3:11pm June 1, 2014

zeezoutenijs-x-bodies-is-easily-one-of-my

youneedacat:

zeezoutenijs:

(X) bodies is easily one of my least favourite phrases

Literally, is it possible to objectify a person more than to describe them as bodies? How is this SJ-approved language?

You mean like when people say “This is being done to disabled bodies” or “black bodies” or “trans…

I think this comes from a section of critical theory where there is the idea that subjectivity is not an obvious thing, for instance in a racist culture a colonizer gets to be seen as more of an autonomous, self-determined person with a real inner beingness that is then called a subject. And from the racist point of view the colonized are anything from noble primitives (and when they are put through a process of civilizing them they will become real subjects) to trade goods, neither of them actually human.

So then subjectivity is something fleeting and ephemeral that gets to be conferred or taken away, and in this way of thinking (it seems to me, I haven’t studied it, this is just “what I’ve gathered”) that means calling anybody a whole person is problematic. And then it asks how do we describe what is going on without referring to an interiority that we can’t know about, and they choose to study oppression in this vocabulary, as what happens to bodies.

I think it can lead to some powerfully blunt descriptions, but the applicability of it is otherwise really limited. It’s really something that is relevant only within a small corner of academia. I think the way various activist circles decorate themselves with this kind of terminology is…. a bit naff, sometimes.