How do we define a body?

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I am nine. It's night and I'm enrolled in a martial arts class at the community center ten minutes from my house. It's on the fourth floor with tall ceilings. The floor is hard. Concrete? The walls are carved like windows such that everything is open-air. My best friend and her brother are with me. We join the group in our weekly ritual of lunging across the floor and back, kicking our legs up to hit outstretched hands, cartwheeling single-file. Once the difficult warm-ups are over, we are commanded to spread out and stretch. I don't particularly like this part until I'm doing the splits, specifically the center splits. We have to hold it for five minutes. I spread my legs apart, lean forward to rest my elbows in front of me, and drag myself forward agonizingly slowly. Keep pushing, keep stretching. The five minutes are almost up, so I rock harder and faster. I have to keep opening myself up. The five minutes are over and I'm still not done. Everyone around me is rising. I fold my entire upper half over and pull. A sweet, hot relief that doesn't last. I get up off the floor, willing my legs to stand straight. Too short. I'll practice again at home tonight.

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Deborah L. Tolman: Researchers have noted [that] the "material body and its social construction are entwined in complex and contradictory ways which are extremely difficult to disentangle in practice." [1]
Mariam Fraser: The body itself "refers to a layer of corporeal materiality, a substratum of living matter endowed with memory." [2]
Jussi Parikka: Bodies are organizations... The concept of the body is close to the definition of an assemblage. [3]
Sherry Shapiro: One's own body is the meeting point between private and public. [4]
Anne Fausto-Sterling: [Judith] Butler suggests that we look at the body as a system that simultaneously produces and is produced by social meanings, just as any biological organism always results from the combined and simultaneous actions of nature and nurture. [5]
Jussi Parikka: Bodies are thus always political in the sense that they are "force-arrangements of chemical, biological and social bodies." [6]

♦

I am nineteen and excited to finally get my first tattoo. This image came to me only a week ago and yet I can feel how right it is. A friend volunteers to come with me to the tattoo parlor. It's in a dilapidated building in Chinatown on the top floor. The bathroom is outside across the stairway with a ramshackle lock on the door. I go to the bathroom first because no one answers. After we knock again, we are allowed inside. The waiting area is lush and full of potted plants, leaves on the walls, and is frivolously animal-themed. There are animal skins, animal-striped cushions, rugs, many photos of animals as well as framed drawings. The artist and I talk for hours. He had drawn me a wolf design that somehow didn't fit. He discouraged me from tapering it around the back of my ear - it would be too small an area and would lose a lot of detail. I wanted it hidden, at least for my parents' sake. The back of my neck? Too flat of an expanse. He wanted something big. A thigh, or some part like that. It made me nervous. Finally, I pushed for the ear. He said the wolf would have to be loping unnaturally, almost like its body was broken. My friend supported me. I agreed to do it. He leads me to the black benches that demarcate the waiting area from the work. I lie down and he begins. It's impossible to see what's happening. My friend gets bored halfway through and sits back down by the striped cushions. It doesn't hurt as much as I'd prepared for. I'm still so nervous about it. Someone else is marking my body forever. Every time I look by my right ear now, will it cease to be mine?

♦

The body is an interesting subject. Like Shapiro suggests, our individual bodies are at once so personal to us and the means through which we access the world. For a rather long time, I have been preoccupied with understanding this contradiction. Implicit in this concern is a strong feeling of wanting to own my body. Through my own reflection, I see myself as an individual easily untethered from reality. I remember being much younger and waking up in the middle of the night needing to touch my skin because I had forgotten while dreaming whose body I inhabited. My body can feel so strange and foreign - parts unexplored, movements uncontrolled, sensations unknown. The material that constitutes the body, "living matter endowed with memory," is understood and used differently based on memory and circumstance, as different as these materials already are.

I grew up in a Roman Catholic household and was strongly taught to regard my body as a temple. Desire was sin. My own touch was violent. Nothing could defile the body which belonged to God, not even myself. It is difficult to trust the body, and it causes me much anxiety to try and let go of this control.

Butler describes this paradox of the body as the site where "doing" and "being done to" become equivocal. [7] Readings of the body, and any interactions with the body, are socially constructed. What does it then mean to liberate my body? Who decides that my actions are my own, my desires my own, my choices my own?

And if a body is akin to a collection, then what is the organizing principle, if there is one? Do I decide this?