Know Your Body

I have been thinking. The meme that has circulated from Feministe to Blue to Goldfish to Lymphopo to Mark about women liking their bodies has caught up with a conversation from Monday night. As is usual for this kind of thinking, I was dining with a crip friend; we were talking about desire, sex, bodies, the sexualizing gaze, disgust, and disability. Yummy. (I wonder what the other diners nearby made of our topics.)

My friend observed that it is only in contact that we know our bodies. Simple, right? But not so fast. For starters, theoretically speaking, we all too frequently are more engaged in the struggle of knowing our bodies only in order to know ourselves. Few people actually want to know their bodies qua bodies. Ironically, though, I live among many of them: dancers and disabled people.

In my West Coast dance life, I practice a form of dance known as contact improvisation. Contact is many things and has many definitions; I like this one: http://greatdance.com/danceblog/archives/dance_bloggers/000494.php. I am most interested in it here as the form of dance that has most readily made it permissible, possible, and exciting for disabled people to dance. Contact, as its name suggests, requires contact between dancers; it also asks for weight sharing as an integral part of its movement philosophy. And it asks the dancers to look to all the nooks, cracks, and crannies of their bodies as part of this contact. Touch, weight, and movement happen everywhere on the body (that the dancer permits).

Mostly, this dance form is fun --though after a 6 hour workshop I often come home wanting never to be touched again -- but it has a very serious meaning for me. Touch, any kind of touch and particularly unexpected touch, can be painful and it also tends to set off my involuntary movement. And so it is that through a combination of jerking, twisting, bending, and painful sensation, I have come to know the contours of my body.

Let me explain more. Contact has given me a weird cartography of my body. If I touch my body myself, I perceive the qualities of my skin: rough here, smooth here, bony, a curve etc. But that experience is internal to me. It's sort of like trying to measure the depth of your numbness with your own hand. You can see your hand is touching your foot, you know your fingers are perceiving your foot, but it's hard to tell what your foot itself is registering because of all this other input. But when someone touches me, I get to own that contact. It doesn't tell me much about me, bony? smooth? I wouldn't know. BUT their contact tells me where an edge is. I get to know the outermost. When this edge triggers a physical reaction, I feel as if I have absorbed this edge. Known this edge. And depending on the quality of the spazz, I might either have pushed back or sucked the toucher in. Sometimes, the body part being touched responds. Sometimes, there is a kind of counter response: touch my left shoulder, my right leg kicks (yeah, I know).

Now, I know. If you touch here, then this. If you touch there, then that. My edges, my surfaces are a set of reactions.

Pain, however, is a different issue. So, a definition is probably necessary. By pain, I don't mean the sort of pain that makes you cry out or simply cry with its intensity and longevity (though I have that, too). I simply mean the kind of pain you get from banging your hand on the door as you go through. Transient pain. Pain that passes through you with a ripple, catching your attention as it goes on its way -- the most important parts being "go" and "away."

Oh. NO. I had hoped to finish this before rehearsal. BUT I want to post it ... anyway.