Embodiment

T. Kenny Fountain, University of Virginia

Opening Remarks 

Language. Discourse. Rhetoric. Talk. Text. Genres. Media. Communication. Practices. For many of us in RHM, these are our objects of scrutiny. What we study, analyze, teach. However, it is the body that emerges, inevitably, as a primary object of concern. An array of always multiple, frequently contested bodies that are enacted in part through that same language, discourse, and rhetoric we study. Patient bodies. Biomedical bodies. Healthy bodies. Ill bodies. Disabled ones. Able ones. Infected and infectious bodies. As well the bodies of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers.

The body is not only as Karen Barad (2007) posits a discursive-material entanglement but, especially for us humans, it is also the foundation of experience. As Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 2005) contends, “we are our body” in that “we are in the world through our body” (239). That is, we have access to the world because we are embodied in that world, one that we co-produce through our embodied perceptions, experiences, actions, and knowledge.

But how do we as scholars and teachers of RHM make sense of embodiment—the activities and practices accomplished in and through the body. My own work in RHM understands embodiment in light of phenomenology and theories of embodied cognition, specifically cognitive enaction, which means I am concerned primarily with brains, minds, bodies, and objects working together or against each other (Fountain 2014).

Another meaning of embodiment, of course, is the making visible, tangible, or material an idea or concept. Let’s think together about how we attend to, conceptualize, make palpable embodiment in RHM – as well as how we can do it perhaps better.

 Some Preliminary Questions to Consider
  • What do we, as researchers and teachers of RHM, mean when we say “embodiment”?
  • What theories, philosophies, and/or frameworks do we (personally) use in RHM to conceptualize (human) embodiment? And what draws us to those ideas?
  • If the condition of being or having a body makes possible or underlies nearly all aspects of human experience, how do we make embodiment tangible in our RHM research and our RHM teaching?
  • As researchers and teachers of RHM, how do we take seriously and appreciate enactments of embodiment that are non-normative, or atypical, or ones just different from our own?
  • Thinking about the RHM research that we do or that we love most, what role does embodiment play? Is embodiment, in that research, an object of analysis (that is, a phenomenon under study) or primarily a background condition or state of being that shapes the object itself?

References

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning.    Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.

Fountain, T. Kenny. Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Experience, and the Gross Anatomy Lab. New     York, NY: Routledge, 2014.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. New York, NY: Routledge,    2005. First published 1945 by Gallimard.

Synthesis from Breakout and Discussion

Running Definition
    • One of the things that kept coming up was how to define this keyword. Is it just a definition, or what do we mean by the term embodiment and how does a definition actually capture this keyword? Many agreed that it’s a great question. Some note it as “almost so much like air, that it is difficult to account for without sometimes being obvious or trivial,” while another mentioned “I think our discussion demonstrates this is a difficult term to define, though it seems like we agree that it is important!” Others agreed that this term is an object of our studies in RHM but also as a point to reflect on our own embodiment and how that influences our work (such as embodiment and compartmentalization).
Takeaways
  • It’s difficult to define as we, researchers, are always in our bodies. Plus, the academy emphasizes mind/body dualism and separation, going back to the enlightenment.
  • What theories, philosophies, and/or frameworks do we (personally) use in RHM to conceptualize (human) embodiment? And what draws us to those ideas?
    • Many agreed that one way to engage in embodiment work would be to embrace multimodal scholarship that centers the body in ways print-alphabetic scholarship can’t.
  • We have to think about the juxtaposition our scholarship makes between a text and a performance, a representation and an embodiment of something, but also one of the things too is to consider the tradition and research interests that we have. These will shape our work.
    • This is tangibility that most people agreed was important for us to focus on.
Future Considerations
  • What does embodiment actually mean and how does the definition change what we look at and how we attend to it?
  • What does “embodiment” mean in our teaching during this pandemic is something that we all have to consider.
  • What does this term mean for our classrooms and the effects on bodies?
  • Why is it even important to attune to it?
  • It is so foundational that we don’t need to attend to this concept – but what about juxtaposition between a text and a performance?
  • Does embodiment change when we’re experiencing communal/worldwide events like this pandemic?