought of the book as a how-to guide or a “here is how to do fieldwork” kind of project. This is because for much of the writing process we were focused on identifying the problem and theorizing how it came to be. Also, we were hesitant to provide solutions or recommendations, because we felt that coming up with rules and regulations for how to do field work would have been artificial, and because we didn’t really feel that the kind of tips that are usually provided work well in the field. The questions for reflection were an idea that came out of discussions with the first editor we worked with at the University of California Press, so we have him to thank for encouraging us to think about how readers of the book could concretely apply what we write about to their own fieldwork experiences as well as when evaluating others’ ethnographic tales.

The questions eventually became our way of getting readers to think about these issues without necessarily telling them what to do about them. We hope that considering the encounters and interactions we discuss in the book—from flirtation to sexual attraction to assault—before going into the field will better prepare students for fieldwork, and perhaps open up space for researchers to have more open discussions about these issues before, during, and after fieldwork. Turning this into a more public discussion within academia is key for us, precisely because, despite the fact that these experiences are quite common, they are also incredibly individualized. So many of the women we talked to, and we include ourselves here, described the interview process as cathartic, or as the first time they had been able to talk openly about what they had experienced. And this really reflects how powerful the institutional silence is around these issues, and how it leads many women to think these experiences are their own fault, that they are unlucky or, worse, unfit for fieldwork.

Your discussion of ethnographic fixations highlights how the “ideal worker” of ethnography is a straight white cisgender man. You demonstrate how academia as a profession constructs “good” ethnography as being done alone, as involving danger, and as requiring intimacy with participants. In what ways is harassment in the field a problem of the structure of the academy? How do masculine accounts of danger in the field make some ethnographic research “sexy” and more valorized than other, more feminized accounts of vulnerability or harm in the field?

In the book we analyze how the androcentric, racialized, and colonialist history of qualitative methods developed within the academy has made discussions of the body taboo in ethnographic narratives, and how this influenced the ways in which the women talked about their bodies in the field. As researchers, what we feel comfortable writing about and what we think count as “data” has everything to do with taken for granted assumptions about knowledge production that have been handed down to us by these histories. So, as we talk about in the book, one of the central ways that harassment in the field is actually a problem of the structure of the academy is that the academy does not valorize and, in fact, actively discourages public and methodological discussions of harassment. Because of these traditions and the way they have shaped fieldwork expectations, we have a whole host of other issues that need to be changed as well, including research design, evaluation, and funding.

As we mention in the book, there is already scholarship out there that deals with sexual harassment and how we can try to protect ourselves, which we think is undoubtedly important for researchers to consider. But we felt that this focus on power dynamics in the field overlooked how intertwined fieldwork is with socialization processes within academia and the pressures and expectations that we face as we try to publish, get jobs, and establish ourselves as experts.

Because discussions about these encounters don’t happen often in classes or even in private conversations with mentors, it isn’t clear to researchers how to proceed, or who to ask for guidance (if anyone at all) when they do happen. Indeed, what is left out of socialization processes within academia is just as important to consider as what is “included.” Michelle’s story, which we tell in the book, illustrates the problem so well. She experienced numerous forms of harassment and violence in the field but wasn’t sure what to do when, for example, she was assaulted by a potential gatekeeper. When she decided to talk to her advisor days after the assault occurred, he was supportive and told her to leave her field site, to prioritize her safety. But she agonized over reaching out to him, worrying that he would tell her she had done something wrong. It says so much about the lack of guidance around these topics that she anxiously debated whether to talk to her advisor at all.

An important part of this socialization process for some of the women we talked to was dealing with harassment and sexualization in their academic departments, The simple fact that women report that they have had to ignore, laugh off, or suffer through sexual and racial harassment, violence, and sexualization while in graduate school and continue to do so as they move into adjunct or tenure track positions tells us a lot about why women would feel unable to discuss similar experiences that happen to them in the field. If they feel unable to discuss or report this behavior in a more “traditional” workplace, where there are offices and regulations set up with the explicit goal of facilitating reporting, but where harassment is nonetheless brushed off and minimized, it seems unlikely that they would be willing to discuss experiences that happened outside of the university, where such mechanisms do not exist (and where they are told that good researchers face danger with gusto and seek out ethnographic intimacy).

Certain masculine accounts of danger in the field capture perfectly the trio of fixations that we talk about in the book: they tend to be stories about a man braving all sorts of challenges alone and ending up with this really “good” (close up, intimate, real) data. However, it is important to note that there are forms of violence and danger that men also may face in the field that, because they fall short of hegemonic masculine expectations (which we like to think have less of a hold on academics), they do not include in their stories of fieldwork. It is also important to note that women feel pressure to adhere to these masculine narratives, as Kimberly Theidon has written so brilliantly about.

In contrast, it is hard to think of many accounts that women authors have included in vignettes or methods sections that address having to confront sexual assault in the field or navigating sexual harassment. And this is for good reason. In 2016 Mingwei Huang published an insightful piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education about how accounts of vulnerability and violence that are associated with women’s bodies are perceived differently from the “hardy masculine” narrative. She writes about how as ethnographers we are pushed to take risks, but only certain outcomes of risky behavior are valorized. In her case, when she was raped while in the field she felt that she would be stigmatized if she talked about the experience. She was also accused of “careerism” by some men academics when she did talk about it. There is no scenario in which discussing this kind of violence leads to academic capital. In other words, not only does the violence that is associated with women’s bodies not accrue the same capital, it accomplishes the exact opposite effect that we see with white men’s stories that stick to hegemonic narratives.

We think it is very important to note here that this isn’t just about masculine accounts, but racialized ones. In other words, not all men receive the same respect for facing what are considered to be dangerous situations. As Randol Contreras and others have noted, their work with men of color has been questioned because they are men of color—the researcher as well as the research are delegitimized here. So, it is important to recognize that the distribution of academic capital must be understood from an intersectional perspective.

As I was reading your book, I was struck by how the ethnographic fixations that you describe require us as women to shut down the observational strategies that we use in our everyday lives to navigate gendered violence. You recount many women’s experiences of ignoring “red flags” from the men they’re interacting with in the field in order to preserve access or gather better data. The consequences for researchers of doing this are both physical vulnerability and emotional costs. What are the consequences as well for knowledge production? How do these ideal worker norms have consequences both for individual researchers and for the discipline?

Yes, many of the women we interviewed referred to how fieldwork required them to behave in ways that contradicted how they had been socialized and taught to protect themselves in their daily lives. Some of the women talked about being chastised by peers and mentors when they did heed “red flags.” They were told that they probably missed out on a really great data opportunity. The idea that researchers need to put themselves out there all of the time, that good ethnography somehow means ignoring indicators of danger or threat, came up time and again in the interviews.

As far as knowledge production goes, ignoring these red flags and “sucking it up” to get the data means that when researchers talk about the data they collected in these moments, they are likely to leave this important contextual information out, presenting the data in a disembodied way. This could be for a few reasons. One is that, as some of the women talked about, researchers may unconsciously “shut off” the part of themselves that alerts them to danger, or ignore it without really thinking about it. If they eventually did realize what they were doing in that moment, it was after the fact and not thought to be an important consideration in data collection. Other researchers may leave these details out if they ignored red flags and then were harassed or assaulted, feeling that they may be blamed for what happened to them since “they should have known better.” So, there are a few different ways that how researchers collect data may be left out of vignettes and analysis, and this silence reproduces the homogeneous narratives of fieldwork that we critique in the book. In a way, this is another form of denial of the body in the workplace—here the field site—that is demanded by the forms of knowledge production that have been erected on the foundation of the “neutral” body.

One of the most important things this indicates is how white and androcentric assumptions dominate what fieldwork should be like. And because these differential vulnerabilities end up totally written out of our research, the different kinds of risks faced by researchers are completely invisible and unexamined as constitutive of our fields of study. What we know and how we analyze it would likely shift if these experiences were made front and center as a part of the knowledge we collect, because these experiences reveal something about the gendered and raced realities of the contexts we study.

One of the provocative claims you make in the book is that much of especially feminist oriented literature on embodiment, reflexivity, and methodology presumes that the researcher will always hold more power in the encounter--and, moreover, that identities are singular and stable. How does accounting for the body in the ways that your book does help nuance intersectional reflexivity?

It’s important to consider the colonialist history of ethnography in answering this question. Critiques of that history led post-colonial and feminist scholars alike to criticize the role of power in research. This work has been important, but it also can have the effect of flattening power dynamics in the field. More recently there have been some incredible methodological contributions from women of color and queer researchers that have unsettled the assumption that the researcher always holds more power. Yet, as we mention in the book, these contributions haven’t really been able to alter hegemonic assumptions about how power operates in the field. Thus, we think it is essential to emphasize the continued influence of colonial thought in our methodology. There is still a lot of genealogical digging that could be done to further uncover how colonial logics can perpetuate power inequalities in the field but also how post-colonial responses can make it difficult for researchers to talk about the power their research participants may have and how this might put them at a disadvantage.

In the book we encourage researchers to consider that we enter different field sites and situations with varying degrees of power, and much of this has to do with our bodies and how they are interpreted in those places. Considering why this is the case, and why there is still a very prevalent belief that there is always an imbalance in power that tilts towards the researcher, is an act of intersectional reflexivity in and of itself. (This is complicated of course by the assumption—colonialist in itself—that we have the “right” to be in the field in the first place.)

As researchers, we don’t always hold power in a given situation, and field research can be really disempowering depending on the context and our particular embodiment—this is about not just gender but also race, ability, perceived religious affiliation, and other factors as well. Recognizing that research can actually be quite disempowering and unsettling for researchers is something that a more intersectional approach to methods training could offer. It is somewhat ironic that many of us spend a lot of time thinking about power relations and how to produce more nuanced theories about them, but when it comes to fieldwork we tend to think about power between the researcher and the researched in such a static and fixed manner, as if those power relations are categorically different from all the other ones in which we are embedded in our day to day lives.

We think concretely considering how one’s body may be perceived and interpreted in different contexts will push researchers to think about how aspects of their identities may be “activated” in some interactions, while in others not as much. In turn, this unsettles the notion that our identities are stable and singular which is, in our opinion, an insight from intersectional theory that has not been carried over into methods.

But the book is perhaps more about advocating for an intersectional approach to training, which we believe is still quite rare, as opposed to providing a more nuanced approach to intersectional reflexivity. Before asking about nuance, we need even a basic understanding among qualitative researchers that the body is an important methodological consideration. What we have tried to do is get people to think very concretely about this and what it means for their relationships in the field. By pushing researchers to do this, we hope that those who feel that an intersectional perspective does not “apply” to them will start to think about their bodies and power relationships in a more aware and reflexive way.

Finally, we strongly encourage people to read the article written by a feminist collective formed by (now former) graduate students in anthropology at UT Austin, called “Toward a Fugitive Anthropology: Gender, Race, and Violence in the Field.” The article compellingly shows how embodied experiences can unsettling methodological epistemology and training.

Given the rise of carnal and sensory ethnographic methods, how does your call for ethnographers to write their embodied experiences of harassment into their field notes extend or challenge these?

What our perspective shares with carnal and sensory methods is a critique of a dualist ontology of knowledge, that knowledge is the production of the mind—a rational, objective process of analysis and conscious thought—that is separate from the body. We agree that as researchers what we feel and experience while in the field can provide essential insights into the social worlds we study.

Where we differ is that, rather than focusing only on the body of the researcher as a vessel or instrument to experience the world in the way our research participants do, we consider the embodied nature of fieldwork itself. So, for us, the experiences we have while engaging in activities alongside our participants are not the only ones that “count” as data that an awareness of embodiment provides.

Secondly, we challenge and critique the call put forward by Wacquant to persist despite all obstacles, that somehow stepping back from a project and modifying it suggests that you do not have what it takes to be a good qualitative researcher. Behind this call is the belief that the best research comes from those who withstand all challenges and dangers, i.e. the fixations we critique in the book. Indeed, taking embodied ethnography seriously means recognizing that some researchers may not be allowed to partake in certain experiences. And that is ok. This doesn’t make their work less-than, it tells us about boundaries and power dynamics in our field sites. So, being prohibited from an experience or even opting out of an “opportunity” for one’s security is also embodied data. The way that carnal ethnography is sometimes written about suggests that not being able to force your way into an experience, to engage in certain practices or activities, is some sort of failure on the part of the ethnographer. We think there are good reasons—both epistemologically and methodologically—to say no in certain instances. At the very least, saying no should be an option that is presented to researchers in a way that doesn’t make them feel guilty about making this choice.

In a similar vein, we question the assumption behind some of these methods that says researchers must get as close as possible to their research participants to really understand them, to document what it means to experience their social worlds as they experience them. As we discuss in the book, we think there are plenty of examples where establishing boundaries and creating a degree of distance with research participants can actually lead to better data, without the researcher having to take on emotional and physical costs.

About the authors
Rebecca Hanson is Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, with a joint appointment in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law and the Center for Latin American studies. Her current book manuscript explores how violence and policing were shaped by the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela.

Patricia Richards is Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also the author of Pobladoras, Indígenas, and the State: Conflicts over Women’s Rights in Chile (Rutgers, 2004) and Race and the Chilean Miracle: Neoliberalism, Democracy, and Indigenous Rights (Pittsburgh, 2013).

About the interviewer
Kelly Underman received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine prior to joining the faculty at Drexel. She is a qualitative researcher whose interests include medical education, the social construction of bodies and emotions, and the politics of scientific knowledge production. Her work has been published in Social Science & Medicine, Gender & Society and Sociological Forum. Her awards include the Simmons Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Sociological Association Medical Sociology Section.

]]><![CDATA[The Borders are a Nightmare]]>Tue, 15 Jan 2019 08:00:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/the-borders-are-a-nightmare

by Anima Adjepong, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Simmons University

In 2016, I began making frequent trans-Atlantic research visits to Accra, Ghana. Since that first journey, every time I pass through Kotoka International Airport in Accra, I turn on my recording device. It is my sole comfort in the face of the harassment I expect to face as I pass through the national border. The first time I turned it on was when the British Airways gate agent stalled my check-in because he wanted to know if I was a footballer. While the question on its face might seem innocuous, as a trans* person, I was aware of its gender-policing subtext. I turned on my phone’s recorder because Perry was questioning me as if I had committed a crime. He asked to see multiple forms of ID in addition to my passport, questioned me about who paid for my airline ticket, and wanted to know why I was traveling. When he saw my recorder come on, he quickly informed me that I was not legally permitted to record “official security business.” His uncertainty about my gender was now a matter of national security. But nevertheless, he backed off. Perhaps it was the recorder, or my U.S. accent and passport. It’s hard to tell. Over the next year and a half, I visited Accra 3 more times, recording each interaction with agents at the airport. With the exception of my most recent visit in November 2018, I have always been harassed by some airport employee, whether from Ghana Immigration Service, the narcotics agent, or the gate agent checking me in. This harassment has always been because of my gender. On my last visit, I managed to pass through freely. But I was traveling with my partner, whose gender became a point of curiosity and conversation at immigration.

Yesterday, crazinisT artisT disclosed s/He/it’s* violation at the Praia airport in Cabo Verde. In an Instagram post, crazinisT artisT wrote, “I was convinced they were only searching for an [illegal pussy or dick] perhaps something far beyond that… I only needed evidence of my abuse otherwise no one will believe stories of this kind.”

crazinisT artisT, I am so sorry that this happened to you. It is absolutely not okay. I am thankful for your clear-headedness and vigilance, thankful that you found the voice to speak out about this violence. Our bodies are not crimes. Your body is not a crime.

One of the things that stood out to me was the fact that crazinisT artist said s/He/it traveled with a letter from the National Police Commander and was escorted by a lawyer and other officials. Despite what appears to be the full weight of the law behind s/He/it, s/He/it was still violently searched to satisfy the whims of the airport security agents. What this tells us is that there are absolutely no consequences for this kind of violation. The agents rightly assumed that they can violate gender expansive travelers with impunity.

When I started recording my experiences at the border in Accra, I often asked myself why. I would diligently record the name of the agent harassing me, while knowing in the back of my mind that even if I reported this violation, nothing would happen. But as well, I always wondered if I would even report these agents. Should they be reprimanded, did I want to be the reason they were out of a job? In reality, that last question is irrelevant. What state entity in Ghana has ever expressed concern for the lives of trans* people? From crazinisT artisT’s experience, we see how even with the ostensible backing of the chief of police, the airport agents knew they could act without consequence.

The kind of harassment and violence described above happens outside of the airport as well. In Accra, whenever I have had to interact with a police officer or security agent, I am immediately criminalized by the question “are you a boy or a girl?” The Unartiste Podcast, an Accra-based podcast which discusses popular culture, recently had an episode in which police accused one of the hosts of being a lesbian. His gender-expansive style and make-up bag made him suspicious to the police, exposing him to search and threat of arrest. To avoid further harassment, the host disclosed that he claimed to be U.S. American. His friend said he was from Tanzania. The podcast host and his friend had their wits about them, and recorded this interaction. Recording the ways we are violated is cold comfort.

It is telling that the hosts claim to be from elsewhere to avoid further harassment. As gender-expansive Ghanaians, we know that we have no protection from the state. In s/He/it’s post, crazinisT artisT asks that s/He/it’s experience be shared “until something changes.” We cannot accept the reality that a privileged few, those of us with U.S. accents, letters from chiefs of police, and security escorts might evade the brutality of gender harassment. There is no guarantee that we will be spared. As crazinisT artisT put it, “the next victim may not survive such violence.” S/He/it’s right. But if there are no consequences, there is no reason why police, immigration officers, and other security officials should treat us better.

*crazinisT artisT’s pronouns are sHe/it.

Website Links:
Instagram Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/BrBWl-KFy6u/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
Unartist Podcast: https://www.acast.com/unartiste/youre-a-lesbian

About the author
Anima Adjepong researches and writes about identity, culture, and migration. They received their PhD in Sociology from The University of Texas at Austin, with concentrations in African and African Diaspora Studies and Women's and Gender Studies. Adjepong is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simmons University. Their current book project, provisionally titled Afropolitan Projects, is about how middle-class Ghanaians experience themselves as citizens of the Black diaspora. The research is based on participant observations and interviews in communities in Houston, Texas, and Accra, Ghana, and explores how migration, race, and sexuality, shape middle-class Ghanaian identities in these different cities. Adjepong’s published work can be found in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sport in Society, and the queer African blog, HOLAAfrica amongst other places.

This post was first published at https://animaadjepong.com/blog/2018/12/6/the-borders-are-nightmares

]]><![CDATA[“White Hot RAGE: Embodying my Rape Again, and Again, and Again”]]>Tue, 16 Oct 2018 13:05:36 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/white-hot-rage-embodying-my-rape-again-and-again-and-again

by Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
California State University, Chico

TRIGGER WARNING!: rape, sexual violence, sexual assault, trauma

I don’t usually yell at the television, sit in front of the TV for 8 straight hours, post my real-time thoughts on Facebook over the course of an entire day, cancel every work-related meeting I had that day, have tear-filled conversations with my Mom about our own violent sexual histories, burst into tears upon hearing a single word uttered by a stranger, or sit in my (painful) memories for long stretches of time. This is not my daily, weekly or even monthly routine. But Thursday, September 27th 2018 was a special kind of day, one that literally forced me to confront, head on, what had been buried deep for well over 2 decades. Since then, I know so many of us have been in a similar space, grappling with pain that is often far too difficult and deep to confront at any one time. Honestly, the pain and rage is often so fierce and sharp that it feels like it is literally cutting me into pieces, ripping my chest apart and open a thousand times over. This entry is the beginning of my coming to terms with the avalanche that hit me on Thursday and hasn’t really gone away. It’s the beginning of some kind of clarity regarding how to move forward; some way that I/we/all of us might be able to use these moments of rage to support one another and contribute to some real social change.

When I talk about Facebook, I usually roll my eyes or bemoan the performance aspect of it all, the way it feeds into our anxieties, often hurts us, and can certainly be used too much. Thursday, again, was a different kind of day. Instead of being used by Facebook, I used it all day long and felt remarkably better and often held by those who heard me and supported me. I was also moved by the collective rage that so many of us expressed on social media across multiple platforms. The Ford/Kavanaugh hearing propelled me forward, fully ready to engage and share and collectively learn how to navigate this rage.

Since Thursday, I’ve also been hyper aware of my embodiments of rage and pain. What has this looked like? To start, I was running errands on Thursday morning, simultaneously listening to Dr. Ford’s testimony in my car, when she said one single triggering word after Senator Leahy asked her the following questions:

Leahy: “What is the strongest memory you have? Strongest memory of the incident? Something that you cannot forget? Take whatever time you need.”

Ford: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter, between the two and their having fun at my expense.”

Soon after I heard this part of her testimony, I was moved to post this to my Instagram:

“Dr. Ford just said she remembered the laughter at her expense. Ooof, that brought on some instant tears. Yes, Dr. Ford, that’s what I remember, too.”

And that’s a much less intense description of what actually happened. While driving, I immediately burst into massive, hot tears and screamed out in pain and rage. The images, the laughter, the blurriness of that night, the pressure on my body from multiple young men, multiple strangers, the heavy smell of alcohol, the laughter, the uproarious laughter from all of them as they each got on top of me, the talk of saran wrap, more laughter, so much laughter: all of it came rushing back and has remained in my body, torturing me with its pain, its confusion, the rage that propelled me into writing almost every second I can, trying to use my rage for good, for clarity, for something that isn’t total defeat.

And at the same pain/rage moment, I remember saying to myself: “Welp, I’m so done for the day,” and then I called my Mom sobbing, trying to explain myself. We live together so I managed to explain that I was coming home as soon as possible. And the rest of my day was spent literally glued to the television, often screaming at it with so much white hot rage, especially when I, like so many others, were witness to Kavanaugh’s outright lies and contempt. Once again, real-time posts on social media helped so much but the writing has also helped and, perhaps most importantly, my embodied self-awareness has served as a guide for how to protect and take care of myself.

In a previous post on this site I referenced Dorothy Smith’s The Everyday World as Problematic as I discussed how we might think about our own gendered embodiments and space as we interrogate the normal, everyday patterns we find ourselves in; and in that interrogation, we can begin to challenge patterns that don’t serve us, patterns that reproduce inequality in our bodies and everyday lives. I gave readers an example of how I was able to do this: when my partner and our friend left the house that we all shared, this gave me the freedom to literally have a room of my own and clean less. I described how I shared this story with my theory class:

“What do you think went on for me when they left? I was there for a year, by myself.” I asked this last question with a devilish smirk and then gave them time to consider the full meaning of my story. A student answered, “You had less work to do.” I immediately followed that with, “[Yes!], and I felt light as a feather for that entire year on my own.” I didn’t have to pick up after anyone (this meant that I literally felt energized) and I could do whatever I wanted to do in each and every room in the house (I immediately set up my own office and breathed a huge sigh of gratitude every time I entered it).

Much like this earlier post, I’ve been forced to confront how I move through and feel into this gendered world and what that has meant since Thursday, September 27th. Granted, I’m still working out what’s going on but the rage reactions are palpable and, arguably, relevant and worth sharing with my feminist comrades.

And in this entire rage moment in so many of our lives, my embodied reactions to other related stories have consistently reminded me of what needs to be done. For example, I was listening to Stormy Daniels’s (2018) new book, Full Disclosure, the other day, when she told one of her stories, shocking me into pain and rage, once again:

The feeling I most remember is SHOCK at what was happening. I was nine, I was a child, and then I wasn’t. It was the start of two years of this man’s sexually assaulting me. He was raping Vanessa, so I put myself between them, continually offering myself up so that he would leave her alone.

Again, massive, hot tears started streaming down my instantly blotched face as I sucked in air, unable to really take it all in. This hot rage comes at me suddenly these days and it doesn’t always look the same.

I just started reading Rebecca Traister’s (2018) new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. In the Introduction, she revisits some feminist history, connecting today’s rage to U.S. feminist rage in 1972, writing:

And then, on the Instagram feed of a friend in San Francisco, I saw her, like something out of a 1972 fever dream: a woman riding BART, wearing enormous lizard slippers strapped above her sandals and socks, a soft, sparkly, green reptilian boob-bib across her front, and a sharp-toothed lizard’s mask over her head. She was carrying a sign.

“Goddess-zilla got woke. Watch out” (p. xviii).

Indeed. My goddess-zilla is totally, abruptly, relentlessly awake and she, along with so many of us, aren’t going to bed again anytime soon.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo is an assistant professor of sociology at California State University-Chico. She completed her Ph.D. (2009) at the University of California-Santa Barbara and her MSc (2001) in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her areas of interest include gender, sexuality, sociology of the body, and globalization. As a graduate student, she coedited Narrating the Storm: Sociological Stories of Hurricane Katrina (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007) and coauthored “The Dyadic Imaginary: Troubling the Perception of Love as Dyadic” (2008). Her work has appeared in Porn Studies, Journal of Bisexuality, Sociological Spectrum, and Journal of Family Issues.

---

References

Daniels, Stormy. 2018. Full Disclosure. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Hidalgo, Danielle Antoinette. 2016. “Embodying Theory: Problematizing the Mundane in Everyday Life.”
http://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/embodying-theory-problematizing-the-mundane-in-everyday-life

Smith, Dorothy E. 1987. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeastern
University Press.

Traister, Rebecca. 2018. Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger. New York: Simon
& Schuster.

]]><![CDATA[Solidarity Activism and the Embodiment of Protest]]>Sun, 30 Sep 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/solidarity-activism-and-the-embodiment-of-protest

by Chandra Russo, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Colgate University, New York

I recently stumbled upon Christina Jackson’s wonderful blog post here. Since my own work also examines the body in protest, I wanted to add my research to this stimulating conversation.

One of the many questions animating my ethnographic research with three movement communities is this:

How does the embodiment of activism operate for solidarity activists, those who are not directly targeted by the injustices they contest?

The groups I look at are:

1) School of the Americas Watch, which endeavors to close the military training facility at Ft. Benning, Georgia;

2) the Migrant Trail Walk, part of the US/Mexico border justice movement;

3) Witness Against Torture, a grassroots effort to close the Guantánamo Prison.

Members of Witness Against Torture process near the nation’s capital while fasting for days and preparing for civil disobedience. Photo credit: Justin Norman.

Embodied resistance has figured centrally throughout history. Southern blacks in the US Civil Rights movement exposed themselves to fire hoses and dogs. People confronting military rule from Tiananmen Square to the occupied territories of Palestine have put their bodies in front of tanks.

Because solidarity activists inhabit a fairly specific position in the movements they join, the embodiment of their protest serves particular ends. These are not always distinct from the embodied resistance we see throughout history. However, I find that high risk, high stakes activism offers solidarity activists unique tools for navigating the particulars of their social position. In this post, I discuss three such functions of embodied resistance: 1. Divesting from privilege; 2. Felt closeness to the state’s targets; 3. Gaining credibility with various audiences.

The activists in these groups seek to enact solidarity with the state’s targets. In their pursuit of this solidarity, they regularly participate in days of fasting. They walk in the desert for a week in 100+F heat. They engage in high stakes civil disobedience, which puts them at the mercy of arresting officers. They endure weeks and sometimes months in jails and prisons. Theirs is an embodied practice that, I argue, deserves attention.

Migrant Trail participants walk for a week in the desert in searing temperatures, often on blistered feet.
Photo credit: Eric O. Ledermann

What do I mean by solidarity activism?

But first, a quick primer on solidarity activism…
Social movements nearly always count among their ranks those who are not directly impacted by the injustice being contested: whites in the US Civil Rights movement, men in feminist movements, US citizens in the struggles of Central Americans, to name but a few. Solidarity activists -- a term that I first saw used by Juanita Sundberg (2007) -- have gone by many terms in the scholarship. We often call them “conscience constituents” (McCarthy and Zald 1977) and “allies” (Myers 2008). (My choice of solidarity activist is elaborated elsewhere.) These kinds of activists are often assumed to be more “fickle,” likely to dabble in different movements, and less committed over the long term. This is most certainly not the case with the lion’s share of the activists I study, many of who have been engaged in high-risk tactics for decades. Indeed, I find that these activists’ high-risk, embodied activism helps to cultivate long term commitment (Russo 2014).

There is of course much more to say about solidarity activists, what the research about them suggests, and even the limitations of such a designation. I’m going to give those topics short shrift, in order to jump to the crux of my contribution here. What does high-risk embodied activism offer solidarity activists? At least three things…

1. Divesting from privilege

Because solidarity activists are not directly violated by the injustice they contest, they are generally thought to enjoy a set of privileges and protections that movement beneficiaries do not. High-risk, embodied tactics give the folks I study a way to divest from privilege and the seductions of the dominant order.

As one example, in 2005, 25 activists with Witness Against Torture violated travel embargos to make their way to Cuba, walk the length of the island by foot, and demand access to the prison, while camping out and fasting for a week.

During this time, WAT participant Frida Berrigan reflected on the meaning of her hunger.

“As I have struggled to bend my cravings for food into cravings for justice, i am in dialogue with my body. Being dependent on the body is such an un-American predicament. Americans write letters to congress and the editor, we write checks, we hire lobbyists and pr firms, we employ people and utilize services. We do everything we can to keep from using our bodies to make a difference. For me the whole journey has been about exploring what it means to have and use a body…in some part- purging ourselves of privilege.”

In Frida’s view, the bureaucratic and market-driven nature of US politics has rendered the possibilities for political participation bankrupt. By using their bodies in lieu of their pocket books or access to social status, these activists introduce alternative avenues for political activity. They demonstrate that putting oneself (bodily and all) into the political scene is a valuable means of political engagement.

This embodied activism is both a practical and ethical engagement with dynamics of privilege. It is practical because these activists are not members of the political elite. They are not Washington insiders, and they do not have enough money to impact the system. It is ethical because such money and power are not the tools for which they strive. Instead, these groups engage in embodied tactics that both require and undercut the privileges they do have.

Embodied tactics also offer solidarity activists a…

2. Felt closeness to the state’s targets

The social position of solidarity activists is defined in part by not having directly experienced the oppression they contest. Embodied resistance generates a felt sense of connection to the direct targets of state violence. This is an embodied and emotional way of coming to know injustice.

The decision to travel to Cuba and to fast was, of course, not random. In part, these activists were seeking to enact a bodily tactic as an act of solidarity publicity with the fact of the Guantánamo prisoners’ first widely publicized hunger strike. This is also what Migrant Trail walk participants do when they travel for days in the desert to draw attention to border enforcement policies that have cost thousands of migrant crossers their lives.

Alex, an immigration attorney, came to the Migrant Trail with a wealth of legal knowledge and years of conversations with migrants who had themselves crossed the US-Mexico border. Yet Alex still understood that the Migrant Trail afforded him new levels of understanding.

“What I’ve learned was a lesson from experience, a lesson of getting sick and this isn’t as bad as it gets. I only got like very minor cases of heat stroke, dehydration… it’s a lesson that I could only learn by feeling it.”

Physically challenging and high-risk tactics have important impacts on activists, and can generate the kinds of felt, subjective experiences that lead to continuing engagement.

Finally, there are politically important ramifications of embodied, high-risk tactics in that they help these activists…

3. Gaining credibility with various audiences

Solidarity activists are sometimes viewed as less trust worthy representatives of a cause. Myers (2008) terms this particular challenge that these kinds of activists face “the credibility hurdle.” By putting themselves bodily into spaces and experiences of state violence that the dominant culture keeps hidden, the solidarity activists I study emerge with compelling stories that they can share broadly. They find that people listen, and are more likely to trust them.

Migrant Trail participant Darlene explained that in her very conservative town,

“I have come to believe that my ability to relate to conservative white people, mostly religious, is where I might be able to have the most impact in terms of changing hearts and arguing a pro- immigrant position.”

Darlene explained that because she had participated in the walk, “people are much more apt to hear my first-hand witness to the border situation than if I hadn't participated. People see that I have an investment in immigration and am not just spouting sound bites.”

Darlene’s ‘conservative’ Christian community valued the fact that Darlene would engage in the physical demands of a pilgrimage rather than partake in politically expedient and shallow speech acts.

Alexa of SOA Watch reported something similar. The SOA Watch campaign has seen thousands of protesters commit civil disobedience, some by physically climbing over (or digging under) fences that separate the military base at Ft. Benning from neighbors. Alexa also believed that her experiences with high-risk activism afforded her a unique platform for discussing the violence of the US security state. Alexa noted how the large-scale civil disobedience of SOA Watch participants dramatized the issue in compelling ways. Having been arrested twice at Ft. Benning and serving six months in prison for her second trespass, Alexa now carried the SOA story through her various social networks.

“I continue to work different jobs and meet new people, and talking about this kind of action has always been like, ‘wow, tell me about that. What was prison like?’ It’s a way to introduce the subject of the SOA and imperialism.”

Tactics that require bodily, personal, financial and sometimes legal sacrifice can earn these activists credibility that they might not otherwise enjoy. Sometimes this translates into having a broader impact with the public. Other times, it can help to build stronger alliances with those communities most directly impacted by US security policies.

In conclusion…

Through the embodiment of their protest, these activists reach out to the targets of state violence in solidarity, confront the state itself in dissent, and appeal to the public with a political alternative and ethical imperative. By embodying their political intentions, they come to see, feel and understand state violence in ways that they could not otherwise. They share these felt experiences broadly, making the state’s targets, which the dominant culture disavows, harder to ignore and hold at a moral distance.

The culmination of this research can be found in my forthcoming book Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the US Security State.

About the author:
Chandra Russo is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Colgate University, New York, where she teaches courses in social movements, activism and anti-racism. Before earning her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, she spent several years working on immigrant justice issues in New York State, Central Mexico and Colorado. Her research and writing on these matters has been published in numerous venues, including Mobilization, Race & Class, Interface, and the Denver Post.

Chandra Russo's forthcoming book, Solidarity in Practice: Moral Protest and the US Security State (Cambridge University Press, 2018), is available for pre-order through Amazon.com.

Book description: Cross-border solidarity has captured the interest and imagination of scholars, activists and a range of political actors in such contested areas as the US-Mexico border and Guantanamo Bay. Chandra Russo examines how justice-seeking solidarity drives activist communities contesting US torture, militarism and immigration policies. Through compelling and fresh ethnographic accounts, Russo follows these activists as they engage in unusual and high risk forms of activism (fasting, pilgrimage, civil disobedience). She explores their ideas of solidarity and witnessing, which are central to how the activists explain their activities. This book adds to our understanding of solidarity activism under new global arrangements, and illuminates the features of movement activity that deepen activists' commitment by helping their lives feel more humane, just and meaningful. Based on participant observation, interviews, surveys and hundreds of courtroom statements, Russo develops a new theorization of solidarity that will take a central place in social movement studies.

Works Cited
McCarthy, John D. and Mayer N. Zald, 1977. “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory. The American Journal of Sociology. 82 (6): 1212-1241.
Myers, Daniel J. 2008. “Ally Identity: The Politically Gay.” In Identity Work in Social Movements, edited by Jo Reger, Daniel J. Myers, and Rachel L. Einwohner, 167- 188. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Russo, Chandra. 2014. “Allies Forging Collective Identity: Embodiment and Emotions on the Migrant Trail.” Mobilization: An International Journal. 19(1): 67-82
Sundberg, Juanita. 2007. “Reconfiguring North–south Solidarity: Critical Reflections on Experiences of Transnational Resistance.” Antipode 39 (1): 144–66.

]]><![CDATA[Surviving State Terror: An Interview with Professor Barbara Sutton]]>Fri, 31 Aug 2018 07:30:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/surviving-state-terror-an-interview-with-professor-barbara-sutton

In this ASA Body and Embodiment Section blog post, Dr. Paige Sweet interviews Professor Barbara Sutton about her new book, Surviving State Terror: Women’s Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina (NYU Press, 2018).

Congratulations on this beautiful and important book. Throughout the book, you discuss what it means to “tell” and listen to a story, especially one that is about state violence and torture. But you never allow this “telling” to become disembodied, and you insist throughout the text that the act of testifying “enlists the body.” Can you comment on how you came to imagine testifying as a kind of embodied practice?

I have long been interested in the sociology of the body and embodiment. However, the notion of testifying as an embodied practice was actually highlighted by women survivors of state terror themselves. In at least two instances (Munú Actis in the book Ese Infierno and Nora Strejilevich in her testimony for Memoria Abierta’s Oral Archive), women who survived captivity in clandestine detention centers referred to the act of giving testimony as poner el cuerpo. This phrase does not translate smoothly to English, as it literally reads “to put the body,” yet its meaning has overlaps with the idea of putting the body on the line or giving the body to a cause. It can connote sacrifice, risk, embodied work, and coherence between words and actions. It is a phrase often used in activist circles in Argentina, and a concept that I analyzed in relation to political protest in my previous book, Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women’s Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2010).

In that sense, we can think of various ways in which testifying involves poner el cuerpo: in the form of embodied emotions, intense embodied efforts to recall events, expenditure of time and energy testifying, the possibility of re-living trauma, and the risk of returning to conditions of bodily harm (for example, in cases of intimidation and threat against witnesses), among others. The embodied dimensions of giving testimony are particularly evident in oral accounts, as bodily gestures and emotions convey meaning, and as the body is mobilized and sensory memories recalled in efforts to produce truthful accounts about what happened, as best recollected by the witnesses. Embodied narratives can also produce powerful effects on those who hear the testimonies, although these effects cannot be determined a priori; they partly depend on the social, historical, and institutional contexts of listening as well as on personal biographies.

Bearing witness to testimonies of atrocity can also be a difficult—but necessary—embodied experience, involving a range of emotions and demanding a particular type of careful and caring approach. As I watched video-recorded testimonies in the oral archive of the human rights organization Memoria Abierta, my embodied presence in the site also elicited caring reactions from others, namely, members of the organization whom I eventually befriended. They noticed I was spending hours in the archive taking notes and dealing with stories that they knew were hard to listen to. I would leave the archive with my back stiff, my muscles aching due to the tension involved in my research. I would sometimes cry as I listened to women’s testimonies of loss and pain; and other times I would laugh with women survivors who managed to deploy a sense of humor in the midst of stories of atrocity. I was described by a member of Memoria Abierta as one of their most “persistent” visitors to the archive. Indeed, I was there for extended periods, and it was important to do so, yet this persistent listening did take a bodily and emotional toll. Thus, for researchers considering research on traumatic histories, it can be important to be aware of this and perhaps plan on self-care strategies as part of the research process.

Finally, thinking of testifying as a kind of poner el cuerpo also raises questions about what kinds of bodies and whose bodies are granted authority to speak which truths. For instance, what does it take for a testimony of rape or torture to be believed? What demands are made of “the body” for such claims to be credible? What are the limitations of relying on the body as the ultimate basis for truth? Which bodies are accounted for or erased in collective memory and historical trauma accounts? What are the risks of making the body (too) visible in such narratives? These are all questions that interest me and that I had to grapple with as I conducted my project.

One of the things that struck me in reading your work was how women struggled to narrate physical pain or other experiences that are not “visible.” Could you speak to the importance of attending to these experiences on the borders of the visible, especially for sociologists?

As a sociologist, I am interested in developing a deep and accurate understanding of the social world. However, the effects of particular social dynamics are not always visible or readily available to comprehension. We struggle to find answers to complex questions, and when it comes to social suffering—at the intersection of personal experiences and power structures—the task can be particularly difficult. To me, delving beyond the “borders of the visible” is partly what it takes to better understand big questions about the social world, the human condition, oppression, survival, and resistance. Paying attention to experiences of the body that cannot be easily articulated or that leave no visible marks may offer cues about the insidious workings of power, extended temporalities of suffering, barriers to empathy and solidarity, and the need to more adequately address and listen to traumatic histories.

Again, I let the testimonies of women I heard be my guide, combined with the work of other scholars in the interdisciplinary fields of collective memory, human rights, body studies, and intersectional and transnational feminisms. As I listened to the testimonies of women survivors, the significance of the body emerged in multiple ways, from the obvious to the subtle. Attention to the body—including visible bodily marks and invisible traces of embodied experience—was important to help me get a better grasp of the relation between gender and state power, and of women’s experiences of oppression and resistance.

The binary of active/passive or vulnerable/invulnerable in relation to the body plays prominently in your work, and you problematize these dichotomies throughout. Can you speak to the importance of attending to these kinds of implicit binaries when it comes to theorizing the body?

Everything about the scenes in clandestine detention centers—for example, shackles, blindfolds, forced nudity, sexual violence, torture, food deprivation, isolation, forced immobility—speak of the extreme vulnerability of the body in places of confinement, and of the repressors’ attempts to create a passive “body with no voice” (to borrow from Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain). However, this enforced vulnerability did not necessarily align with passivity, and the body does not need to be invulnerable in order to cope with or resist oppression. As is evident in the narratives I worked with, multiple forms of embodied resistance may emerge from vulnerability, and setting up dichotomies such as vulnerable/invulnerable bodies, undermine our ability to recognize not only the possibilities of a diversity of bodies, but also may prompt some to strive for illusory bodily invulnerability as self-preservation, instead of addressing the social relations of inequality that create the conditions for harm and injury of certain bodies.

The testimonies I heard defy strict separations between active/passive and, going back to the question about the invisible, what at first glance might appear as passivity may actually be active resistance. For instance, one of the women whose testimonies I heard, Marta García de Candeloro, spoke about how she generated a certain realm of freedom based on the hood that she was forced to wear in captivity. This was meant to deprive her from sight, fostering disorientation and isolation. Yet she was able to construct an interior world behind the hood, a world to which the repressors did not have access. She could smile, cry, and be herself behind the hood. The hood—a paradigmatic symbol of oppression and enforced vulnerability—was radically retooled by this woman during her captivity in a torture center. Surviving State Terror narrates this and many other examples of embodied resistance, tactical performances of body and emotions, ways of “leaving the body” temporarily to survive atrocity, and other forms of agency that suggest that binaries such as active/passive or vulnerable/invulnerable are not necessarily useful to comprehend the nuances of embodied experience.

You center the body and gender in your theorization of state power throughout the book. What investment does the state have in producing tortured or disappeared bodies, and how can sociologists attend more carefully to the place of embodiment in the operations of state power?

My book engages state power in its extreme manifestation—not only the state’s ability to regulate bodies through laws and institutional policies, but through the brutal deployment of its punitive arm—military, police, and security forces enlisted to enforce political, social, cultural, and economic agendas through utterly repressive methods. The body plays a prominent role in this type of project. The bodies of the citizenry were not only expected to comply with norms of body appearance, sexual and gender relations, restrictions on movement and assembly, and so on, but dissident bodies were meant to be silenced, severely punished, and even eliminated. Enforced disappearance is not only a tool for targeting dissident bodies and promoting terror among the population, but a way of getting rid of the “body evidence” that state crimes did occur. Enforced disappearance wreaks havoc on the social fabric of a community and denies the disappeared person’s relatives, friends, and comrades a body to mourn. In the case of people who were assassinated while in captivity, but this fact was denied by authorities, the disappearance of bodies perpetuates uncertainty and can function to guarantee impunity.

In my work, I also pay attention to torture at the hands of the state. Needless to say, this is an extreme embodied experience. As I analyze women’s testimonies of torture, I discuss gender as an implicit script. I do this by examining how torture overlaps with social constructs associated with femininity, including the treatment of women as if they were just bodies, the construction of femininity as vulnerability, the imperative for women to be hyperaware of their bodies, and the association of women with monstrosity. I do not claim that these are inherently feminine attributes or experiences, but examine how they are deployed through torture in ways that might be helpful to understand the experiences of people of various genders. I ask questions about the investment of the state in these dynamics, pointing to the significance of gender inequalities and ideologies to state power.

As sociologists, we can trace the workings and effects of state power on “the body”—the social body, the body politic, and the concrete material bodies and embodied experiences of individuals. This means paying attention to the interplay between state power and social inequalities, and how these social forces are experienced and contested by different groups of people through their bodies. It also means that even in the age of “disciplinary power” theorized by Foucault, we still need to pay attention to repressive forms of state power that have continued to target the body—even through torture—as key sites of violent control and brutal punishment in contexts of confinement.

The women whose stories you analyze talk a great deal about their bodies, about their embodied experiences. Do you have any advice for scholars whose research participants or subject matter is less clearly embodied? How can we excavate stories about the body when the theme is less present or available?

Everything we do involve our bodies in one way or another, though, as sociologists of the body have discussed, the body might not be constantly at the forefront of our consciousness or discourse.This has also been the case for much of sociological theory and social sciences scholarship, in which the body is taken for granted. For those who are interested in including the body in sociological analysis, the challenge is how to theorize, conduct research, and write in ways that makes the body’s presence and significance evident. How to acknowledge not “the body,” but concrete and diverse bodies shaped and constituted through social discourses and material inequalities? This partly has to do with the questions we ask and the concerns that drive our research.

For instance, if conducting qualitative research, we might want to include questions that are operationalized in ways that encourage interviewees to talk about sensory experiences, embodied emotions, what bodies do or feel, etc. However, even in the case of data that does not have bodies and embodiment as a central focus, stories about the body may still be there, and could be excavated through close listening. In my research for Surviving State Terror, I heard women telling stories that were obviously about the body, such as narratives about torture. However, they also told other stories that were relevant to embodied experience and knowledge, but were more “buried” in the narratives, or told in passing as part of accounts that were apparently about something else. These instances might be missed, might not be noticed, unless one’s ears are attuned to them.

Even in relation to topics that appear to be farfetched in terms of their relevancy to the body, there is still the possibility of retrieving body-related matters. For example, seemingly abstract and large-scale phenomena, such as the economy, might not be obviously about the body, and yet depending on how we approach the study we may discover important connections between the body and macro-economic forces. This is something I explored in my previous book, Bodies in Crisis, as I traced the ways in which women’s bodies were affected by neoliberal economic policies, how women spoke about the economic crisis in embodied ways, and how they used their bodies to protest economic forces that intersected with other systems of power. In that research, I developed a technique based on the use of “concept cards,” which yielded rich body stories. I offer an account of this research approach in my article, “Playful Cards, Serious Talk,” published in Qualitative Research. There are many other research innovations that aim to better convey embodiment, embodied emotions, and social dynamics involving the body. These require interventions at the level of theory, data collection, interview transcription, analytic and interpretative strategies, writing, and/or other forms of dissemination of results. In the last few years, new articles have been published that describe such approaches and synthesize the literature on embodied research and methodology. I look forward to learning more about and applying some of these innovations.

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About the author: Barbara Sutton is an Associate Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University at Albany (SUNY). She is also affiliated with the departments of Sociology and of Latin American, Caribbean, and U.S. Latino Studies. Professor Sutton's scholarly interests include body politics, global gender issues, human rights, collective memory, and women's movements, particularly in Latin American contexts. Her book, Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence, and Women's Resistance in Neoliberal Argentina (Rutgers University Press, 2010) received the Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize by the National Women’s Studies Association. Her new book, Surviving State Terror: Women's Testimonies of Repression and Resistance in Argentina, was published by NYU Press in the Spring of 2018.

About the interviewer: Paige Sweet is a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard University Inequality in America Initiative. Her research focuses on the politics of health, expert knowledge, and inequalities around gender and sexuality, and social theory. Dr. Sweet's current research explores the medicalization of domestic violence and the effects of that shift on feminist politics and on domestic violence victims themselves.

]]><![CDATA[The Public Meeting: Embodied Dissent in Urban Spaces]]>Sat, 30 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/the-public-meeting-embodied-dissent-in-urban-spaces

by Christina Jackson, PhD
Assistant Professor of Sociology
Stockton University

In my work on San Francisco, I study public discourses and relationships between residents and institutional stakeholders. The redevelopment agency, real estate companies, corporations and the Navy all have a stake in the timely cleaning up of the environmentally toxic Hunters Point shipyard, redevelopment and the accompanying process of gentrification. Within public discourses around protest lie power struggles among neighborhood residents about how bodies negotiate dynamics in meetings over the future of their life in the neighborhood. I use public meetings to analyze the body as the central signifier of institutionalized social relations within a field of power (Adelman and Ruggi 2016:909[i], Foucault 1975[ii]).

Greenaction and other BVHP residents protesting at the steps of San Francisco’s City Hall in 2018.

Bodies performing in the way they are suppose to behave are considered useful to the city’s growth machine. As we layer this politically economically useful body intersectionally, we can see how low-income communities of color in negotiations of the future of their gentrifying neighborhoods are sites for illustrating how cultural tropes work to further isolate individuals. These tropes dictate treatment and behavior in the public arena as many community residents are doubly- othered or triply- othered for their race, class and gender presentation (Adelman and Ruggi 2016, hooks 1997[iii], Roberts 1997[iv]).

For over the past 20 years’ residents of Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco have been fighting a long uphill battle for their right to breath clean air and not to be pushed out of their space. In particular, their battle has been with the the Navy’s Base Realignment and Closure program and shipyard investors primarily around the thorough clean-up of an environmentally toxic Hunter’s Point shipyard. Labeled as a superfund[v] site, this shipyard brought what was thought to be a temporary African- American population to the city due to labor needed during WW2.Today, neighborhood residents are subject to the environmental racism of decades of delayed radiological clean-up and pollution from the shipyard as well as impending redevelopment.

The shipyard is attractive to investors and corporations who have aggressive plans of building condominiums and entertainment centers amidst the clean-up due to the fact that the shipyard is subject to a fast-tracked process[vi] which allows for both the clean-up and redevelopment to happen simultaneously. During my ethnographic study, I learned that as of 2010 and before, residents distrusted the plan and the process, especially since corruption and the unnecessary fastracking of the project has led to a less-thorough and false clean-up. As of fall of 2017, it has been revealed that despite proclaimed clean-up, over 97% of the Hunter’s Point shipyard’s soil was contaminated and remediation data falsified (Roberts 2018[vii]). Residents knew from the beginning that their bodies were being contaminated and displaced because they lacked the political will and social capital to be higher on the priority list of the growth machine (Jackson 2010[viii]).

We are used to protest outside of City hall or in the streets of the neighborhood, but I analyzed micro-forms of protest within meetings between residents and institutional representatives. "Bodies themselves cannot talk, but we invite our bodies to move, make noise and act in certain ways to demand or incite someone to speak up for them and put their concerns first" (Kroll-Smith and Floyd 1997: 7). Given that middle to upper class Blacks are invited to formal channels for discussion on quality of life issues and redevelopment, while the poor are not, the latter residents use their bodies in public meetings to demand that their perspective be valued, since they perceive no one to be sticking up for them. Residents would lengthen public comment, ask honest and revealing questions out of order about profit and motive off the agenda in order to protect their lives and be a part of the decision-making process. A joint community and institutional board that the residents trusted called the Restoration Advisory board was promptly shut down claiming that residents did not follow proper meeting protocol with their bodies and voices. The larger question was: was the Restoration Advisory Board shut down because residents were not being obedient and asking too many honest questions?

Why does this matter? Embodying desires to stay in the neighborhood, be part of the decision-making structure or painting a different kind of future represents a threat to political and economic agendas. Lower or working class bodies act on the front lines of their neighborhoods---the public meeting is one of their few places to make sense, heal and be invested in future redevelopment. Focusing on the body allows us to see a power struggle to create obedient bodies to meet project deadlines. Given the recent revealed case of eco-fraud at the Hunters Point shipyard, their literal bodies have been devalued and in combination with the desires they embody, residents perceive this a larger process of sanitizing the neighborhood.

This conversation has broader implications for how we define a protest or a riot within cities due to the kinds of bodies participating. In 2018, after both the Philadelphia Eagles won the Superbowl and Black Lives Matter protests swarmed across American cities, public discourse arose over what counts as a riot and what counts as a celebration[ix]. Eagles fans damaged much private and public property, injured law enforcement as well as conducted other grotesque acts in the city of Philadelphia due to a sports victory. Some minor property was damaged in occasional Black Lives Matter protests, but yet this has been heavily condemned by media as violent and unnecessary. The larger picture here is that the race and class of the bodies matter in terms of classifying what is “inappropriate” behavior in city public spaces. Bringing the body back to how we study urban spaces, dissent, protest and riot will allow us to think more deeply about the landscape of power these bodies exist in and how it defines what are appropriate, useful and celebratory acts. This study will be forthcoming in my co-edited volume entitled Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse by Lexington Inc in spring of 2019.

[i] Adelman, Mariam and Lennita Ruggi. 2016. “The Sociology of the Body.” Current Sociology Review 64 (6), 907-930.

[ii] Foucault, Michel. 1975. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Pantheon Books.

[iii] hooks, bell. 1997. “Selling hot pussy: representations of black female sexuality in the cultural marketplace.” In Conboy k, Medina N and Stanbury S eds, Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, pp 113-128.

[iv] The cultural attack on the embodiment of black womanhood historically illustrates how our cultural representations doubly-other them therefore identifying mainstream definitions of appropriate behavior for being a black person and a woman. Roberts. Dorothy. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

[v] As determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, a superfund site is a list of the nation’s most environmentally toxic places that pose a significant risk to human and societal health.

[vi] Described by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1993, fast tracking is a process of rapidly cleaning up identified parts of a toxic site for immediate reuse (https://www.epa.gov/fedfac/fast-track-cleanup-process-initiative-and-guidance).

[vii] Roberts, Chris. 2018. “Faked Clean-Up at Hunter’s Point Shipyard much worse then Navy estimates.” Curbed San Francisco. April 10, 2018. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/4/10/17219434/hunters-point-shipyard-navy-cleanup-san-francisco-faked.

[viii] Jackson, Christina. 2010. “Black Flight from San Francisco: How Race, Community and Politics Shape Urban Policy.” Master’s thesis. University of California, Santa Barbara.

[ix] Da Silva, Chantal. 2018. “Black Lives Matter: Philadelphia Super Bowl Riot Reaction ‘Glaring Example of White Privilege.” US Newsweek. February 5, 2018. (http://www.newsweek.com/philadelphia-chaos-reveals-racial-double-standard-over-riots-critics-say-799421)

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About the author: Christina R. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Stockton University. Her research and teaching areas include urban sociology, inequality, intersectionality, embodiment, redevelopment and gentrification. She is the co-author of forthcoming book, Black In America: What It Means To Be A Problem with Polity Inc and Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse with Lexington Inc. She has authored articles in books such as Black California Dreamin’: The Crises of California’s African American Communities, The Ghetto: Contemporary Global Issues and Controversies and journals such as Sociology Compass and the Journal of Urban Affairs. She is also a community arts and cultural facilitator based in Philadelphia.

]]><![CDATA[Synkinesis: Movement, Communication and Mood Disorder]]>Fri, 15 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/synkinesis-movement-communication-and-mood-disorder

by Faye Linda Wachs, PhD
Professor of Sociology
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

In 2009 I woke up with Bell’s Palsy. After googling the symptoms… What flashed across my screen in emergency red capital letters were the words: YOU ARE HAVING A STROKE. GO DIRECTLY TO AN EMERGENCY ROOM...I sat frozen for a moment, but I didn’t think I was having a stroke. I knew the signs, and I didn’t have any cognitive impact… I thought, or did I… I ran to the book shelf and grabbed Foucault and my advanced statistics book from graduate school. I could read (and basically understand) Foucault, I could read (and basically understand) multiple regression equations. I was reasonably convinced I was not having a stroke.

A quick visit to the ER confirmed that I was not having a stroke. It was Bell’s Palsy. It would go away. But it didn’t…. And it not going away, can be more complicated than residual paralysis.   Bell’s Palsy is damage to the seventh cranial nerve resulting in one side of the face being paralyzed (usually, there are rare bilateral cases). It is the most common cause of facial paralysis, though acoustic neuroma, trauma and Ramsay’s Hunt Syndrome are all fairly common causes. Acquired facial paralysis differs from congenital facial paralysis, in cause, impact and experience, but also shares some overlapping essentials and a quintessence of experience. Over the last few years, I have interviewed over 100 people with facial paralysis, some acquired, some congenital (congenital is considerably less frequent in occurrence). I also spoke with doctors, physical and occupational therapists and those connected with people with facial paralysis. Here, I want to focus explicitly on a specific experience, that of not only permanent facial difference, but also, what occurs when a rare movement disorder, synkinesis results.

Synkinesis occurs when as the facial nerves heal and regenerate, they grow to too many places. What this means in practice, is that when one makes facial expressions, the wrong thing happens, in addition to the right thing. As you read that, did you knit your brows in the standard expression of thought? When I knit my brows, my chin also tightens, my mouth pulls… When I laugh spontaneously, my neck tightens and the corner of my mouth pull down as if I were stressed/screaming/miserable. The face may appear paralyzed, but it’s the opposite problem, too much is trying to move. Of my sample, over 80% had synkinesis.

When I set out to interview people impacted by facial paralysis, with a focus on the social and professional aspects, much of what I found was expected. The discrimination faced by those who “look different,” though disheartening, was hardly unexpected. And certainly, as a sociologist, that one’s access to services, ability to cope, and treatment options, were shaped by our intersecting axes of privilege and oppression, though useful and valuable for advocacy, is, not surprising.   Being urban, more educated, wealthier, whiter, more professional, and from a family background that lacked violence, was tied to an overall ability to cope, and specifically access to information, services and support. Being rural, not white, in a job in which one had less personal control, from a home life in which one may have felt unsafe, meant more difficulty in advocacy, accessing necessary care, accurate information and maintaining one’s career trajectory. And all of this is important, and will be detailed in my forthcoming book (someday in the not too distant future). For those with acquired facial paralysis, the shift from “normal” to “other” resonated deeply as people struggled to adjust to what being an “other” means. For those with congenital facial paralysis, early assessments, family over or under-involvement, painful treatments, and a lack of clear information, shaped experiences.

But one thing that deeply resonated with me, as a sociologist of the body and a person with synkinesis, was the impact on identity and self, not because of the change in appearance, but because of the change in the experience of self. The experience of synkinesis is an experience of a disrupted self. And people with synkinesis described a certain level of angst that could not simply be explained by “how they looked” or by the new experience of the “other” they were now enjoying. It was beyond that. Ultimately, my own experience with synkinesis spurred me to ask a certain layer of questions, it might never have occurred to me to ask otherwise, because I was also living it. And I would explain the experience in this way. Self is an embodied experience. Pleasure, pain, love, hate, regret, anticipation, desire, these are all experienced in an embodied way, and facial expression plays a unique and integral role in this process for those who are born with that ability. And while place and time shape and normalize some forms of expression, once learned, those expressions are intimately tied to the experience and expression of self. Facial expression is tied to how we feel, and how we communicate, not only with others, but also with ourselves.

How is the experience of synkinesis disruptive?

Explicitly, miswiring of facial expressions means that every facial expression carries within it several problematic components. The spontaneous experience of self becomes an alienating experience. This is subtle and hard to understand.

When one engages in spontaneous communication, we mirror and mimic, the nonverbal occupying more of our interaction, than the verbal. Without conscious thought we slide into expressions of joy as our friend shares excitement over a triumph; or, feel our heart tug in empathy as our face falls with some sad news. We do this unconsciously and constantly as we communicate. For people with synkinesis, the normal unthought expressions are often “wrong.” This is jarring, and unsettling. The process of communication, of sharing emotional experience, the shared empathy, excitement, joy, and even pain, that make social interaction so gratifying, is something disrupted. I try to smile happily at the photos of your new niece, grandchild, puppy, car, vacation condo- whatever… To share your joy, to communicate my good will toward your good fortune, but my neck pulls. A trigger emotion for anxiety, anger, stress. My brain is tricked. For a moment a flash of the wrong feeling. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I just be happy for you? Wait, I am just happy for you… It was just the synkinesis… OK, wait, now where were we?

That moment of synkinesis, it’s a reminder. It’s a reminder of pain, of illness, of otherness… Of the biggest challenge in one’s life. One’s deepest source of anxiety. It’s involuntary….   People with synkinesis start to shut down. We have to. It’s overwhelming to have constant reminders and triggers for one of the biggest traumas in one’s life. It’s frustrating to constantly be triggered with emotions we don’t feel from an affect disrupted. It also undercuts those moments that should be joyful. And we shut down, and we try to feel, and express less, and that’s not healthy.

One respondent expressed this frustration so poignantly,

There’s an inability to share how you feel. To share social emotions. To have a social emotional experience. It’s like my expression is being forced into sad, and I don’t want to feel sad… I shouldn’t feel sad. But without my botox it all pulls down like I’m sad, so I start to feel sad. And I see in pictures, I look sad… So I just have to try to shut down a little…. I probably should talk to someone about this….

Another noted,

Expression becomes a reminder. Where I think a lot of people have issues, is the basic day to day life reminders. The big stuff, you can distract yourself, but when you’re doing basic things… Smiling at somebody, talking to somebody, laughing spontaneously, kissing your wife. I kiss my wife like 100 times a day, so that’s 100 reminders… All the time. I want to just feel loving, not feel the pull the wrong way… You drink- there goes your eye…. You laugh, there goes your neck and your eye… It’s the constant reminders that wear you down. After a while, you just try to find reasons and ways to not have that happen. You feel less, you express less…

The loss of spontaneous nonverbal communication is startling for those with acquired facial paralysis. For those with synkinesis, the additional layer of miscommunication or unintended communication exists. One person recounted not understanding why suddenly, no one smiled back, when she gave her customary smile on her morning jog. A friend had to tell her, that the friendly smile she thought she was giving, appeared as a painful grimace. Compensating with a friendly wave, was wonderful solution, but adjusting to expressions that miscommunicate takes some time. It’s also important to note, that for those with synkinesis, often the tightening of facial muscles that seems spectacularly distorting from an internal perspective, may be almost invisible to others. Being assured no one notices, is only marginally comforting, as that does little to address what the face is communicating to the brain. The tightening of synkinesis is so often what communicates stress and anxiety to the mind. So while we may be having a light fun conversation, half my face is triggering anxiety to my brain. This is disconcerting, and I am constantly working to manage this. To not communicate anxiety to you, to convince myself, you are not communicating something negative to me. That I am not as stressed and anxious as half my face is trying to convince my brain I am. Communication is now exhausting and intense as a result. Fatigue in communication was one of the most often voiced complaints. Almost everyone reported needing to do less of it. It took too much out of one.

As a result, people’s sense of self was disrupted. The experience of self, went from an unthought experience, to one of constant anxiety, produced by a physical mimic response, rather than an external fear, message or rejection (though in some cases that was present too). I can say it no more simply than the spontaneous moment of joy, that moment when you are laughing so hard tears are rolling down your face, and you wish it could last forever…. For me, in that moment, my face significantly distorted and it felt like my emotional core was slapped with a “wrong emotion.” And I have to fight to get back to joy, while I am also now trying to cover my face because somehow putting my hand over what feels so wrong will make it ok, but it doesn’t and now you are saying I look fine, but it wasn’t about how I looked. It was a hard jolt to the system. As real as a slap or a shake. It was an experience of self that was shaken. And now I don’t want to laugh like that. I just want it to stop.   And it was so amazing to hear that from so many other people… And so deeply painful….

And finally, telling us we look fine, is lovely, and your heart is in the right place. But you missed the point. This giant internal experience of self disrupted. It’s real. And you just yadayadayada’d the most difficult, painful, soul crushing thing in someone’s life… It’s not that I worry so much about how you think I look, not that the awful photos that reveal that it looks even worse than we often imagine, but the constant interruptions, disruptions and blows to the self.

And even as someone who has put tremendous thought and research in this process, it can catch one off guard. In preparing for my upcoming surgery at the end of this month for my facial paralysis, I had to stop my botox. While stuck on this blog post I decided to take a break and bike up the hill. As I biked, I ruminated on my writer’s block, on a growing feeling of unease that I couldn’t identify that had been creeping over me for the last couple of weeks. Was I depressed? I’d never really been depressed, but I seemed to feel inexplicably sad, anxious and unsettled. No that wasn’t quite it, I felt like I should feel sad… Like I should feel stressed… But I don’t really… I feel like a wrong message is somehow telling me to feel stress to feel sad… A deep pull on the corner of my mouth…. Long pause..

Me to myself: So what’s one of your key finding about people with facial paralysis who also have synkinesis?

Myself back to me: That the misfiring of facial muscles leads to confusion and anxiety because facial muscles signal emotional state, so one’s fundamental sense of self and well being is disrupted in a profound way, but the cause is actually physiological and therefore botox and surgeries like selective neurolysis are actually a necessary, not cosmetic medical treatment….

Me to myself: And what wore off about one to two weeks ago… My botox…

Myself to me: Yes, my research findings are validated!!!! Damn I miss my botox…. (Insert happy research dance here).

That awesome moment when your own disrupted anxious state actually confirms key research findings!!!

Bodies, selves, experience are complicated!! But in the breaking of this process, lies some access to understandings that would elude the whole person. The subtleties of the relationship between expression, self, experience, identity and status would never have occurred to me if I didn’t have to live them. The self is social and physiological, and the self can be disrupted, damaged or disturbed. In addition, this disruption also highlights how much of the experience of otherness is an embodied unthought experience of subtle communications, that require deeper and more nuanced study. The larger project embraces the embodied state and experience of otherness, coping, and what it means to have a disability that impacts communication.

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Author Bio: Faye Linda Wachs is a professor of Sociology in the Department of Psychology & Sociology at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona). Dr. Wachs received her Phd in Sociology from the University of Southern California, along with a graduate certificate in gender studies. Dr. Wachs’ published work focuses on gender equity, health, fitness, media, sport, sexuality and consumerism. Her book, Body Panic: Gender, Health and the Selling of Fitness, co-authored with Shari Dworkin was the recipient of the North American Society for Sport Sociology (NASSS) Distinguished Book Award in 2010. She is the 2017 George P. Hart Award winner for outstanding faculty leadership, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona 2012 Provost Award Winner for Distinguished Service as well as the 2009-10 Cal Poly Pomona College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences Outstanding Advisor. Dr. Wachs is the former president of an international academic organization, the North American Society for Sport Sociology, and also served as secretary for the same organization. Dr. Wachs’ current research focuses on the impact of facial paralysis, innovative research methods, social media and identity and STEM Education. In her spare time, Dr. Wachs enjoys hiking, running, biking, sailing, knitting/crocheting/sewing and spending time with her family and dogs.

]]><![CDATA[Remembering Leonard Nimoy, Feminist Photographer]]>Sat, 31 Mar 2018 07:00:00 GMThttp://sectionbodyembodiment.weebly.com/blog/remembering-leonard-nimoy-feminist-photographerFebruary 27th was the third anniversary of Leonard Nimoy’s death. For most people, his name will conjure up images of “the Vulcan salute”—what a 1968 New York Times article described as a “double-fingered version of Churchill’s victory sign.” His parents were Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and Nimoy drew from his Orthodox upbringing when creating the iconic gesture. In his autobiography, I Am Spock, he explains: “This gesture symbolizes the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter in the word Shaddai, ‘Lord.’”

Another thing you might find interesting to learn about Nimoy is that he was a fervent photographer and feminist. In a 2015 post honoring his feminist artwork, I talk about how his work draws attention to the feminine embodiment of God (Shekhina) and the ways he challenged narrow definitions of beauty, especially for women (The Full Body Project). You can read my post, below. And to see more of Nimoy’s photography, check out his artist page on the Massachusetts’s based R. Michelson Galleries website, here.

Remembering Leonard Nimoy, Feminist Photographer*
Kristen Barber on March 5, 2015

Leonard Nimoy attended University of California, Los Angeles in 1971 to study photography. He had already filmed the original Star Trek television series, which didn’t develop a cult following until reruns of the show aired in the 1970s. His love of photography, however, predates his portrayal of the half-Vulcan, Spock.

While this role is what most people are sure to remember Nimoy by, I will always think of him as a skilled photographer who engaged cultural rhetoric on the gendered and sexual body. Perhaps his most controversial work is titled Shekhina, which is his attempt to capture divinity in a “feminine” form. Shekhina, he explains here, is a Jewish “deity”—one so luminous that men in synagogue have to look down, away, or otherwise shield their faces. As a child, he wondered, “Why hide the face? Why can’t we look?”

Spending seven years searching for Shekhina through his photography, Nimoy produced images he describes here as a “crossover between sensuality and religion.” Consequently, he was asked to not show his photographs at a Seattle synagogue where he had been scheduled to talk about his work. The controversy around this censorship arose because of a religious discomfort with sexual portrayals of women—as sexually desirable and perhaps as sexually desiring—and the association of women with power. Nimoy saw his work as a “very strong feminist statement” partly because “to some degree, in the orthodox community, that makes people uncomfortable—the idea that god is a woman.”

Shekhina. Leonard Nimoy/R. Michelson Galleries

Nimoy’s Shekhina series at times conflates femininity with desirability, but it also challenges us to think of women as corporeally and inherently powerful. He captures the simultaneous idolization of femininity and invisibility of the female body in religion, specifically in Judaism. And the looking away from Shekhina speaks to her ideological incandescence as well as to the way religion is structured around gender dichotomies, whereby women are cast within an androcentric institution as heterosexually alluring and men as driven by primitive roots—or by what Martha McCaughey refers to in her book, The Caveman Mystique, as Darwinian ideas about sex.

At the same time Nimoy challenges the invisibility of a powerful, deific femininity, he also privileges hegemonic corporeal norms, situating in his frames thin, white women with long hair who often peer down. [When they look directly at the viewer, the images take to task representations of women as meek]. Nimoy recognized this, noting that it was not until he began work on The Full Body Project that he realized very specific bodies and definitions of beauty dominated his work. A large-bodied model contacted him to see if he was interested in photographing her precisely because she represented a different sort of body than he was used to shooting.

Joan Jacob Brumberg’s book on The Body Project looks historically to demonstrate the ways social norms have turned women’s bodies into all consuming projects. At any given time, women’s bodies are defined as malleable and docile, evoking Michel Foucault’s notion of the panopticon, by which women internalize narrow, sexist bodily expectations. To take on work that captures an alternative image of beauty, Nimoy said he had to ask himself, “Will you do something that scares you?” In other words, could he do justice to a woman who challenged him to rethink how he was portraying beautiful bodies and women’s sexuality?

Nimoy’s relationship with the model evolved into a larger venture as he found that when he showed his photography, it was pictures of this full-bodied woman that “got the attention. So I thought, there’s something going on there in our culture about this kind of body.” Nimoy appeared to know he was engaging larger conversations about the misogyny of fat-shaming and problematic definitions of what counts as a beautiful and thus culturally valued woman. He found a San Francisco burlesque group called The Fat-Bottom Revue that was happy to pose for him; the women were comfortable in their own skin and used the art of dance and theater to do body-positive activism. Along with these women, Nimoy highlighted bodies as cultural symbols that are constrained by gendered structures but also vehicles of agency through which we experience the world around us and develop intellectual, emotional, and physical relationships with others. [For more on The Full Body Project, see here and here].

The Full Body Project. Leonard Nimoy/R. Michelson Galleries

Leonard Nimoy. Seth Kaye Photography.

As a gender scholar who studies issues of masculinity, I can’t help but wonder where the masculine body is in Nimoy’s work. Why not capture sensual photos of large bodied men? Or of female masculinity? Focusing on femininity and female bodies relegates “beauty” to feminine identified bodies, but it also keeps women at the center of a discussion of bodies and structures of power. [In my own research, I explore men’s relationship to beauty and the beauty industry. See here]. What Nimoy does so well in his photography is acquaint us with images of bodies that beget conversations about gender, sexuality, and social hierarchies. As Nimoy noted, his photos put us in touch “with something beyond what you see in the image;” and he saw his work as not about any particular model or group of models, but rather about “feminine power.”

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Kristen Barber is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She teaches courses on gender, inequality, and qualitative methods and is on the Gender & Society Editorial Board. Her book, Styling Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Inequality in the Men’s Grooming Industry, is published by Rutgers University Press.

* Originally published in The Society Pages, March 5, 2015.

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