Bodystrike

Feminist Health Care Research Group

Find a quiet, comfortable place where you feel at ease. Prepare what you need for this exercise (pen and paper, timer). Make yourself comfortable. Breathe deeply and feel inside yourself.
Can you think of a physical reaction that you have learned is embarrassing / out of place in academic / artistic / institutional / school spaces, and that you should hide / be ashamed of, or discard?
Can you think of a specific physical reaction? Can you trace its history, how it has accompanied you, and how it has changed over time? Red marks, stuttering, diarrhea: when did they strike you? Did they bother you? Did you think about them a lot? Did you learn what helps you?
Can you feel today what this physical reaction was trying to tell you? Do you feel something about it today that you can accept and appreciate?
Do you have physical symptoms of discomfort when you are in spaces of power and normalization? What are they? What do they remind you of?
Try to remember a moment when you perceived this discomfort in others, such as stuttering, red spots, sweat, nervousness, shame. Try to visualize—based on this situation—what power relations were at play. If possible, try to visualize how differently the people present were affected by these power relations.
Try to write down associatively which things, people, feelings, expressions could be considered inappropriate in academic / university / art spaces due to these subtle and covert ways of exercising power.
Try to write down associatively what you miss in academic / university / art spaces, in the way that things, people, feelings, and expressions remain absent or suppressed.
Do you have a sense of which parts of yourself you would rather assign to a knowing and working body and which parts you keep out? Do you have a conception or an image of your “knowing body:” a posture, clothing, way of speaking that you adopt in order to better correspond with the spaces—permeated by these power relations—and to get along well in them?
Do you have, the other way around, an idea of the parts of you that rather form your “counter-knowing body?” What does it do, what does it communicate to you? What wishes does it have and to whom does it most likely make contact?

From: “Körperstreik” by Inga Zimprich (Feministische Gesundheitsrecherchegruppe) (https://nocturne-plattform.de/text/korperstreik)