The Role of Embodiment and Emotion in Self and Identity

My research therefore is located within a decolonization process, as it explores how we can emancipate ourselves by gaining a fluid relationship to historical and socio- political constructs which shape our identities and sense of self. For this purpose it brings ideas of embodiment and emotion into relation with ideas of social

construction. Research interest in embodiment and emotion is expanding rapidly across a range of academic disciplines including cultural studies, political science, history, sociology and psychology. Previously the study of feelings and emotions was marginalised and associated with qualitative and interpretive approaches and so-called ‘soft’ science. However, in the last 30 years scholars have wanted to find out more about embodied social action: understanding how people engage with their bodies and how this informs their perceptions of themselves and what is going on in the world.

Margaret Wetherell refers to the term ‘psychosocial’ as a means to ‘expand the scope of social investigation’, as it allows for ‘a focus on embodiment, to attempt to

understand how people are moved, and what attracts them, to an emphasis on repetitions, pains and pleasures, feelings and memories’ (Wetherell, 2012, p.2). Similar to Merleau-Ponty, she seeks to engage with both the text and the body: ‘everything is both manufactured and natural in man [and woman]’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p.189). Wetherell’s concept of affective practice is an ‘assembling of

multimodal resources’ between the social, the psychological and the physiological. The central component she has identified as ‘most [crucial]’ is the body: ‘it is the participation of the emoting body that makes assemblage an example of affect rather that an example of some kind of social practice’, thus bringing together feeling and thought, social and personal relationships (Wetherell, 2012, p.159). Wetherell’s understanding of ‘affect’ is as ‘embodied meaning–making. Mostly, this will be something that could be understood as human emotion’ [authors italics] (ibid, p.4).

Feminist theorists have made a significant contribution to highlighting corporality and the critical role the body plays in socio-political discourse. Simone DeBeauvoir, in her seminal book, The Second Sex, located her ideas between the body and the self: ‘to be present in the world implies strictly that there exists a body which is at once a material thing in the world and a point of view towards the world’ (Beauvoir, 1953, p.39). She speaks of how women experienced their bodies as objects through the eyes of others, which consequently limited and undermined the understanding of self: ‘the

exuberance of life….restrained’ (ibid, p.323). Beauvoir’s focus on the significant relationship between the woman’s body and the self is similar to W.B. Dubois’s focus on the racialised body. The internalization of the racialised gaze from the outside

world greatly influences how black people experience themselves: ‘a world that yields the black man [or woman] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see him through the revelation of the other world’ (Dubois, 1903, p.38).

Feminist and racial discourses have highlighted the critical relations between bodies and selves, thus expanding the social and political parameters to engage with ideas of mind and body. Stanley points out: ‘What results is a truly radical approach to

theorising knowledge, one which refuses the scientific distinction between

mind/knowledge and body/experience’ (Stanley, 1997, p.4). Margrit Shildrick and Janet Price contend that the theoretical recognition of embodiment has created a generative space which accounts for ‘sexual difference…racial difference, class difference and difference due to disability’ (Price and Shildrick, 1999, p.5).

For Audre Lorde, within the Euro-centric intellectual tradition: ‘we rely solely upon our ideas to make us free, for these were what the white fathers told us were precious’ (Lorde, 1984, p.37). Dubois also expressed his concern: ‘These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed or forgotten’ (Dubois, 1903, p.39). Dubois’s use of ‘power of body and mind’ reminds me of Ford-Smith’s idea of ‘creative power of rebel consciousness’, a source of embodied knowledge hidden within our own stories, charting ‘ways in which women can move from the apparent powerlessness of exploitation’ (Ford-Smith, 1986, p.xiii).

In my research the creative writing process is explored as a way in which the research participants, and I with my own writing, are able to unlock the power within our own stories by connecting to a bodily sense of self which extends outside of the text of social constructions. Phenomenological philosopher Eugene Gendlin is very helpful in

this connection. He refers to a bodily felt sense, a physical feeling that carries deep embodied knowledge and can bring personal meaning. He sees this bodily felt sense as those feelings that are often not given much attention, a ‘gut feeling’, a sensation that ‘begins in the body and occurs in the zone between the conscious and the

unconscious’ (Gendlin, 1996, p.1). The felt sense ‘is not about words and thoughts but the attention in the body’ (ibid, p.19). He points out that at first the feeling can be ‘unclear, murky, puzzling, not fully recognizable’ (ibid, p.26), but in time it can reveal experiences and memories that would otherwise be missed.

Gendlin’s notion of the bodily felt sense supports the idea that we are not just discourse and that the body plays an instrumental role in our search for identity and sense of self. Even Liz Stanley, a confirmed social constructionist supports the idea of embodied knowledge when she recognises that ‘rather than travelling the “strict” constructionist’s route, we feel the necessity of taking the body seriously’ (Stanley, 1993, p.197). Elisabeth Grosz’s notion of ‘the crisis of Reason’ (Grosz, 1993, p.187) challenges the old Cartesian certainties of knowledge which separate mind and body, placing the former source as superior to the latter. She recognises the body as a critical source in the making of knowledge. Embodiment is a centrally important concept for my research, as I see creative life writing as helping us to ‘move away from a sense of fixity or “stuckness” in one or more dominate self-concepts’ (Hunt , 2004, p.163) by engaging with the body, listening to how we feel and our perceptions of what is going on in the world. Creative writing offers an exploratory space for finding words that are able to express feelings that Gendlin describes as ‘puzzling’ and ‘unclear’ (Gendlin, 1996, p.26).

Gloria Bavette Gordon’s experience of doing her PhD speaks to Gendlin’s idea of the bodily felt sense containing social constructions:

A major issue that engaging in my PhD process threw up for me were my silences; silences which I had come to realize were not necessarily of my own choosing…The conscious engagement with my silences made me aware that in my mind they were reflecting the ‘mental inferiority’ ascribed to Blacks in the western world…I was to conceptualize silence as a social construct (Gordon, 2006, pp.248-249).

Gordon’s recognition of ‘silence as a social construct’ echoes Lorde’s idea of the necessity for the ‘transformation of silence into language and action [as] an act of self-revelation’ (Lorde, 1984, p.42). This was a turning point for me as a facilitator as well as a writer, as I recognised the importance of the stories we told but also those that remain silent, and by expressing the unspoken in the creative writing process we are attempting to dismantle dominant discourses and ‘open up new possibilities for the construction of self and the assertion of agency’ (hooks, 1991, p.28).

The kind of work I have always wanted to do requires me to learn how to manoeuvre ways to free up language from its sometimes sinister, frequently lazy, almost always predicable employment of racially informed determined chains (Morrison, 1993, p.xi).