Hi everyone, thank you for listening, and thank you to Mady for inviting me to do a Shouting
About the Silence blogcast, not to mention, for all of the labor she has taken up in order to create a space where silences are broken. Today I wanted to talk about a struggle that I hope is relatable, which is the gap that sometimes emerges between wanting to live a feminist life and actually living a feminist life. One of the questions I often have about my own feminist consciousness is how the heck it took me so long to not only develop a feminist consciousness, but to begin practicing feminism in my daily life. Even after I began to position myself as a feminist in my early-twenties, and even after I began to immerse myself in feminist texts, as I do now, I could feel a gap in the way I was thinking and the way I was living. That’s not to say that this gap does not still exist. In fact, I think the gap will always be there—and I think it will always be up to me to keep myself accountable for holding that gap up to the light, to interrogate why it’s there, and to try to close it—even if closing it is an impossibility. The trying to live a feminist life is what’s really important to me. So, why did it take me so long to practice the feminist theory I was reading? I think there are a lot of complicated reasons that are related to my own privilege as a thin, white, straight, cisgender woman, as well as my deep-rooted internalizations of sexist ideology. More specifically, though, one of the major barriers I faced was that I had a whole lot of obsessive and disordered habits around exercise and eating, and I was really attached to the external validation I received from men in regards to both my face and body. In The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolfe proves that these kinds of obsessions are not unique. Rather, they are by patriarchal design—my obsession with the way I look and my attachment to the privileges afforded to me because of the body I was born inside and my craving for external validation from men based on my body kept me too busy to do any real work. So, I’ll just cut to the chase: It wasn’t until I began combatting my own disorded behaviors and the ideologies that perpetuated them that I was able to even begin living a feminist life. I wish I could look back and mark the very moment I began to question the way I was attempting to punish and control my body, and how it felt like a mask or a shield—protecting me from something I couldn’t quite name, but I do know that questioning my ways of thinking about my body, and moving my body, and nourishing my body, has led to essential breakthroughs in terms of actually moving away from these obsessions with chasing after this quote ideal body—which is obviously an ableist, racist, sexist endeavor—and moving towards work that attempts to dismantle these systemic structures. It seemed almost counterintuitive at first, but to overcome these obsessions—which I really began to notice as barriers to the work I wanted to do—I had to look really closely at them and ask a whole lot of uncomfortable questions that helped me get to the root of my behaviors, which were, as I’ve been hinting at, really wrapped up in ableism, fatphobia, diet culture, racism, thin privilege, white privilege, cisgender privilege, sexism and patriarchy, capitalism, and neoliberalist ideologies. So, what seemed counterintuitive at first, now makes perfect sense: living a feminist life, as Sara Ahmed shows us in her book of that name, Living a Feminist Life, starts at home and in our bodies. For me, it’s been about looking really closely at the things I feel like I’ve been taught to look away from. And so, I’ve spent the past few years really intensely taking up my body as a site of feminist analyis—which has required me to let go of the assumption that there is anything about my life or the way I live it that is innocent or somehow apart from the oppressive systems that I—as a cisgender, white, thin woman—benefit from. So, with all that said, I thought it might be useful to share a line of questioning that has become an essential part of this analytic practice for me. Before I go on, though, I just want to note that this line of questioning is deeply related to my own identities and experiences and perspectives, in fact, it’s made necessary by those things. That being said, because of the pervasiveness of toxic and violent rhetoric around health and fitness and wellness, and the colonization and capitalization and even weaponization of movements like body positivity, I offer up this particular line of questioning because I think it may be useful to others too. So, every time I consider engaging in exercise, I ask myself, “If this yoga session or run or gym workout or whatever it may be does absolutely nothing to change the way my body looks, would I still do it?” It seems so simple and obvious, but asking myself this question forces me to be really honest with myself about whether or not the way I want to or plan to move my body is wrapped up in violent ideologies. And so, for me, if I feel myself unable to answer that question of “would I do this if it didn’t change my body even slightly, if there was no hope that it would have any impact on my body” with a really clear and sure yes, I resist the urge to move forward with that exercise session. Not being able to honestly answer that question with a clear yes means that my urge to move my body has once again gotten entangled with not just my personal body image struggles, but with diet culture, fatphobic culture, and ableism, as well as socially constructed, Eurocentric standards around what kinds of bodies deserve value. If I’m having trouble answering the question about why I want to work out, I’ll try to trace my urge to workout back to where it began that day. Did I want to workout when I felt overwhelmed with school work and needed some space to breathe or did it come when I looked in the mirror or pulled on my jeans or noticed my body in some way that wasn’t neutral? The other option I sometimes open up to myself when I’m not quite sure if my desire to move my body in a structured way has gotten wrapped up in toxicity, is to allow myself to engage in the kind of movement that I can more easily keep free from those toxic and violent ideologies I’ve just described. For me, that’s a sort of short, wandering walk around my town or some super gentle yoga and stretching. It’s trying to clear out that toxicity and move my body in a way that feels intuitive and like I’m caring for myself, rather than punishing myself or keeping my body in line. That being said, sometimes this feels impossible to do, and if that’s the case, I try to honor that too—and in this case, honoring that means I refrain from engaging in anything that looks like fitness that day or even for months at a time. I try to acknowledge that it’s not my fault that it’s nearly impossible to divorce moving one’s body from the desire to change one’s body, but the practice of trying and asking these questions and being really honest with myself is what’s most important to me. When I force myself to acknowledge and face the ways my desire to exercise is often wrapped up in my relationship to my own thin, able-bodied privilege, and I decide not to engage in exercise that has gotten wrapped up in the systems I want to fight against, it literally creates more time and space in my day to get down to the real work I want to do. And so, for me, this sort of analytic work is complicated and unending and both deeply personal and political. But it’s really helped me better understand my own gaps between the feminist work I want to do and the feminist work I’m actually doing. OK! Thank you so much for listening, and if you want to continue this conversation, join me in the Shouting about the Silence Community Facebook page.
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AuthorMady is the host of Shouting About the Silence Podcast and Community. She is by no means a professional writer; she just has a lot of thoughts! Archives
October 2019
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