There’s a really interesting post up at bitch! about the ballerina Maria Tallchief, colonization and the effects on “movement” that colonization has. The most interesting part:
Is movement (and/or sports/exercise) a human right? And if it is, how do we, as U.S. citizens justify supporting nation/states that deny, curtail, or otherwise severely monitor women’s right to move (i.e. Israel with Palestine, U.S. at the Mexican border, etc)?
Now, before you say that the right to exercise and ‘border monitoring’ are not intimately connected, consider this: If Maria Tallchief were living in Palestine, she would not have the right to travel abroad freely for performances without possibly losing her right of return (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_return#Palestinian). She may also lose chances of performing because of closed borders (as many other Palestinian acts have (see the Palestinian hip/hop group DAM http://www.nowpublic.com/culture/hip-hop-palestine).
Are the only people who have a right to make a living off of “movement” non-colonized people? Or people who are willing to give up access to their homeland? How does the right to travel interconnect with the right to individual body movement?
How can women interested in protecting and improving women’s access to movement support and respect women living in colonized states?
Interesting to consider. What do you think?
- Share
December 21st, 2008 at 4:17 am #
I’m on a long term trip about Harriet Jacobs, of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Get this: She’s an enslaved Black woman in 1830s Virginia and her “owner” (who she calls “Flint” in her narrative) constantly promises/threatens to rape her. So, after attempting a few failing strategies to avoid this, she finally settles on hiding in a tiny garret in her grandmother’s house while she figures out a way for her and her children to escape.
She watches from a small hole in the attic where she hides for SEVEN YEARS, a place so tiny and cramped that she can neither sit nor stand. She crawls for exercise. (It’s interesting that she knows that she must find a way to intentionally exercise, reminding me of your earlier reflection about Angela Davis concluding the same thing while incarcerated, seeming like a real life Linda Hamilton in Terminator). While imprisoned in this hole, Harriet is attacked by insects, her feet and shoulders become frostbitten, her bedding is wet from rain, she loses consciousness for a while, and eventually her whole body atrophies.
I’m not sure where I want to go with this example, except to say a couple of things: 1) That there could be a connection between colonization and incarceration, thinking of a prison wall as another kind of border wall that is deeply gendered and geographically constrained. and 2) That the body movement happening in these “borderland” sites is happening in the context of on-going violence or threat of violence or death. They aren’t supposed to move. That’s why they are confined in the first place. In Harriet’s case, the confinement to the hole might be self-imposed (in a way), but she’s just constructing that confinement as an alternative to the geographic confinement of slavery, in which Flint’s property is the prison with particular boundaries that can’t be breached, else torture or murder.
On the border, the kind of movement that colonized or incarcerated women employ might be shaped by the normalized condition of violence and the threat of violence. So how do we think about the nature of women’s movement (even if they are being “still as a statue” as Harriet is when she can see that Flint is near) in the context of perpetual threat?
December 21st, 2008 at 11:46 am #
This reminds me of the backlash Harvard had against the muslim women students who wanted women-only gym hours http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23470304/
The 6 hours a week designated to men-free exercise seemed to be too much for some students to “give up.” I think the implicit attitude of those against the new hours was that the gym was “their” space and the “others” didn’t have the right to use it how they wished– or even use it at all.
I’m a black women and I’m used to being excluded from certain public spaces. But it’s interesting to think about how colonization is specifically detrimental to movement and physical health. I’ll be chewing on this for awhile…
December 21st, 2008 at 5:15 pm #
both of you (shelby and that girl) have given me *such* things to grapple with. SO important, so necessary to consider. It really boils down to the fundemental nature of how our cells will be used or not used, how our bodies will redefine borders as sites of resistance, how we will approach ‘health’ in liberatory ways–both of you have left such chocked full important comments–both of you have given me something very profound to work with and consider. I thank you both, I’ve been looking for a way to think about ‘movement’ in terms of health and liberation, and your comments have guided me in some really productive deep thinking spaces….
December 21st, 2008 at 5:46 pm #
This connects, for me, with the way many economists and politicians talk about how necessary it is for businesses (capital) to be “free” and to move across borders, and yet that freedom is not accorded to workers.
But also it makes me think about the restrictions that people face on the job – those dreadful stories about the janitors locked into wal-mart, the control of “bathroom breaks” and of workers’ time and movement under ‘total quality management.’
Where because we are at work we are assumed to give up certain rights, because employers somehow own our bodies?
And it also makes me wonder about jobs that aren’t under such explicit control as in factories.. what kinds of mental and social systems get people to control themselves and their movements?
December 21st, 2008 at 7:16 pm #
I think about freedom of movement a lot nearly every time I go jogging in my (middle/upper class white) rural neighborhood, for a lot of reasons. First, that I’m grateful to have a space to run freely where I don’t have to worry about violence. Second, that I’m allowed (groan, “allowed”) to run down a public area in the view of strange men in a way that probably involves twitching my (sexy?) female ass. This is not the case for all of us. I also think about it on swelteringly hot days in summer when I want badly to take off a lot more running clothes, but don’t, because… well, I guess I could go sportsbra only.
This isn’t really related but I’ve had it on my mind for my mind:
). Most of this chart would involve eating & digesting, and exercising. So why would anyone understand my body only as a sexual object? Obviously, because our bodies are defined by men.
It always seems that if a woman exposes her body she’s giving implicit (or explicit??) permission to see that body as a sexual object. Obviously, that pisses us all off. For me, it is just so stupid because, how can I be sexual when I am obviously jogging and therefore wearing only a sportsbra to stay cool? If you were to make a pie chart of how my body spends its time, only a small fraction would be on sex (and of that, mostly solo
Thanks for indulging my tangent… I love this blog, bfp!!!