body-losophy

We didn’t want to write. To write again? To reduce all cognition to a false perception of a compartmentalized mind? No. To be, to feel, to experiment, and experience within us the physicalities and emotions that we have for so long neglected. We wanted to think differently; take the call to laugh, the pulling of sense-uality, the encouragement to live our bodies. To cut through the history of ‘Philosophy,’ to acknowledge how it has shaped us into subduing to a patriarchal reason, of morals, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the insignificant; the philosophy of binaries. Yet to build beyond the claims that have shaped how we view and how we are invisibilized in our societies; to practice new philosophies (Lloyd, 1984, p.16). To re-read, de-construct, re-build. To let wither, die, decompose, turn into something else, be molded by our hands in the dirt. To stare at the formative aspects of the fearfulness of the body and to demystify an obsessive psychophilia .
Yes, we are Nature. Yet we nurture within it the experiences we embody. We do not see our bodies as reductions. And isn’t our reason just a chain of physical and chemical reactions? How could it be beyond our lived experiences? How can we pretend that our skins and our organs do not think? Don’t they tangle neurologically in endless nervous connections?

Being horizontally proposes a different spatiality to our daily verticality, it gives rest against the constant effort of opposing gravity, it proposes a different multiplicity of systems, it dissolves conceptions of forward, behind and any other bodily hierarchies .

We laid on the floor to refuse hierarchies of mind over body . Isn’t our head on the same level now? But does that even matter? We wanted to think with our bodies. These queer bodies, bodies whose sexuality has been suppressed, bodies where gender has been problematized and bodies which have been mistreated by dysmorphic and alimentary disorders . To write with our bodies and on them. To become aware and present on how we live in them, how we have suppressed it, how we pretend to cut it apart in discrete parts ‘here is my head, where my brain floats, here is where I think, where I reason, and where I transcend, and only there.’ Yet, this required training. We had to learn again, exploring different forms of knowing, tearing our body parts to construct a new corporality. We had to learn to say ‘and’ instead of either/or. Eventually we came to understand how this could prepare us to mobilize our bodies for political action, how it could work as a way to warm up and tune in into what we were feeling and into feeling with; connecting with others in a public intimacy. We also realized how it could become an emancipatory tool that allowed us to rediscover our gender(s) or genderlesness and therefore rediscover our own physicalities and use of space.

But how can we unlearn and dissociate from all that which has kept us - since a very young age - disconnected and inattentive of our bodies? (Young, 2005, p.44). How can we disconnect in order to connect; to turn the significations and imaginaries created through readings into actions that can allow one to put theory into practice? That is what we have set out to explore.

We did not want to confine ourselves, yet again, to a theoretical level that kept distancing us from our bodies in the redaction of another standard academic essay. Nevertheless, we knew that resisting the structures of power that we co-manufacture within systems and ideologies would not be easy. Oh, the challenges that come from daring to make the connections, to be intimate and to present oneself as vulnerable! We understood that being able to delve into politics of embodiment would require training, a repetitive practice. We wanted to explore how such disruptive practice would look like; what it could bring to us and to others. In a search for solidarity and sorority, in a search that meant that we had to feel ourselves in order to feel with others we went with a storm of ideas, without letting anything settle: we started from embodied experience.

Our training started a late evening with Mary Carmen Niella, a Paraguayan woman, contemporary teacher, dancer, choreographer, yoga instructor and Body Mind Centering and Somatic Movement Educator. We delved into an exploration of how techniques from dance improvisation and the previously mentioned disciplines could serve as tools for experiencing and experimenting with flows of embodiment. Three sessions took us along different tools of embodiment and improvisation, opening us up to new ways of knowing. From this, we later delved into the book Hacer magia: asuntos de danza (Capriotti, 2016). This served as the basis of a journey in which we translated, uttered and listened to Capriotti´s text to re-signify it. Accompanied by the inwardness of Mary Carmen, we created a two hour process of embodiment and inquiry (See Appendix 1-4). Since we wished to have this as a collective experience - by participating in it as facilitators (guiding others) and entrants (being guided).
In our trainings she initially guided us to a meditative state, where she called upon us to feel the falling of gravity. The pulling and the speed at which our organs, bones and muscles were constantly falling towards the center of the earth. Through horizontality, we were disrupting the daily spatiality of our bodies consisting of a vertical existence that is in constant opposition to gravity .
How can we translate the qualities that are found by laying on the floor to vertical life? How can we translate this constant giving in to our weights and our becomings, always dissolving representations and transferring to the senses?

It took us back to the concept of performative texts - proposed by authors such as Irigaray, Cixous or Haraway - which consist of a writing that attempts to disrupt common logics and values. Here, as we wrote and designed with our bodies we were disrupting horizontality and hierarchies. We were disrupting the direction and role of our limbs. We were gliding, crawling, contorting our bodies, liberating them from societal demands and imposed representations. We became aware of the different positions/positionalities from which one can perceive and be perceived. From which positions can our “otherness” be conceived and how can we place our bodies beyond the spatiality of phallocentric structures?

"Imagine different bodies from the one you have brought today"

It was not an instantly comfortable and empowering experience. We discovered that both us, as well as the other of the two queer participants that later on joined our collective experimentation, had a sort of muscular memory, an impulse to directly discard our own bodies as valid or good. An impulse to assume our position as the other; the lack, the flawed. At the utterance of this phrase we would go on to imagine what it would be like to have a ‘better body,’ more manageable, less uncomfortable. From this point on, uneasy and confronting sensations tingled inside us . How could we disrupt heteronormative notions if these had also been internalised by our bodies? Is it possible to exist as “feminine” outside the paragons of phallocentrism ? Of creating a radical alterity? (Irigaray, 1985, pp.80-82).

The skin does not start or end anywhere, it IS always. Think of the continuity of the skin: it does not start or end anywhere. There is always skin. To move continually, the movements do not start or end anywhere. The skin: both public and private at once. An organ that cannot be submitted to this politicized binary. Moving our attention to our skin, to its intimacy and its availability, its un-linearity. Experiencing the sensations that it produces by perceiving and being perceived by even the slightest touch, wind or movement in the space where it is placed. A way to reappropriate the power of definition. Of writing outside the specularising economy. That which is tactile is a way the body has to be in touch with the place where it is. A way to know, recognise, make itself present and relate to itself. Notions of identity, of ´me´ against ´another´ were shaken up. You are in the present by the recognition of the tactile, your tactile. Touch becomes the motor of your movement, behaviours and thoughts, even if it's the touch of the air around us, the moving of particles across it and the crashing of sound waves across the space. Moving from those sensations, the exploration flowed towards leaving behind the individuality of self-touch; turning the act of touching the skin of a partner into a form of self-touching . You touch yourself through the tactility of someone else's surface. Moving towards a different understanding of the tactile.

“Let a tactile-ness develop”

A publicness of touch blossomed and a privateness of touching diluted. Could experiencing tactileness collectively be perceived as something more intimate than the touching of one's self?

Person 1: At first, I was touching myself and that felt comfortable. It allowed me to notice the presence of my skin and with it my own presence in this space. But later, touching other people was weird. It made me more aware that we were sharing this space, I could not know who I was touching or what body part it was. [I asked myself] Was it okay for me to explore touch in someone else's body without verbal or visual consent?

Both as entrants and as facilitators we asked ourselves this last question. Consent and checking with others, caring for each others well-being, was something that constantly came up; something we believe should take place in politics of activism . Especially as facilitators, we could feel the pull of the necessity to attune our senses to what was happening in this room full of bodies. We had to feel with others, recall what we had felt during our trainings and our previous experimentations as we simultaneously remained present in our own faticities. Additionally, in both situations (either facilitator or entrant) we recognized the importance of understanding that each of our individual experiences could be shared. But not always. we had to leave space for the diversity of happenings within others .

The skin is a layer and layers are a form of time. Let your partners [in space] be layers. Let the perception and communication flow throughout the layers. The skin is a layer of continuity and duration .

Elena: Through self-touch, there was no distinction between the me (subject) and the space, air, time.. (object) around me. I made the space and the space made me. However, the presence of others - who were also making the space - was influencing me. If my mere presence influences other bodies, if the mere presence of other bodies influences mine, none of us can be crossed out. The body in space is already a political tool.

Despite attempts of crossing Other bodies out of space, everybody is always curving space and time as matter . It is not passive. Regardless of its morphology and its behaviours, the body is always active - it is always creating, re-shaping places and being reshaped by these. As such, it is political within the creative power it holds. Through the developed tactility - notions of private and public, of us and others, of space and presence were disrupted - the flesh became a tool for resignification of these binaries, a resignification that meant to escape a false purity of categories . The body wrote, read and spoke. What does it want to say? Are we allowing it to freely express and with it to give directionality to the body?

Renata: At some point we started laughing, and there was something in me that dictated ‘no, be serious, take this seriously’ but what does that even mean? Why should laughter, such a physical impulse, be suppressed?

We concluded: there is no need for seriousness! Why hold back? Laughing is a physical reaction in motion. Our bellies shake up; our stomach, intestines, uteruses all twerking in enjoyment. Ridicule the legitimacy that has been given to seriousness by the tradition of male reason. Laughter allows us to make fun of the unexistent structures and boundaries that have been built around our queer bodies, it allows for us to find joy in activism, joy in the challenges of being uncomfortable when aknowledging our bodies with their infinity and their physical limits.
In almost all occasions, instinctively, most of us entrants in the experimentation kept our eyes closed. There was no direction to do so, but it seemed that to reduce the hierarchical power we tend to unconsciously assign to seeing, and to really tune in into our embodiments, this sense had to be turned off. Still, there was a deep vulnerability in this;in not being able to position oneself exactly in space, and neither do so for others. Yet to hear ourselves and others breathe, to accidentally get into a rhythmicality together.

Observe for a while how your eyes are behaving.
What are they seeing and what do they choose to look at? Stay in that visual presence while you feel yourself in space and time through your eyes. Enjoy the images. Remain looking and breathing throughout those images. The visual is another way to stay present .

Person 2: It was quite relieving for me to open my eyes. To explore the surroundings and to be able to visually process what the others were doing, and maybe even feeling. Especially while [self-]touching, it was a form of communication in which we could search for consent, a way we could understand if a certain touch was ok.

Observe what type of present gives back your gaze and its images.

We believe that being with closed eyes helped us to dilute representations. However, at the time of the invitation to open our eyes and build a visual presence, a grounding practice of reception had been built. When we opened our eyes we were able to receive the other - as well as acknowledging our positionalities - without ascribing meaning into them. We could put in practice the rebellion against a gaze that objectivises bodies and reduces beings to their physicalities (Young, 2005, p.44). Shape and flesh was not subject to unwanted intentions and manipulations, but rather connected and available through the playful, curious intimacy that was gradually built.

[music is played]

Dance to stir up the present.
To dance is to let the body decide for you
And to not resist
Dance is to last intimately in that which is public and, in contrast, to decompose what is public in intimacy
To dance is to use the body as a system that connects other bodies
To dance is to use the body as a system that connects intuition with destiny
To dance is to use the body as a system that connects observation with action

Person 3: There was certain erotism, certain aesthetic in the way we touched each other and then in the way that this invited to movement, and then dancing to the
music.

Eroticism as an opening towards others, as a way of intimacy without sexuality, within friendships or fleeting connections. We were able to play with bonds that were sensuous and find comfort in discomforts or puzzlements. We were turning ourselves into gifts to others in our rhytmicalities, in our use of our skins, eyes and space . In our interaction with others’ movements, their skins, their eyes, our laughs, our space. It was all mine, yours, ours. We were to ourselves, to you and to others. We have brought our bodies to the epitome of obliqueness, distortions; shedding any traditional sense of aesthetic. We are now more capable of dancing beyond form, exploring how to move with our hips forward, our heads in reverse. We were spinning in circles and running backwards. We were shredding any predetermined orientation of spatiality and bodies . We are dancing into embodied freedom.

To dance is to affect and effect
It is to break
Become undone
Forger myself
To dance is to the present with intuition and to transform it
It is to change the body every day, at every moment

We will not make pretense that a conclusion to this experiment is possible. More than a close circuit, it felt for us like a warm up, an experience that opened up a portal of possibilities, questions and inquiries. We can only offer some closing thoughts that then again come to form the opening of other practices, of other moments, of other bodies. As two mouths together, are they openings or are they a sealing stamp?
Each exercise left something written in the body and each body wrote its own vocabulary unto the exercises: it became a process of co-writing in between all of those who were present. Knowledge was and continues to be produced. We continue to reflect upon our experiences and be constituted by them in retrospection. We carry these practices that have started to reform our bodies, resignifying the importance of our lived experiences unto our daily lives.
We believe in the importance of moving and staying still as ways to become present in our own bodies. As a way of deep embodiment and connection within ourselves. In this experimentation we have discovered a deep potential for dealing with scars, insecurities, stress and the overal pains of being queer bodies in a patriarchal, heteronormative and heterosexist situation. We believe in the relevance of practices alike this one to provide us with multiple tools of liberation from imperatives that discard the body; as a way to do conscious intersectional politics.

References

Capriotti, F. (2016). Hacer magia: asuntos de danza. (1). Cámara Argentina del Libro.

Cixous, H. (1976). The Laugh of the Medusa. Signs, 1(4), 875-893.

Irigaray, L. (1985). The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Femenine. In This
Sex Which Is Not One (pp.68-96)

Irigaray, L. (1985). When Our Lips Speak Together In This Sex Which Is Not One
(pp.205-218)

Kruks, S. (2014). Women’s ‘Lived Experience’: Feminism and Phenomenology from Simone
de Beauvoir to the present. In The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory (pp.61-74).

Lloyd, G. (1984). Introduction, Chapter 1. In The man of reason: "male" and "female" in
Western philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spelman, V.E. (1982). Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views. Feminist Studies,
Inc. 8(1), 109-131. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177582

Wright Miller, G., Ethridge, P., & Tarlow Morgan, K. (2011). Body-Mind Centering,
Mindfulness and the Body Politic. In envvkmn, Exploring Body-Mind Centering: An
Anthology of Experience and Method (pp. 369-376). Berkley: North Atlantic Books.

Young, I. M. (2005). Introduction, Chapter l and ll. In On Female Body Experience:
“Throwing like a girl” and other essays (pp.3-45)

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