CHAPTER 2What Difference Does the Body Make?
PRELUDE
Embodiment — having a body, needing a body, and experiencing life in and
through a body — is something you and I have in common. I think and write
this book through my body, and you read it (or hear it) through yours. We
each bring our embodiments to encounters with text, as well as to interactions
with other persons, nonhuman animals, objects, and environments. Embod-
iment locates us in a space and place, while allowing us to extend ourselves
with technological means. Embodiment gives us phenomenological access to
our worlds and provides opportunities for action, while allowing us to modify
those worlds and opportunities. It lets us perceive others and renders us per-
ceivable, sometimes visible, to others. Having a body is agentic for us, and yet
it also makes us “vulnerable by definition” (Butler 2010, 33). No matter who
or where we are, having a body places practical demands on us, and gives us
each an incurable condition of mortality. In these ways and others embodi-
ment is a shared condition of human experience.
Yet because bodies are differently located in the world, undertake different
practices, and are affected by social hierarchies — and because they physio-
logically vary as well — embodiment is a site of difference as much as com-
monality. I do not mean only that bodies are represented differently, marked
on the surface. Specificities, peculiarities, and inequalities are part of lived,
practical, felt embodiment. For every body- subject, embodiment is partic-
ular, specific, and local as well as transversed by social patterns. Between
persons — and for persons experiencing different settings, temporalities, and
situations — embodiments vary. Bodies diverge in their sensorimotor capac-
ities, bodily boundaries, perceptual tendencies, and orientations toward the
world. They differ in the space they take up (and are allowed to take up)