Three Unruly Bodies Beautifully Examined

[jesse_the_k]

Roxane Gay curated work from some excellent writers on their “unruly bodies.” Hosted on Medium¹, every essay begins in a place that’s familiar and spirals out into extremes of passion, emotion, and experience. Every essay explores the relationship between body and society, body and love, body and peace. Every essay is both text and audio. All the essays are insightful and well-written. If I must limit you to three², I’ll recommend:

• The Body That Can’t Run Marathons by Kelly Davio On chronic pain, American healthcare, and the fantasy of discipline
  https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies/the-body-that-cant-run-marathons–295d89f2a9a0

These are folks who willingly undertake two dozen miles of misery, knowing full well that the activity itself was named for the city where some poor bastard dropped dead after doing the same. And I envy them. [… snip …] What I really covet, though, is the almost spiritual experience runners seem to get out of bodily discipline. As far as I can tell, looking in from the outside, it has something to do with the ritual — the almost liturgical activity of bending sinew to will, of forcing the meat self to serve the elevated mind — that makes runners feel apostolic, like secular remakes of Christian ascetics wandering the deserts, arriving at a higher, more complete place than the rest of us through their self-denial.

• The Body That Says ‘I Am Here’ by Carmen Maria Machado National Book Award Finalist Carmen Machado defines all the ways in which her body is unruly
  https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies/the-body-that-says-i-am-here-f21c9642d49c

Once, many years ago, I got out of bed to watch the ferocious glory of a late-night Iowa thunderstorm. I groped around for my glasses, but they were not there, and so I ventured into the darkness without them. As I walked toward the living room, I slammed my toe into the leg of a table and limped the rest of the way. I stood in the open door and watched the lightning rip open the sky, so bright the streetlamps turned off. The rain came down in torrents; the thunder made the old windows rattle in their panes and my rib cage in my chest. Even without my glasses and with my throbbing foot, my body was there, experiencing the storm and experiencing the night, and we both felt satisfied. I do not hate my body, because such a thing would be pointless, shortsighted. You cannot hate an animal for what she is, especially one who bears your ungrateful mind through this terrible world. And anyway, how do you hate something who marks her territory so dramatically, with such violence and panache? Who reminds you, with each step, I am here, I am here, I am here?

• The Body That’s Too Asian and Too Sick for America by Matthew Salesses Author Matthew Salesses on his Korean wife’s battle with cancer during a fraught time for healthcare and immigration
  https://medium.com/s/unrulybodies/the-body-thats-too-asian-and-too-sick-for-america–3b43cc05091c

Korean tradition calls for the mother to stay warm and inside for the first three months after delivery, lest the wind gets into her bones, but we had treated this as a superstition. My wife had broken the rules. The one extra complication in her second pregnancy — the one that didn’t even follow pregnancy rules — was that she felt cold all the time, not hot. Later, we knew that her coldness should have alarmed us. In March, four months after our son was born, my wife couldn’t stop losing weight, was still vomiting, and could no longer even drink. It turned out she had stage 4 stomach cancer.

I’m not linking to the final, heartbreaking, essay in Unruly Bodies: Roxane Gay on her decision to have weight-loss surgery. Marianne Kirby provides a kind, challenging response, which begins:

I didn’t really have any interest in writing about Roxane Gay’s personal decision to have weight loss surgery. Body autonomy means that she is the arbiter of decisions about her body, and I respect that the way I want people to respect my decisions about my body. But then a friend and fellow fat person messaged me on Facebook to ask how I felt about it all. This kind of thing sometimes happens when you have spent years talking about fat politics, about the radical philosophy of fat acceptance. And as much as I didn’t want to write about it, after that conversation and a few others, there was no way I couldn’t sit down and put something out into the world because my friend asked me an incredibly sad question. “If Roxane Gay can’t love her body,” she typed in that little window, “what hope do I have?”

https://medium.com/@therotund_81110/when-your-fat-role-roll-models-hate-being-fat–7748e3d31391

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1. an over-designed platform that is frustratingly inaccessible, and paywalls more than 3 articles/month ↩︎

One way around the paywall: copy the link, launch your browser, turn on “private mode,” then paste the link into the address bar. ↩︎

Comments

[davidgillon]

That first article, particularly the stuff on 'pain acceptance', is terrifying.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah.

It's the reality right now in the U.S.

The only pain meds I have are paracetamol and topical lidocaine.

I think Davio totally nails the intersection of Puritan suffering values, scorn for disabled people, and "tough love" that keeps so many of us in constant pain.

[davidgillon]

*Headdesk* *Headdesk* *Headdesk*

[sovay]

I think Davio totally nails the intersection of Puritan suffering values, scorn for disabled people, and "tough love" that keeps so many of us in constant pain.

"The body has its own rules, and its logic doesn't hinge on America's moral panic over pain."

I ran cross-country in high school. I hated how it felt. I never experienced a runner's high, or a sense of transcendence or exaltation; I was the slowest person on my team (I did sometimes come in ahead of runners on other teams) and I didn't look like the girls who did track and I think it kept confusing the coach that I ran at all. But I liked having the ability to run five miles without stopping. It felt useful. I liked knowing it was there if I needed it.

I still miss it. But I miss more a lot of other things my body was trained to, and I care more about getting those back, and they are less likely to wipe me out for a week right now.

[sovay]

Roxane Gay curated work from some excellent writers on their “unruly bodies.”

Thank you for these. I had read only the last, Gay's own.

[jesse_the_k]

I’m very glad to point at the other good stuff.

[magnetic_pole]

These are folks who willingly undertake two dozen miles of misery, knowing full well that the activity itself was named for the city where some poor bastard dropped dead after doing the same.

This is what I've always said, too! *sigh* I've never understood long-distance runners. (Though I respect them!)

Thanks for linking to these. Looking forward to reading later this week. M.

[shehasathree]

thanks for sharing. <3

[sasha_feather]

Thanks for these! Marking to listen to them later.