Disciplining the Out of Control Body

It’s been a while since I posted here. I have been working on a few publications, many of which will be published this year, and some presentations— including one in April called “Disciplining the Out of Control Body” for the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology’s 2024 Spring Meeting in Washington, D.C. My co-presenters were fantastic and I learned so much. Here is an excerpt from my presentation, which was an adaptation of a publication from 2021 called “Purposive encounters with “lack” in strength sports and diet culture” which can be found here.

Excerpt of presentation given April 4, 2024

I want to acknowledge that we are at a psychoanalytic conference in the middle of several genocides and ecocides, and that we are hearing stories everyday of more Palestinians being massacred by a colonial regime funded by the American empire. I also want to emphasize that we can push back against this, we don’t have to accept it as just the way things are. In addition, I foreground concurrent devastation in Sudan and Congo, much of which is directly related to the greed of American corporate extractive demands—a modern echo and resultant context of colonialism— which continue to exploit people and planet, when we have multiple other options to pursue that do not involve exploitation. I also pay my respects to the Anacostans, Piscataway and Pamunkey peoples among others who were systematically forced from these lands. Considering lands as body, body as lands, this is also what we are talking about here today in this presentation: a systematic and intentional alienation from body, land, and mind and how we might reclaim that.

I’m going to kind of try to set the stage here by introducing the sport of strongman and discussing how I have used that sport as a way of using physical force to push back against objects that seem immovable or too heavy to lift. Of course, this is both a reality of the sport, and a metaphor. Sports, including strongman, are a performance in multiple senses of the word: We put on a show for the fans and the audience and each other, and we do something, we perform a physical and mental action that changes something tangible, if fleeting, in our environment and ourselves. Most athletics, in some way or another, embody performative elements: The athlete trains for a sport and enacts it, often enacting the sport during the training itself. Performance expresses itself differently in the clinical realm than it does for an activist or on the strongman lifting stage—yes, we call it a stage— but all these realms require us as participants to show up with full capacity, having undergone practice, commitment, and consistency, in order that, in Sara Ahmed’s (2004) definition of performance, we do what we say we will do.

Training for competitions in lifting sports is a very intense experience. I have trained for several low-stakes competitions in varied strength sports where the ‘‘win’’ was primarily just to have the experience rather than to have the prize (one of my favorite events encouraged athletes to compete by offering stuffed dinosaurs as prizes). Even so, I was intense about my training regiment. Like such things as psychoanalytic training, graduate school, and other formative endeavors, we invest a lot into things that we think will help us become better at something. This intensity, coupled with entanglements in diet culture and fat phobia to which I have been repeatedly subjected, has meant that I could easily try to use exercise as a method of bodily control, which turns play into punishment. Because of my investments in the culture in which I was raised and what my family has passed down to me, it has taken me several decades to unlearn this messaging and practice nourishment, and to experience the type of movement that allows me access to vitality, not punishment.

I do these things on purpose, in fact for multiple simultaneous purposes. In Strongman, the purpose includes lifting, but the purpose also becomes one of creating competitions and training as spaces and locations in which people gather. These are supportive and positive spaces, because we know the stakes are low and yet the competition and performance within us is fierce. We know we are not solving any major catastrophic problems, but we are working something out, together in community and also inside of ourselves.

Strings (2019) argues that control over food intake and body size is directly connected to maintaining white supremacy. In other words, if the white community is ’‘fit and well,’’ they could be better, superior colonizers. These colonizers are the white christian women who were/are needed to proliferate the creation of baby settlers in the West of the country, in order to continue with manifest destiny. In this way, religion, gender, body size, and ‘‘wellness’’ have been utilized to uphold an all-American hierarchy based on skin color, status, class, and affiliation. After all, if bodies in a settler-colonial capitalist society are representative of status, access, and identity, a lot is riding on how we look, and what spaces we can fit into, and how we are seen and registered by the dominant social narrative. So taking all of this, the fixation on “health and wellness” as code for white supremacy, we can see that the systems and practices of a settler-colonial society foreclose and prohibit the subject from developing an intuitive relationship between one’s body and mind. All of these messages of control that convolute our relationship to body size and shape turn the question, what body is a good enough body, into something answerable only in context to whatever entity is doing the measuring.

Da’Shaun Harrison, who is one of our esteemed keynote speakers, urges that body positivity, when utilized solely as a neoliberal placation of the shame that comes from internalized and introjected social messaging, is harmful and not actually liberatory. Considering the violence that is always already present in the social and juridical milieu, in their 2020 book “Belly of the Beast,” Harrison states, “The body — an entity of sorts, or the flesh we are born into— is not what creates the violence. What creates the violence is an ideology and the power to enforce it, interpersonally or systemically. This means that whether or not you love on, show up for, and transform how you view your body, the structure of the World does not shift. This is the harm of “body positivity”. It cannot produce anything more than a quasi self-confidence because it, for a long time now, has not been asked to. Body positivity individualizes something that is bigger than the individual. (p.7)”

So bringing this back to sports, and psychoanalysis, how can we transform not only how we live in and view our own bodies, but the spaces around them, to make these spaces fit us rather than the other way around? How might we transform the intrusive encroachment of the biological essentialism that regulates bodies in sport, which is tied to eugenics, which is tied explicitly to anti-Blackness and anti-transness, and prioritizes a cisheteropatriarchal narrative? Because— and this is true, in 1967 Katherine Switzer was the first woman to run the Boston Marathon and she was told she could not because her uterus would fall out if she ran!— it threatens the white, male, authoritative social order when racialized and gendered people have any physical agency at all. According to ideologies of racial capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy, we’re all just objects to be used. Checking Caster Semenya’s testosterone levels, for example, is explicitly anti-trans, anti-femme, and anti-Black.

This is where strongman provides so much for me, where I choose the use, I build my own body with these heavy odd objects, which are in fact just as odd as me, and which become queer with my use (Ahmed, 2018). And perhaps the odd object that needs lifting and throwing is the social order of this world itself. We do this not by disavowing the sociopolitical fact of anti-Blackness, and anti-fatness, and the “subaltern,” as built into a coercive system designed to control all of us. Let’s break these ideologies that seek to keep us confined, and take up space with our voices and our actions as well as our bodies.