.writing the body: everyday examples.

Have you ever learned a new concept and then it seems to continually reveal itself to you?  You might learn a brand new vocabulary word and then you hear several people use it in the next couple of days...or you might become interested in a new show and then everyone around you seems to be talking about it.  Well that's been happening to me lately while in my 'Feminist Theory: Writing the Body' class, a class focused on...well...the body, and writing the body.  When I first started the course (and even before going to class) I didn't really understand that concept "writing the body;" I definitely wasn't the only one in the class who felt this way.  Based on our conversations I'm pretty sure all of us felt that way at the beginning.  But as we've read, discussed, and practiced writing the body, I've been finding other examples in my everyday readings. Here are two recent examples - -

The first comes from Take This Bread: The Spiritual Memoir of a Twenty-first Century Christian. The author, Sara Miles, is a left-wing journalist raised atheist as a child; she received communion one day and embraced a faith she'd once scorned. Here's a beautiful excerpt from one of her chapters:

"The entire process of human production was, if I considered it for a minute, about as 'intolerable' as the apostles said communion was. It sounds just as weird as the claim that God was in a piece of bread you could eat. And yet it was true. I grew inside my mother, the way Katie [her daughter] grew inside me. I came out of her and ate her, just as Katie ate my body, literally, to live. I became my mother in ways that still felt, sometimes, as elemental and violent as the moment when I'd been pushed out from between her legs in a great rush of blood. And it was the same with my father; He had helped make me, in ways that were wildly mysterious and absolutely powerful. Like Jesus, he had gone inside somebody else's body and then become a part of me [here, she's talking about Jesus taking on flesh, being born in Mary just as her father's sperm went inside her mother to create her - some might view this as more spiritual, but that's what (my husband and I feel) she's discussing here in relation to the physical body]. The shape of my hands, the way I cleared my throat, the color of my eyes: my parents lived in me - body and soul, DNA and spirit. That was like the bread becoming God becoming me, in ways seen and unseen" (71).

I found this next one while browsing the pages of Real Simple - yes! even this women's magazine focused mainly on home organization, food, and beauty secrets includes examples of 'writing the body.'  Elizabeth Berg, a New York Times Bestselling novelist shares how she came to accept her belly after years of sucking in her gut, holding her breath, and covering it up.  I've included a couple quotes below, but you can read the entire article, "Beautiful, In Every Single Way: An Essay on Body Image Issues," here.

"For my entire life, I have hated my midsection. It was always too big for the rest of me. Sure, my arms and legs were long and thin enough. But, then, right smack in the middle of my body was my excessively large blubber belly.


...A few years ago, I was on a trip with my best friend, and we were lying on the beds in our hotel room. Her blouse was raised a little and I glimpsed her belly, and lo and behold: I saw that it was even bigger than mine.


But it wasn’t awful at all. It was part of her. And as such, I loved it...


...I have stopped hating my belly. Realizing that my mother’s varicose-vein anxiety was as pointless as my own adipose-tissue worry was a turning point. But I have also seen enough of the world and its sorrows to know that this type of thing is not worth my time and energy...


I have come to hold a certain respect for fat cells. They may make us look less than ideal (if you define ideal as those angry-looking models who wear their ribs as accessories), but they serve a few rather exalted functions: They store energy in the form of reserved nutrients. They give us insulation from heat and cold. They provide protective padding around internal organs. Isn’t it nice to know that the so often maligned parts of our bodies are looking out for us in these ways?..."

I love both of these examples, Miles's beautiful and physical imagery of reproduction and Berg's realization that all the parts of our bodies are "a part of [us]" and we should love that, embracing the 'imperfections' that are only defined as 'imperfect' simply because they don't meet the 'ideal.'

(After searching for an appropriate 'body image' photo to include in this post I stumbled here and learned about a blog called The Belly Project, whose mission is to provide "a place to come and put our bellies in perspective and to share them anonymously with the great wide Internetz." - - just found it interesting. Oh the things you can find if you follow enough hyperlinks...)

Signing off and reminding you to LOVE YOUR BODY and all its many perfections!

photo came from here.