I'm only recently accepting the extent to which my physical body has been intrinsic to how I self-identify. The realization has come on the heels of a bunch more that are the result of the heart failure (cardiomyopathy if you like big words) diagnosis in September. My body has changed significantly in the way I use it for self-identification purposes. [...]
There are few, if any, choices a black body can make that do not speak its history, including the requisite traumas and proud triumphs over them. Under the gaze of the status quo, this body, with its history written all over it, is an indictment of the status quo. Erasing that physical body becomes critical to sustaining not just the aesthetic of the status quo but more importantly its structure. Erasure is not necessarily the literal murder of it, though that is one way to erase it, but more typically, the suppression of it. Suppression often comes in the form of assimilating the black body into the status quo.
delivered at the Northeast Modern Language Association Conference Toronto, ON 2 May 2015 Slide 1: "How the Body Remembers" is not just a creative project but is, I guess like all my creative projects, a question I’m trying to answer for myself--this time about how our physical bodies perform traumas. The question came up after [...]
darlene anita scott 