Reclaiming our Bodies with Critical History
This women’s day, I’d like to talk about bodies. For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard commentary about feminine bodies that I just haven’t heard about masculine ones. Recently, a relative who hasn’t seen me in around decade made a point to comment on a phone call that I looked like I’d put on weight based on pictures/zoom calls while she said my husband, who she has never met in person at all “looked just the same” and “hadn’t changed at all.” The whole thing left me annoyed but unsurprised. Of course, as most desi folks I know will concur, the tendency to verbalize unsolicited and often entirely false opinions about bodies, particularly femme bodies, can be more frequent in our community than others- but having spent so much time in so many non-desi spaces, I’m fairly certain absolutely everyone thinks this stuff across cultural lines even if they aren’t all as unfiltered about saying it.
For me, and I think many others, it starts very early on in life. I heard my parents and adults around me discuss my mother’s weight, the appropriateness of my physique for a variety of sports and physical activities, chubbiness and “puppy fat,” whatever the hell that is. I was frequently offered strategies to optimize my skin color, constantly having it compared to the skin of others, and I recall countless examples of adults around me commenting to me that a friend or cousin’s facial features were prettier than mine even though I was skinnier or some other similar backhanded compliment… but I rarely heard these discussions and comparisons about my brothers or about masculine bodies that conformed to masculinity.
Later, as a teenager, it entered a whole new world where I heard males, including family, discuss things like how abhorrent they found female bodily hair, with one individual actually letting me know that I needed to be more on top of hair removal regardless of my own preferences because “you don’t have to look at yourself, we have to look at you.” There were endless Shake-esque (IYKYK) ex-boyfriends who seemed to think that their gift to the world was to proudly and loudly offer the information that they were only attracted to “flat women with small butts” or some other useless variation of the same. In comparison, I didn’t hear of as many women setting, much less enforcing these types of grooming or physiologic standards on men. Though they did do it to other women — there were always female friends buzzing about with wisdom about which body parts of mine were assets that I could feel uplifted about and those who admonished my mother for not putting me in the right type of training bras during puberty because they thought my breasts were unusually saggy.
In high school, my first time spending time in a significantly racially diverse environment, I also started noticing desi preferences for white bodies and becoming exposed to the dynamics of exoticization of POC bodies, particularly non-masculine ones; something I would become even more acutely aware of my first few years in the USA for college. As I embraced my sexuality, I heard endless conversations about male anatomy and pleasure, but few about female anatomy and pleasure. Similarly, my clothing, make-up and behavioral choices were almost always contextualized in terms of my sexuality, but the same was not happening to masculine entities around me, who could dress-down without being frumpy and dress-up without being labelled sex-crazed. And I am not even going to get into the whole other issue of media representations of women because there isn’t much left to say about that.
Throughout all this, I had basically heard a lot about my body but I had never been asked about it. I internalized how standards of beauty negotiate power and in the face of any disenfranchisements I experienced, I often unconsciously capitalized on them without really exploring how wrong that was. Reflecting on it today, part of the reason for this thoughtlessness despite being a mostly thoughtful person is that I had formed the opinion that my body was an object to be commented on, never a live entity with the authority to set the standards it wanted — it seemed like the only people with the agency to really accept it were those conforming to or serving heterosexual masculinity, and it felt pointless to really think about it because it seemed to be outside the scope of my influence. The absurdity really comes out when I write this down: I grew up thinking that how my own body was perceived was not something I could influence.
Being sexually assaulted and then incorporating societal responses to that definitely served to emphasize this feeling of helplessness surrounding my body, but it only highlighted something that was already there. As I connect all these things together, it becomes clearer and clearer to me that a large foundation of the pyramid of violence against women that rape and murder crown is this endless chatter about our bodies, this systematic and violent removal of our own influence from them, and I want to talk about it because I don’t think we stand a chance at combatting toxic masculinity without talking about it.
Over time, as the years passed and my body continued to change, as I can only hope as a living organism it will continue for many years to do — I started to struggle a lot with sorting through the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing between my innate love for myself and how incongruent I am from what years of unconscious bias and micro-aggressions made my mind’s eye see as a lovable body.
Whereas in childhood and as a teenager the messages about my body tended to be more overt, growing older they were more subliminal, often sanitized as a conversation about health: people reminding me that I needed to “watch what [I] eat” because my metabolism would slow as I transitioned to sedentary work and aged, discussions about diets, about needing to be strong/muscular, workplace weight-loss challenges, hearing about people getting chin-tucks and lip-fillers, reading about the extent women with endometriosis like me feel like they have to go to in order to reduce endo-bloat on top of the pain the already endure… conversations about being content with and serving our bodies instead of having our bodies service our warped and colonized understandings of excellence were few and far between, both because I didn’t know how to seek them out and because they are a minority of the conversations humans have about bodies.
In fact, it took a lot before I found this space — I had to start very consciously facing the body dysmorphia I was experiencing, to name the issues I had with that dysmorphia, and crucially, to stop normalizing it. I stopped accepting the bullshit excuse most desi elders have when you call them out on body shaming (“oh we like it when you look more filled out/we meant to say you look more beautiful”) and I started talking about the struggle I was having with body dysmorphia to people who felt safe enough to discuss it with. After bringing it out of the darkness of my unexpressed thoughts and feelings and putting it out there right in the middle of my relationships and reality, I felt like I could finally grapple with reframing the relationship I had with my body and start to reconnect with my agency over how it is perceived, especially over how I myself perceive it.
Initially, it was just a lot of internal reflection and acceptance of the harm that I had sustained and caused in this area. Then, I started to search outside to reeducate myself about bodies. What helped me the most was gaining a critical history of the gaze on non-masculine bodies, particularly non-white ones. I’ll share some of the resources I used on social media for those who are interested.
Critical theory and critical history get a lot of slack these days, although they have been a basic part of all the academic work I have ever done. In my master’s thesis I wrote: “we must re-examine the knowledge that brought us here; acknowledge the past lessons we have forgotten to apply — taking a hard look at why we missed them — and we must meaningfully consolidate the new knowledge that we think can reform us…it is now being increasingly established that our knowledge is incomplete without an understanding of the processes we use to gain it.” I stand by that and find it hard to believe that anyone reasonable would disagree with it. Critical histories and critical theories of what we are going through as humanity are simply responsible and necessary epistemological exercises that allow us to break down and overcome toxic and regressive patterns of thinking and seeing. They are a necessary step in healing and those resisting this step are simply choosing to perpetuate maladaptive ways of life.
Thinking through the history of how the beauty and health standards we associate today with femininity came to be was a liberating experience for me. Early on, proponents of slavery talked about darker skin color being connected with evil and associated markers of non-white racial profiles such as darker body hair and various others features with impurity and animalism. The significance of such biases runs so deep that even in 2016, half the white medical students in the full sample size of 418 students were found to hold ridiculous beliefs such as thinking that black patients felt less pain than white patients. When we consider that practitioner racial bias has led to black women today being more than three times as likely to die during childbirth than white women because of these same standards of health and beauty that we allow our bodies to be defined by, it becomes so much easier to let go of them.
As I conclude, I want to point out that this is just one amidst an ocean of examples of how historical propaganda has excluded us from our own bodies, and just one amidst an ocean of examples of how learning the critical history of a flawed understanding can help you heal. There is so much more out there to explore that will help you better understand whatever it is that doesn’t sit well with you. And there are more and more voices having this conversation about reclaiming our bodies. I hope as future generations grow they hear and generate fewer negative messages about their bodies than I did. I hope they don’t feel as entitled to define others’ bodies as generations before have. I hope they are offered more context for things that don’t sit well with them and more agency and ownership over themselves. I will be trying my best to make it so and I hope you will join me.