Practice of Freedom - the illegible body

[upbeat music] This episode is not a survey of trans theory.

It is not an account of what trans bodies mean or an attempt to represent the embodied experience of being trans or non-binary from the inside.

Quite frankly, I am not the right person to do that.

Many theorists have offered their bodies of work to those questions from lived experience, and those are the books and the frameworks worth engaging with directly if this is something that interests you.

What I am the right person to do is a little more narrow and maybe more honest, and that is to examine what this system does to bodies it cannot file and why it does it with such consistent and coordinated violence.

I wanna do this from the position of someone who has spent this entire season arguing that your body is the site where power either installs itself or gets undone, and where knowledge of that is carried.

I should say that where I am standing, I am every form of womanhood that I was taught.

Not exactly, some of it is misogyny, but I have never had to question my body.

I love being a woman.

I love being this curvy, vivacious, soft, womanly bodied person.

I have never had to inspect the dissonance between the world's construction of a gender and the body I was given.

I have never had to analyze myself with that depth, that sincerity, that commitment of someone who is experiencing dissonance.

And so I recognize this as a kind of knowledge that is simply not available to me, one that I will always be on the outside of, needing others to fill in the gaps.

One of the things this season keeps returning to is that embodied knowledge is real, specific, and non-transferable.

You cannot deposit it.

You cannot summarize it and hand it across.

The knowledge a body carries is inseparable from the experience that produced it, which means there are things you will never know because of your body.

This is how knowing works.

I think this is why we exist relationally.

Everyone is carrying sets of knowledge and experience within themselves that they can share with you, but that you cannot have until you build those relationships.

So embarking on those relational endeavors becomes the only way to really connect to others, and by doing so, to the world around us.

But this type of acknowledgement that someone else's body carries a different world from my own, and that in order to understand someone else, one might have to ask, this journey can become disrupted when the knowledge is assumed or projected or met with violence.