The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research [1 ed.] 9781032335605, 9781032335650, 9781003320210, 1032335602

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‘This is a rebellious book. It is a response-able book. It is a book that collectively refuses the timidity and the judgementalism, when it comes to bodies that pervade the social and psychological sciences. The Bodies Collective challenges the absence of bodies, and the tendency to construe them as matter that is unspeakable, unthinkable, irrelevant, superficial, and even abject, in the context of research and research writing. This book challenges that contempt for, and fear of, the body, as it develops collaborative ways of working that move beyond that familiar version of the disembodied researcher. It is thus a courageous work that The Bodies Collective undertakes here, as they map out ways of working together that are safe, engaging, intimate, erotic, playful, and mobile. Through their collaboration with each other, they map out an academic skinship that enables each, singly and collectively, to flourish, in the pursuit of new understandings that begin with the matter and mattering of intra-acting bodies’. —Bronwyn Davies, Independent scholar, Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne and Emeritus Professor Western Sydney University, Australia ‘Challenging the Cartesian legacy, this important text will alert readers to hitherto neglected epistemic possibilities. Although the idea of texts without bodies has never made sense, much writing is tacitly body-silencing, thus—by extension—body-shaming. This is strange because the body is always thoroughly textualized and textualizing, in interaction and intra-action, and the embodied other is always you. In a marvellous, ground-breaking style, this book puts voice back into bodies, where it belongs’. —Alec Grant, PhD, Visiting Professor, University of Bolton, UK ‘An intimate, reflexive account of how to “be with”, “work with”, “stay with” one’s body in an academic context. This book is not a simple cookbook with ready-to-go recipes on doing Bodyography. It is an invitation to use some of its prompts affirmatively on the beautiful, rich methodological playfield qualitative scholars are currently creating for themselves’. —Karin Hannes, Professor in Transdisciplinary Studies and Creative Research methodology. Faculty of Social Sciences, KU Leuven, Belgium. Coordinator research group SoMeTHin’K; Curator Townsquare13; European Network Qualitative Inquiry ‘This book sparkles . . . it is a delicious read/quite a romp/into voicing the bodies. . ./and staying with the trouble so hang on to your knickers/readers each jewel written at an angle/tells the truth but ‘tells it slant’ to polyamorous academia/we the readers/are included on the blind date and invited in to the friendship between this group of scholarly oddkin writing image/full; seriously play/full and deeply lyrical/excoriating texts together we/the

readers become part of the resonation process and climb inside experiences of dysmorphia and grief/finding ourselves voices that have been disquietingly silenced in the academy/we seem/reading this book/always to have had our knickers on backwards/read this book! You too will explore your response-ability from the ache in the small of your back to your optic nerve/you will laugh a lot and cry—and sometimes sob at/with the embodied/poignant/piercing beauty of it all . . . so . . . read this book!’ —Jane Speedy, Emeritus Professor of Education (Qualitative Inquiry) University of Bristol, UK ‘The Collaborative Body unfolds like a folk dance as chapter by chapter, each participant in The Bodies Collective takes the lead in turn, sharing unique insight that centres the body/ies as origin and site of inquiry, as inquirer, as act of inquiring, while the others (readers included) witness, then respond. Aligning with post-feminist, post-modern, and post-human efforts at restoring the unity and connectedness of body-mind(s), this work leads the way for a new generation of scholars who are done with pretending their thoughts and minds exist beyond their embodiment. Relatable, accessible, enabling, and a delight to clap along to, from first encounter to final breath, this book reads as a processual creative act, birthing the field of Bodyography into being’. —Melissa Dunlop PhD, Psychotherapist, Researcher & Writer, Collaborative Artful Narrative Inquiry Network ‘This book is a breath of fresh air, a manuscript that teaches us alternative ways of researching and collaborating, allowing us to rethink the role of bodies in academia. The Bodies Collective presents us with a lively methodology full of humanity, creativity, and corporeality. This book teaches us to collaborate organically and to know and write about what is submerged in our bodies, teaching us ways to reach beyond words’. —Inés Bárcenes Taland, Associate Professor at Francisco de Vitoria University, Madrid, Spain ‘The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research constitutes one of the most body-centred research tools in the fields of qualitative inquiry. Packed with accessible exploratory activities and examples, The Collaborative Body illustrates methodologies of compassionate critique, international collaborations, and politically personal communions. I  recommend accepting their collective invitation to become a Bodyographer’. —Tami Spry, Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Communication and Performance Studies, St. Cloud State University, USA

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research challenges normative philosophies that have frequently neglected the body’s place in research and then illustrates how the body is essential for all meaning making. By ‘voicing the body’, the first part of this rebellious book problematizes how the body is used/assessed, yet often silenced in academic writing. This book then fluidly moves to celebrating the body through discussing taboo topics like sex/sexuality in friendship, underwear (knickers), ageing, and death, as well as how a non-binary body moves in a heteronormative world. Through the lens of Bodyography, this book does research differently—illuminating how the body flourishes, excites knowledge, and is complicated when placed on a ‘screen’. This book celebrates a collaborative and arts-based approach. This book is a dialogue between The Bodies Collective, with dialogic resonance sections between each chapter and art pieces throughout. This book will encourage all scholars to do research differently. Anyone with a thirst to challenge normative practices in academia and who wants research to be inspiring and playful will fall in love with this book. The Bodies Collective is an international group of researchers from different scientific and artistic fields. They aim to bring the body back into the focus of qualitative inquiry as a creator, explorer, and challenger of knowledge. The Bodies Collective does Bodyography, works collaboratively, and applies arts-based methods. Ryan Bittinger is a Doctor of Psychotherapy, specialising in therapist training and relational psychodynamic psychotherapy. They are a Practice Manager of Centred Self Psychotherapy, CA  & Director of Clinical Training at Maria Droste Counseling Center in Denver, CO, USA. Claudia Canella is a Qualitative health researcher at the Institute of Complementary and Integrative Medicine of the University Hospital Zürich, Switzerland; a Homoeopath in her own practice in Zürich, Switzerland; and an Artist.

Jess Erb is a Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and CEO/Founder of Centred Self Psychotherapy, Canada. Sarah Helps is a Consultant Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Psychotherapist, the lead for Children’s Psychological Services, and the editor of the Journal of Family Therapy. Mark Huhnen is an Independent Scholar, Systemic Psychotherapist, Coach, and Theatre Practitioner, in London, UK. Davina Kirkpatrick is an Artist, Independent Scholar and Visiting Specialist at the Peninsula Medical School, University of Plymouth, UK. Alys Mendus is a Parent, Artist, Independent Scholar, and Research Fellow in Disability Research Collaboration at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne, and Casual Academic at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia.

The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research Becoming Bodyography The Bodies Collective

Designed cover image: Academic Skinship. Oil on paper, 18 × 24 cm. 08.07.2022 ©Claudia Canella First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Ryan Bittinger, Claudia Canella, Jess Erb, Sarah Helps, Mark Huhnen, Davina Kirkpatrick, and Alys Mendus The right of Bodies Collective to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-33560-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-33565-0 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32021-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210 Typeset in Optima by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgements List of Contributors List of Figures Foreword: What Does The Bodies Collective Do to Academia? Tatiana Chemi

Introduction: We Are The Bodies Collective. Researchers Working Towards Change Through Bodyography

x xii xv xviii

1

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

1 Voicing the Unspeakable Body: The Politics of Appearance and the Silence That Pervades Academic Discourse

20

DR. JESS ERB



Resonances to Chapter 1: Conversation with The Bodies Collective Around Power and Privilege

34

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

2 Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography: When Is It Ok to Talk About Cis Women’s Bodies and Sex?

40

DR. ALYS MENDUS AND DR. DAVINA KIRKPATRICK



Resonances to Chapter 2: Abject autoethnography: A Conversation JESS ERB, ALYS MENDUS, AND DAVINA KIRKPATRICK

51

viii  Contents 3 (Un)dressing the Body: Underwear Stories and Audio Found Poetry

56

DR. ALYS MENDUS



Resonances to Chapter 3: The Academic Life of Knickers Discussion

68

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

4 Uncovering the Non-binary Body: Using Bodyography to Discover Gender Identity and Combat Body Dysmorphia

72

DR. RYAN BITTINGER



Resonances to Chapter 4: The Presence of Absence and Other Refractions of Gender Identity

82

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

5 Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief

87

DR. DAVINA KIRKPATRICK



Resonances to Chapter 5: The Presence of Absence and the Twelfthtide Nights Through Creative Serious Play

99

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

6 Snacks from Cooking After the Bodyography Recipe: The Body as an Epistemological Entity

108

CLAUDIA CANELLA



Resonances to Chapter 6: Between Academic Skinship and Authorship—Cultivating Different Tastes and Appetites

121

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

7 Talking/Walking to Myself: Questioning the Primacy of the Word

126

MARK HUHNEN



Resonances to Chapter 7: Matter as Mattering THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

135

Contents ix 8 Doing Online Embodied Research: Researching Together, Apart

141

DR. SARAH HELPS



Resonances to Chapter 8: I am Always in Relation to You, Whatever Form We Take Together

157

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE



An Ending to the Book and a Beginning of Sorts: Of Bodies, Organs, Time, and Space

161

THE BODIES COLLECTIVE

Index

171

Acknowledgements

We thank all the members of the wider Bodies Collective, the participants of our workshops, and academic colleagues for inspiring us and for shaping and experiencing Bodyography together. We acknowledge and thank all the former founding members of The Bodies Collective: Inés Bàrcenas Taland, Tara McGuiness, and Elena Serrano-Drozdowskyj. A special shout out to our creative academic friends and supporters from the first hour, Tatiana Chemi, Karin Hannes, and Hannah Shakespeare. We thank the editorial and publishing team at Routledge—Hannah Shakespeare, Eleanor Taylor, and Matt Bickerton—for believing in our vision. A warm thank you to Bronwyn Davies, Alec Grant, Karin Hannes, Jane Speedy, Melissa Dunlop, Inés Bàrcenas Taland, and Tami Spry for endorsing our work. A happy heart to Bobi Connelly-Mendus, our youngest member, for holding the space during our Zoom meetings and inspiring us with her artworks. Thanks to friends, family, partners, and lovers for enriching our bodies throughout the writing of this book. Thank you to our non-human animal friends—Ulf, Maggie, and Lino—who keep our hearts warm, our feet grounded, and who insist on being present in the space of our Zoom meetings. We acknowledge that those of us writing and working from Australia, the United States, and Canada are on stolen lands and pay our respects to all Indigenous people. Alys wrote her sections of this book while living in Bundjalung Country, Gubbi Gubbi Country, and Darumbal Country, Australia. We acknowledge and pay respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, past, present, and emerging. Ryan wrote their portions on the American Indian unceded land of the Ute, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples. We recognise that the sovereignty of the land was never ceded and that it remains Aboriginal land.

Acknowledgements

Figure 0FM.1 Bodies in motion, 2023. Source: © Bobi Connelly-Mendus.

xi

Contributors Please cite this work as: The Bodies Collective (2024). The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research: Becoming Bodyography. Routledge.

Ryan Bittinger (they/them) Ryan Bittinger is a Doctor of Psychotherapy, specialising in therapist training and Relational Psychodynamic Psychotherapy. Their work is most often focused on supporting those healing from trauma, in particular childhood sexual abuse. This passion crystallised while volunteering at the Kingdom Abuse Survivors Project (KASP) in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, and Ryan is proud to now sit on KASP’s Board of Trustees. Ryan is the Practice Manager of Centred Self Psychotherapy in Toronto, Ontario, and supports Dr. Erb, the founder, in taking therapy beyond the couch. Ryan is the Director of Clinical Training at Maria Droste Counseling Center in Denver, CO, USA, where their passion for training excellent therapists takes shape through rigorous internships, post-graduate fellowships, and supervisor training. Ryan’s research interests focus on understanding self, refining self-reflective therapeutic practice, and exploring the many facets of queer identities and bodies through experience-near accounts. Claudia Canella (any pronoun fits) As a member of The Bodies Collective, Claudia Canella explores collaborative, arts-based ways of experiencing the world through the body. Besides this, she is an artist, works as a qualitative health researcher at the Institute of Complementary and Integrative Medicine of the University Hospital Zürich, Switzerland, and runs a homeopathic practice in Zürich, Switzerland. She holds an MA in Cultural Anthropology, East Asian Art History, and Philosophy. Jess Erb (she/her) Dr. Jess Erb is a registered Psychodynamic Psychotherapist in Toronto, Ontario, specialising in trauma, BPD, and working closely with LGBTQIA+ populations. She is the founder and CEO of Centred Self, which is an

Contributors xiii innovative psychotherapy practice that meets clients through talk therapy as well as bodily therapies like: holistic nutrition & how trauma is formed in the body, yoga and breathwork therapy, boxing for anger expression therapy, and pottery for mental health and awareness therapy. Jess is an avid potter and is often found getting messy on the pottery wheel with her fluffy Samoyed Dog, Maggie. She is also a feminist activist who strives to bring bodily awareness, particularly awareness of ubiquitous silences, that are placed on the body—all bodies. Sarah Helps (she/her) Qualified as a clinical psychologist in 1995 and systemic psychotherapist in 2002, Sarah is a clinician, trainer, leader, researcher, and academic. She is the editor in chief of the Journal of Family Therapy. She works in London, and the Highlands, UK. She is interested in how communication actually happens, whether on screen or in-person and is currently working on the #BetterCommunicationProject. Mark Huhnen (he/him) Mark Huhnen is a social worker, systemic psychotherapist, and coach with a great interest in the expressive capacities of bodies since having gone to a physical theatre school. His doctoral thesis (currently being examined) titled ‘How to do things without words’ examines how systemic practice is neglecting non-verbal ways of working. Currently, he is involved with an indoor market building being taken over by the community. Davina Kirkpatrick (she/her) Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick is an Artist, Researcher, and Visiting Specialist in Medical Humanities at the Peninsula Medical School, University of Plymouth. Her background is in site-specific public art, socially engaged practice, and collaborative interdisciplinary projects that have involved national and international residencies, commissions, and exhibitions. She has an MA in Multidisciplinary Print. Her PhD, from the University of the West of England, focused on grief, loss, and living with the presence of absence. Her Postdoctoral Creative Economy Engagement Fellowship at the University of Plymouth, titled Immersive Environments and Serious Play: New Initiatives for Patient Practitioner Interaction, explored pain. Alys Mendus (she/her) Dr. Alys Mendus is a feminist parent, artist, researcher, innovative educational consultant, and casual academic at the Melbourne Graduate School for Education and Deakin University, Australia. Alys is from the United

xiv  Contributors Kingdom but has just spent the last four and a half years living in tropical Australia. Alys’ background is as a very itinerant teacher from Secondary Science, Primary supply teaching, Outdoor Education, Special Schools, an International School in Switzerland, retraining in Early Childhood, Steiner Waldorf, and Forest Schools, which led to a MA in Learning and Teaching (Sheffield Hallam, 2012). From this, Alys received a PhD scholarship in Freedom to Learn (University of Hull, 2018), which allowed her to visit over 180 places and educate differently in 23 countries. Alys’ first book, Searching for the Ideal School Around the World: School Tourism and Performative Autoethnographic-We was published by Brill in December  2021. Alys did not find the Ideal School and will be homeeducating their almost 4-year-old!

Figures

FM.1 Bodies in motion, 2023. © Bobi Connelly-Mendus. 0 0.1 The Bodies Collective first discussing writing this book with Routledge, 2019. © The Bodies Collective. 0.2 The seven authors share stories of how they are navigating life within the COVID-19 pandemic and wondering about ‘The Body through the Screen’, July 2020 (see Chapter 8). © The Bodies Collective. 0.3 The Group expands as we come together for our ‘dream team’ session of Bodyography as activism event at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Edinburgh, UK. February 2019. © The Bodies Collective. 0.4 February 2018 — The Bodies Collective beaming as we have successfully completed our first ever Game Changer even at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Leuven, Belgium. © The Bodies Collective. 0.5 The Bodies Collective moving separately and together, workshop at ECQI Leuven 2018. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 0.6 The Bodies Collective planning for the ECQI 2019 conference in a basement pub in Edinburgh, UK. © The Bodies Collective. 0.7 Bodyography badges, Edinburgh 2019. © The Bodies Collective. 1.1 Jess Erb writing with her dog Maggie. © Jess Erb. 1.2 Maggie showing off her personality—one that always wants attention and all your focus: She’s such a diva! © Jess Erb. 3.1 ‘I have a bag of old knickers. Do you?’ Cyanotype and paper cut, shown as a black and white image. Artwork and photograph by Alys Mendus. © Alys Mendus. 4.1 Jess Erb and Ryan Bittinger at their presentation of ‘Where does power go if no one wants it?’ at ECQI, 2019. © Jess Erb.

xi 2

2

5

8 11 14 16 22 37 59 86

xvi  Figures 5.1

Tying the Threads, April 2013. Coloured photograph printed on archival paper shown as black and white image. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 91 5.2 Tying the Threads, June 2015. Coloured photograph printed on archival paper shown as black and white image. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 91 5.3 Tether black collagraph over coloured giclee print, shown as black and white image. There are seven variations each in an edition of 10. Size of print 26 × 26 cm on A3 archival quality paper. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 95 5.4 The Empty Fence black screen print over coloured giclee print, shown as black and white image. There are seven variations each in an edition of 10. Size of print 26 × 26 cm on A3 archival quality paper. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 96 5.5 Absence/presence (pencil on paper). ©Mark Huhnen. 100 5.6 In front of the white canvas, eavesdropping to the murmur of a lost connection, I step out. Twelfthtide night picture 26 December 2021/January 2022. Coloured Acryl on paper, 10.5 × 14.8 cm, shown as a black and white image. ©Claudia Canella. 102 5.7 I dreamt I had articulated wings that unfurled. I was standing on a bridge—a gap between and showing them to someone. Twelfthtide night picture for 26 December 2021/January 22. Coloured collage on paper 20 × 13 cm, shown as black and white image. ©Davina Kirkpatrick.102 5.8 The magic reveals itself beyond the light. Response to the Twelfthtide night picture 26 December 2021/ January 2022. Colour Acryl on canvas, 30 × 24 cm, shown as a black and white image. ©Claudia Canella. 103 5.9 Response to the Twelfthtide picture 26 December 2021/ January 2022. Coloured photo on archival paper 21 × 14.5 cm, shown as black and white image. ©Davina Kirkpatrick.104 5.10 Living in the bush, Yeppoon Garden, Sepia collagraph print (June 2022), Added colour pencil highlights (December 2022), shown as a black and white image. Artwork and photograph © Alys Mendus. 106 6.1 In motion I. Acryl on paper, 14.6 × 20.8 cm. 03 June 2022 ©Claudia Canella. 111 6.2 Improvisation card set of Claudia: Body parts—‘Upper legs’; Qualities—‘airy’; Emotions—‘trusting’. Original language: Swiss German, translated by Claudia, ©Claudia Canella.113

Figures xvii 6.3 6.4 6.5 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 8.1 8.2

Academic Skinship. Oil on paper, 18 × 24 cm. 08 July 2022 ©Claudia Canella. 115 To face my subconscious frightens me. Pencil on paper, 14.8 × 21 cm. 01 October 2022 ©Claudia Canella. 117 A visual creative response—black watercolour on seed paper. © Davina Kirkpatrick. 123 The neutral mask. © Mark Huhnen. 131 Mark interviewing the hatfrog. ECQI19, Edinburgh, UK. Pencil on paper. © Claudia Canella. 136 Davina’s first puppet, seen guarding her studio. © Davina Kirkpatrick.139 Mark shows us his puppets via Zoom. © Jess Erb. 140 Sarah on a Zoom call on her ironing board in June 2020. © Sarah Helps. 148 The feet and the screen. © Sarah Helps. 150 The authors gather on Zoom to complete the book, March 2023 © The Bodies Collective. 162 Bodyography in a Zoom session. © The Bodies Collective. 169

Foreword: What Does The Bodies Collective Do to Academia?

When I met The Bodies Collective, my whole scholarly organism awoke and flourished. At conferences, one least expects to find a collective body that turns into anonymity, the All-encompassing Academic Ego! Conferences are marketplaces where academic rockstars negotiate their predominance at the top of the hierarchy by performing at the centre of the stage. The Bodies Collective playfully brought to the scholarly community an alternative approach. At the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in 2017 (USA), I met Davina and Alys, and their presence filled me with joy and curiosity. During one of the social events, they were informally commenting on their provocative paper addressing sexual taboos and preconceptions in unapologetic ways. As a consequence, I was eager to reconnect with them at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Edinburgh, UK, in 2019. Something that I did, only to find out that they had multiplied, all of them. Alys was becoming Alys-and-Baby, and the pair had become a group: The Bodies Collective. Members had distinct names and bodies, but they insisted on calling themselves The Bodies Collective. This was a joint definition that did not flatten any of them into a grey zone or assimilate their differences into one single uniform being. They were warm, beautifully provoking, colourful, and inviting. Their presence at the conference was entirely counterintuitive in/for academic praxes: they insisted on bringing bodies into/as thinking, they invited their participants to the floor, and they shaped the room for being silly, playful, and curious about each other. On top of it, they were a collective body. What? They did not want or need academic credits, could it be so? How is their institution going to assess their performance and earn money from their work? Their energy was contagious and their perspectives a fresh breath. They even produced a badge (Figure 0.7) with the collective’s name on, something that I received with pleased gratefulness and that I have been proudly wearing since on my red jacket. Finding myself on the floor in the role of a Scottish Hairy (Highland) Cow in conversation with a cheeky monkey during their workshop (a ‘game changer’), all this made sense: the ways in which our stiff academic bodies were

Foreword: What Does The Bodies Collective Do to Academia? xix intra-acting with each other and establishing unusual and deep conversations, the embodied reflections we were able to share safely, the leaps of thinking we dared to experience, our becoming playful bodies. It all made sense. It all resonated. It all brought more conversations and curiosity about each other. In 2020, some of us met again at the ECQI in Malta, in a weird pre-COVID-19 atmosphere. What a relief to see that the collective was present, alive, and kicking. The initiative had not been stifled by institutional needs; on the contrary, it seemed to thrive and flourish. My curiosity grew into deeper respect and into the wish/hope/need to be involved. The need to go visit and make kin (Haraway, 2016) with people who were reclaiming the body as home for learning, the senses as knowledge, and affects as necessary. Malta was for most of us the last large gathering, the last trip before a 2-year-long isolation. A strange period where bodies hid behind screens for safety reasons began in uncertainty and disbelief. The prolonged seclusion and the related suspension of what bodies were used to do make it even more essential that The Bodies Collective reclaim embodied entanglements. Rethinking the body in intra-active exchanges with technology, nature, and other humans was compelling. This book answers this need and offers a perspective on the intelligent work of The Bodies Collective. Its pedagogical consequences are as far-reaching as its political implications. Taking the body seriously is in fact a rebellious (Burnard et al., 2022) act in today’s academia: knowledge work is still acknowledged if and when it is cognitive, linear, measurable, and commercial. Pleasure in the exciting adventure of inquiry is denied (Riddle et  al., 2017), a paradox if we think that one of the master sciences of knowledge, ‘philosophy’, originally meant ‘love of knowledge’. Bodies are silent, silenced, invisible, and shamed in academia. Especially some bodies: women, other-abled bodies, ageing bodies, bodies of different colours and shapes. Once, at a research group meeting, all the participants were speaking sitting down, motionless behind the wall of a desk. When my turn came, I stood up saying ‘well, I have a body, you may as well look at it’, and kept on with my contribution, without helping to notice the embarrassment of my colleagues of all genders. Instead of looking at me, they turned their gaze away. I was (made) invisible, neutral, even though I was standing up and visible to all; my voice, scent, and body temperature were filling the space. But I became invisible. This book is about encounters, friendship, love, love of knowledge, and what bodies can do. It establishes an intimate relationship with us, the readers, and invites us to co-create appropriate critical-creative meaning. The work of The Bodies Collective is brave, critical, creative, generous, and provoking. It relates rebelliously to scholarly content by means of its simplicity and straightforwardness, and by doing so, it radically challenges myths of incomprehensibility, the powerful weapon that holds on to (white, male) academic privilege. The Bodies Collective disconnects the very mechanisms of academic violence: knowledge that is singular (exclusively cognitive, linear,

xx  Foreword: What Does The Bodies Collective Do to Academia? and verbal), measurable (by numbers and experiments), obscure (our language must keep hidden for the few the secrets of truth), and pompous (the dark side of seriousness). To this end, The Bodies Collective proposes knowledge and knowledge-making that is multiple, resonant, poetic, and playful. The reader will not find any dualistic alternative between body/thought, individual/collective, process/product. One example for all: the text is built up as narrative and dialogue, and dialogues reflect the process of collective thinking. I find myself within the machine room of the making of the book, in conversation with the different voices that make up the collective. I am not outside the book; I am not at the periphery of sense-making; the authors are not making sense for me but with me; I am welcomed to inhabit this space freely and creatively. What does The Bodies Collective’s work do to me? As a scholar and human, I  am moved. I  feel taken care of. I  am inspired by their courage. I learn. I dream. I hope. Tatiana Chemi References Burnard, P., Mackinlay, E., Rousell, D.,  & Dragovic, T. (2022).  Doing rebellious research: In and beyond the Academy. Brill. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Riddle, S., Harmes, M. K., & Danaher, P. A. (Eds.). (2017). Producing pleasure in the contemporary university. Brill.

Dr. Tatiana Chemi Associate Professor at Department of Culture and Learning, Aalborg University Visiting Associate Professor at University of Chester/Philip Barker Centre for Creative Learning, UK Visiting Researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Norway Aalborg University | Kroghstræde 3, 3.206 | 9220 Aalborg | Denmark T: (+45) 22393546 | Email: [email protected] | Twitter @TatianaChemi Web: http://personprofil.aau.dk/124693#/minside

Introduction We Are The Bodies Collective. Researchers Working Towards Change Through Bodyography The Bodies Collective1 A Collective of Voices Who Trouble Epistemic Knowledge Making In this book, seven researchers living in/from the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, and Germany celebrate the Body and its ‘affects’ within the research space. This group is part of a wider The Bodies Collective, and together they tie these provocations together, taking an in-depth exploration of the new research modality of Bodyography that The Bodies Collective has been co-creating since the group was first formed in 2017. The Body is political, changing, invitational, creative, moving, differently abled, often silenced and sometimes powerful. The body does something in each space that it finds itself in. As the reader of this book, we welcome you into a qualitative research modality that moves away from pen-to-paper and into a conversation on what a body can do through Bodyography. We do this by troubling the motif of the top-down structure of a sole researcher examining an idea as if as an abstracted entity, who then presents work that is presumably fully polished and finished. The Bodies Collective denies this ‘epistemic stance’ that is often seen within the sciences by engaging collaboratively in-between/with chapters and their authors, which we call Resonances. Bodies cannot help but be affected by each other in space. They resonate with each other. We wanted this book and the corresponding thoughts to reflect this. We have also collectively written both the Introduction and Conclusion of the book. We do this to embody a living dialogue on how the body matters as matter (Barad, 2007), which is a continuing conversation. It is our aim that this book will spark an array of questions and delights in your own place as a researcher, academic, life-long learner, and, as always, a body. The Why Behind This Book: Troubling the Mind/Body Dualism *Jess’ back hurts. She is leaning over her computer. Worried about what to write for this intro; how to define a moving concept like Bodyography? She’s recently made a soda loaf, and now gets up to cut herself a slice and put hummus on it. She goes back to her computer, her procrastination not lost on her.* 1

 Please correctly cite this work as “The Bodies Collective (2024). The Collaborative Body in Qualitative Research: Becoming Bodyography. Routledge.” DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-1

2 The Bodies Collective

Figure 0.1 The Bodies Collective first discussing writing this book with Routledge, 2019. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

Figure 0.2 The seven authors share stories of how they are navigating life within the COVID-19 pandemic and wondering about ‘The Body through the Screen’, July 2020 (see Chapter 8). Source: © The Bodies Collective.

This book challenges the assumption of a mind-body dualism that the body is separate from the mind’s rational processing of ‘data’ within qualitative research. This book thus joins a movement of post-modern, post-humanist, and embodied-inclined writers who are working to centralise the body in qualitative inquiry (see e.g. Ellingson, 2017; Hervey, 2012; Leigh & Brown,

Introduction 3 2021; Snowber, 2016; Springgay  & Truman, 2018). While we are excited to contribute to this movement, we find that the body as matter mattering (Barad, 2003, 2007) can often feel neglected as the corporeal body is made to feel abject (Grosz, 1994; Weiss, 1999). As Kesselring (2015) asserts, even with the numerous writings on the importance of the body within the social sciences, we have not moved closer to understanding the ‘bodily dimension making up our agency and shaping our lived experiences’ (p.  4). In fact, she asserts that our gaze upon the body is still far too distant, which she asserts is because our very methodological approaches are still ‘inseparable from theoretical concepts’ (Kesselring, 2015, p. 4). *Jess gets off the couch, stretches, and washes her plate. She sits on the floor to pet Maggie, her Samoyed puppy. Getting up, she stretches again and then sits back down to get back to writing—this piece is coming along now.* This move towards mind-over-body is even more pronounced given that much of our research involves writing; even practices that embrace the body are then inscribed through the act of taking ‘fieldnotes’. We argue that this abstracts the practice from the bodily, experiential realm. As Hastrup (1994, p. 174) acknowledges: The almost mythological status of fieldnotes as recorded observations has obscured the pertinence of the highly emotionally loaded ‘headnotes’, the unwritten recollections. This has fostered a view of intentionality as located in a disembodied mind, and a view of agency as the outcome of cognitive rationality alone. While much of social science research may have moved beyond these assertions, the felt sense of the body, how it moves, relates, is viewed, and labelled, is still often abjected and demeaned in literature. It is simply assumed that the body is not academic enough. We disagree. This book is our celebration of all that the body can do, can be, and can achieve within research. Defining and Voicing the Body in Bodyography We define the body as that which is living, developing, moving, and breathing—an organism that is composed of living cells and extracellular materials and organised into tissues, organs, and systems. We define the body as felt-sense, feeling, sensing, sensating, intensities, flows, and romance. *Ryan says ‘don’t write romance—it doesn’t quite fit. Maybe ‘intimacy’ better illustrates the comingling of bodies’. Jess writes ‘intimacy’ instead.*

4  The Bodies Collective  . . . and intimacy. We posit that the body is the means of interacting, intra-acting (Barad, 2007), and engaging in our environment and with each other. We believe that bodies are never neutral (Erb, 2019, 2021; Lang et al., 1990) and both respond and are responded to based on their appearance and their intersectional political and societal meanings (Erb, 2021). The corporeal body, and its affects and impacts on research, needs to be brought to the forefront of our work as researchers. Consequently, privileging the corporeal body has feminist and political implications (Bordo, 1993; Grosz, 1994). As Braidoitti (2011, p.  12) writes, ‘We simply must assume that we do not know what a body can do’. What Braidotti is pointing to is the multiplicity that the body welcomes. The body is exterior, felt within interior processes. The body tells us about emotionality—feelings and affect, intuitions, symptoms, biological, chemical, and physical processes, thoughts, and beliefs that are experienced bodily if never voiced. Therefore, for Erb (2019), the term ‘voicing the body’ illuminates the ways in which the body is intra-active, contradictory, paradoxical, and our first and foremost point of contact with another (see also Merleau-Ponty, 1968). Voicing the body does not grant supremacy to the ‘voice’, but rather allows these intra-actions to have a place within academic literature, showing the body’s place within discourses that often privilege the mind. The body has a voice, even if it is often silenced and subdued. Voicing the body breaks these bonds of silence and sheds light on all that the body is, even if it is yet unknown. And yet it is, and it becomes, especially in relation to other bodies. It is I, in this moment, because you-the-other is you (Helps, 2019). Each author in this book champions the diversity, generosity, and complexity of our bodies and explores how meanings of the body also implicate it within the research space. This is not simply an embodied practice—the very body itself is a form of research. In a sense, we consider the body in multiple positions: as data and the body, providing a method and means of data gathering, it is with, through and in the body that research is made and impacted upon. For this reason, we purposely have not, again, made the body an adjunct to the research process—for example, by naming our work Body Ethnography. Instead, we have redirected the typical methodological approach to forefront the body’s place within research, and have thus named our methodology Bodyography. Bodyography is the act of research with, through, in, and between bodies. It is a research methodology that champions felt-sense approaches, complicates understandings of bodily processes as abject (see Resonance—Abject Autoethnography by Erb, Mendus, and Kirkpatrick, between Chapters  2 and 3), and recognises that no mode of knowledge-making happens without the body. Bodyography research is a multidisciplinary meaning-making; knowledge need not only be voiced and written but also be felt, intuited, and enhanced through being-with practices.

Introduction

5

Figure 0.3 The Group expands as we come together for our ‘dream team’ session of Bodyography as activism event at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Edinburgh, UK. February 2019. Source: © Jess Erb.

*Ryan texts to say he just woke up and feels ‘meh’ . . . he dusts his body off, and begrudgingly goes into the google doc to re-read this intro. The body in Bodyography is complicated, and this is what makes it a vital methodological concept—it embraces, rather than shies away from, that which is taboo and troubling in research. For example, the ‘we’ in this book are all white, Western, and educationally privileged. We all see ourselves as active researchers. Some of us are young, others older, yet we are all mostly able-bodied. Some of us are parents, others are not. Religion and spirituality are things we addressed more by means of art than by discussion within the group (see e.g., the subchapter about the Twelfthtide nights in the resonances to Davina’s chapter). Our gender expressions vary. Importantly, we try to examine how our biases, blind spots, and similarities shutter our experiences. We acknowledge that these body differences afford us both power and privilege and are intimately felt by each of us. Our intention is to both acknowledge our structurally privileged position, and to be troubled by/ trouble that position. Bodyography is also not linear and therefore not clearly definable. It is a form of geography, a way of thinking about where we come from. For example, some women in Erb’s research on therapists relationships with their bodies in

6  The Bodies Collective the therapy room spoke of the body as geography (Erb, 2019)—navigating the landscape of the body as a nomad might experience the intimate land around them. We often intentionally use active verbs rather than stagnant states of being (e.g. become rather than are), as Bodyography is an active and engaged process, not an end goal or destination. As we navigate our bodies, we become intimate with our own contours, touching and feeling our way into a space that can, at times, feel taboo. We hope that by this living/moving/ becoming definition, we enable the reader to stumble with us as we navigate how the body does research. Therefore, the purpose of this book is to describe and show the evolution of a methodology for working from within and about the body as a form of collaborative inquiry. Within this, we demonstrate the affordances and constraints of writing (‘down’) the body, the difficulties of collaboration and working as a collective, and showing Bodyography as iterative, ever communicating and changing, through Chapter Resonances. As we push at these boundaries of academic/mind-over-body restraint we have been told to accept, we stumble over hierarchy within ourselves. Who will write and edit, who has the time and space, and whose influence guides the group? We fall in and out of hierarchy in a collective practice that challenges itself in order to maintain its ethics and seek change. The Multiple Bodies of The Bodies Collective Questions that we often ask are: What privileges do we have that enable us to still be here? What do we give up to be here? What’s in it for us?! Davina— pink-cheeked and slightly giddy from Prosecco drinking. Alys— rushed downstairs to join the chat still in her pyjamas, one moment hot and almost asleep snuggled up to her 3-year-old, and then switching hats from parent to academic. She wishes she was drinking prosecco with Davina. Jess— Writing into the Voicing of the Body meanwhile, my dogs are tearing up the garden and there is dirt all over my deck space . . . I run out to yell at them, and quickly lose my place in the document as the writing continues without me. Mark— sitting in my living room, reading. But also feeling a little sorry for myself. ‘Come on, Mark!’ Self-pity is the last thing you want. And COVID will pass again. Actually, I am grateful that it is mild this time. Sarah— fingers so cold that it’s hard to type, happiest to see others on screen but worried about the similarities that we share: if innovation emerges from difference, is there enough difference between us to produce something useful? Claudia— I am recovering from two consecutive influenza viruses and am just so exhausted, and pretty busy processing all the English;) x heart x Ryan— logging on asynchronously to join in from Colorado hours (or is it days?) later. My body resists as I wipe exhaustion from my eyes and attempt

Introduction 7 to clear my depressed and work-stress-addled mind. I  realise it is so much easier to feel pulled into my passion for our collective when our bodies are together! I feel a deep sense of gratitude for my co-writers’ dedication to making this happen and gently calling me back in. We maintain multiple voices, as we are multiple bodies, and we seek to trouble the concept of a disembodied researcher through ‘voicing the body’ (Erb, 2019). In our voicing the body (or rather, bodies), we are attempting to provoke or invite dialogue with(in) you. This book is active and alive, and to keep with this ethic, you will encounter the voices of various The Bodies Collective members in a variety of writing styles to highlight each of our preferred writing techniques. In this way, you are welcomed to get to know each writer through their preferred writing style and to hear them as they write about their passion regarding Bodyography. Through the Resonances to each chapter, we offer reflections/diffractions, a dialogue through a variety of thoughts and references to different thought traditions. These interactive elements are always alive within The Bodies Collective; artfully illuminating how theory and practice can be felt, heard, and grappled with from within the bodily experience. Merging the Academy with the Physical We voice the body in ways that challenge hegemonic and hierarchical workings within academia—established by academic hierarchies built by economically privileged white men, who ‘dick’-tate particular ways of knowing and writing. As we discuss (now via Zoom) our thoughts and understandings of hierarchy and The Bodies Collective, we are beginning to unpick the challenge of power and personality dynamics that still occur even if we make small changes to normative assumptions of hierarchy. Some of us have lived through many uncomfortable academic conferences indeed, it was in—perhaps because of?—these spaces that we initially came together. Academic conferences can provide a glorious venue to nurture academics’ need to present our ideas, receive critical feedback, and learn from our peers and experts in our fields. Conferences are also social spaces that blur the lines of usual professional academic interaction, spaces in which the blurring of disciplinary boundaries, contexts, normative interactional patterns, and ways of discussing things has the potential for change (Biggs et al., 2017; Mendus et  al., 2021). Sometimes these blurrings and changes are helpful, leading to collaborations and exciting projects, but sometimes they are not. Sarah: I  recall standing in a bar in Champaign, Illinois, being desperate to join in with the talk and the laughter and the dancing but unable to find a way in, not knowing anyone, feeling that I  didn’t fit, that I was too old/young sober/drunk, inexperienced/not the right kind of researcher/too positivist/not creative enough . . . I wanted to make a connection but was on such high alert that I was frozen to the spot,

8 The Bodies Collective and perhaps sending off signals of fight and flight and fright rather than of engagement and joining . . . wondering how do you get to join this club? The challenge that we encounter—and you, the reader, are witnessing it here—is to translate this multi-layered, faceted, complex, and at times paradoxical experience into text. In joining the corporeal turn within academia with scholars like Grosz (1994) and Weiss (1999), we seek to uncover the ways in which the body has been used, abused, and ignored throughout academia. But also to celebrate the ways it has and can yet be the focus of key understandings of knowledge. Even when, especially when, we are presenting Bodyography, the lens through which we and others view our bodies diffracts, working from within and about the body as a form of collaborative inquiry. Assumptions come—‘are they allowed to say that?’ Or does society permit that body to have that voice? History of The Bodies Collective

Figure 0.4 February 2018 — The Bodies Collective beaming as we have successfully completed our first ever Game Changer even at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in Leuven, Belgium. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

Introduction 9 The First Game Changer

To introduce our ‘Game Changer’ multi-day workshop at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) in 2018, participants came into a relatively open room; all the tables were moved to the back, and we put the chairs in a circle. Those holding the space spread themselves around the circle of chairs, inviting those who attended to join the circle. From this circle, the voices spoke.

Body 1 To speak of the body in any manner—from the sexual, sensual, to the physical, physiological, psychological, emotional—our bodies house us, whether we make a conscious understanding of who we are. Why we are here. To be here together, we are bodies. Merleau-Ponty states that we can only come to understand the world and others through the body. But what does that mean? Body 2 How is the body forever implicated in how we come to understand the world around us? That is why we are here at this Game Changer—to inquire into the depths of the body. The ways it feels, moves, inquires, senses, and feels pleasure—touch, taste—of how it looks and is perceived. We are here today to be. . . In our bodies. What happens when the body is repellent to us? Body 3 To be with each other. This space is a bodily space. It always is! But during these three sessions, the body is given focus. But how to speak into a body? How to inquire into its shapes, its shame, and its abject spaces that aren’t talked about? What silences pervade the space of the body? Body 4 This is a safe space where safety and consent are paramount. You are always invited to collaborate, but it is never expected. Being in the room, observing by the door, or being in the centre of a workshop is all participation in the collaboration of bodies as we explore together. Body 5 This is a space for the unsayable. For the spaces that are often neglected—whatever this might look like. To speak into the body, into

10  The Bodies Collective all of its places, means that this is a space of inquiry into the unknown. This is where you all come in. Body 6 This is a mutual discovery. Please come as you are. And come to this space knowing that even as workshop sessions are led, it is a mutual journey of togetherness. There will be workshop facilitators, and yet everyone here is a learner in this space. Bring ideas. Body 7 Bring your opinions, voice. Bring your fears and expectations. Bring your bodies into this space. And as we inquire together, we bring ourselves into pathways newly formed from our mutual inquiries together. This is a space for you. How? Together, we will find this out.

It was with this intra-action of various voices that we welcomed those around us to ‘know’ us, our work, and our passions related to the body, as Bodyography. This vignette also shows the different inflections of Bodyography for each of us; for some, it is the place of ‘unsafety’ through the safety of the group, for others, it is a space of mutual inquiry, for others it is a place of friendship, kinship. Bodyography is always a place of collaborative inquiry (Mendus in Mendus et  al., 2021). It is a knowing, a multiple-knowing, of bodies in space, in time, in privileges, and in political positionality. It is a snapshot, a trans-materiality of embodiment. ‘It All Started with a Pint at a Conference’: The Movement of The Bodies Collective

The pictures presented throughout this Introduction show a forward movement from our first dream team session in Leuven, Belgium, to us working across the world and hosting workshops and seminars virtually. Bodies that once hugged and moved together are now accessible only via a screen, anticipating free movement in the months to come. As Sarah shows in Chapter 8, even on a screen, relational intimacy can be created by paying careful attention to faces and bodies and by seeing the different spaces that Bodyographers occupy across the globe. But it all started with a pint. And more pints. Like the iterative nature of Bodyography, there is a geography to its collective starting. Sitting together at a pub in Urbana-Champaign, Alys and Davina talked about their performative piece ‘Nobody Comes’ (see Chapter 2). Ines

Introduction

11

Figure 0.5 The Bodies Collective moving separately and together, workshop at ECQI Leuven 2018. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

Body 1 I invited them to this house in the south of Spain after several beers in that Pub in Urbana-Champaign. Come to my house—I said—at the beginning of September. Body 2 Travelling beyond our usual boundaries, into the unknown brave, vulnerable, and bold. Body 3 The personal/the flesh. We sit closer together. I tussle a desire to write the abject. Write my own unacceptable. I want to push against my politeness.

12  The Bodies Collective Body 4 We are not all women, or even always women. Is this the wrong term to define our bodies? I think about us all being Nefelibata or Cloudwalkers. Pushing and questioning conventions. Body 5 My body does not represent the tides of complexity that revolve inside me, my body traps me, demands my attention, and pulls me from the clouds. Will I  ever be able to dare bring myself from the clouds to this imperfect body of mine? Body 6 I am wearing a socially respectable one-piece swimsuit that I  got on sale at Tesco. I feel constrained in this, and yet I have admitted to the group that I have never worn a two-piece suit. I would feel too exposed. Exposed. Constrained. Binaries that speak to my own feelings right now. I feel constrained in my body and in my mind. Yet I felt exposed as I shared my earlier writing. I am emotionally putting on a two piece. and Tara were getting more pints. And Jess was challenging them that there needed to be more to what they were saying: Jess asks: ‘Where is the explicit, really? How is the abject still constricting the writing space, the performative space? Is it because we are at a conference? Or is there something bigger going on here?’ In that pub, we were becoming friends, colleagues, scholars. We were also, unbeknownst to us, becoming The Bodies Collective. In this space, we decided to go to the South of Spain to write together. And to explore how the body could reposition itself back into the academy. From our time spent in Spain in the fall of 2017 to our first Game Changer workshop at ECQI in 2018, we have now presented at ECQI each subsequent year—finding basements in pubs to work in, cafes to sip tea in, and now welcoming each other into our homes through the screen. We’ve published journal articles on activism (The Bodies Collective, 2021), the politics of bodily appearance (Erb, 2021), and have a chapter in Arts and Mindfulness Education for Human Flourishing (The Bodies Collective, 2023). Our work has brought us around Europe, Canada, North America, Australia, and the

Introduction 13 Body 7 I do not feel that my hand is connected to my body; my eyes are seeing from a deep place that is far away from me physically here now. I am here now. I hear the waves washing up on the beach and the goosebumps on my skin as the sun has dropped behind the mountains. I stopped just then to glance up at the trees, and I felt myself falling back into my body with a bump. Body 1 My skin is ageing, my shape is changing, I am crumbling from the inside out, and my bones are no longer able to support all I want to do. I have to be careful, take care, and be mindful of a less than youthful, perfect body. I now depend on medication to keep my vagina plump and lubricated. Body 2 This morning I am getting in touch with the experience of being different things in this flesh, in these bones, in this body. My grandma’s legs, my father’s brown skin, dark sharp eyes, and curly hair; my mother’s breasts and elongated hands. Are our bodies really ours? Body 3 The safety and privilege of white western women and men are written on our bodies. Bodies are not always safe. I want to be naked. To be free. I’m afraid. Why? Cloudwalkers—I am an imposter. In this space, I am free and not free. I want to explore, and yet the feelings of prudence and (anti)liberation haunt me. Body 4 Sunshine and warm air surround us and hold me as do the mountains, grey-green against the white-blue sky. Do I dare let myself uncurl and unfurl. What place does reticence have? Body 5 I have come through years of feeling my body being used and assessed. Years of hiding and using sensuality in a way that is socially acceptable to me.

14 The Bodies Collective Body 6 I feel anxious about my absence and about the choices I have to make, but, ultimately, I  want to be close to my mother. Her body is failing her, turning in on itself. An autoimmune disease is the body attacking itself. My anxiety resides in my chest, my stomach bloats, a restlessness inhabits me.

Figure 0.6 The Bodies Collective planning for the ECQI 2019 conference in a basement pub in Edinburgh, UK. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

world through virtual conference spaces. It is here, in writing this book, that we embrace the stickiness of having the contours of the body flattened but not diminished on the page. The Six Prompts to Bodyography: The Flourishing Body In our Chapter for Arts and Mindfulness, we go through six tasks or prompts (The Bodies Collective, 2023, p.  166) that can be used in the process of Bodyography. We are dedicated to not only bringing the body into focus but also illustrating how it can flourish given helpful conditions. The six prompts we created for human flourishing were: creating safety, becoming pro-motion, activating the ventral vegas through Polyvagal theory, employing arts-based approaches, collaborating, and embracing flourishing. These prompts are not

Introduction 15 the only ways to do Bodyography, but they are powerful tools to aid in how we can use this methodology. In this book, Ryan’s Chapter 4 and Claudia’s Chapter 6 both explore these six prompts. The Invitation: Become a Bodyographer with Us We invite and welcome you, reader, to explore becoming a Bodyographer with us. To dive into this invitation, unlike most academic books, you will not be divorced from this process. Don’t read us in a distanced and removed way. We welcome your voice, and welcome you to join the ‘call to resistance’ in reflecting from within your body, on your own body, its voice, and its experiences. We would like you to voice into this process with us. Becomings, as discussed by Deleuze and Guattari (1987), are enacted through the fringes, the edges of societies. All of us are in some way(s) on the fringe of something, including when we write as Bodyographers. We are all drawn by the tensions of our own lives, bodies, experiences, and fields. We are in tension together (Springgay  & Truman, 2018). Our tension and constant challenges are the sites of our learning and growing. Becoming is in process, never finished or stagnant, ‘unfinalised’ (Frank, 2004). We welcome your voice, and welcome you to join the convocation in reflecting on your own body, its nuances, and your experience (Mendus et al., 2021). Come into this tension with us. Join us! Disagree with us! Have feelings and noticings! We do this so that we might collaboratively inspire and perturb you, reader. For this to be an embodied experience of you reaching into your feltsenses of body and starting to voice your experience. As Bodyographers, we transgress boundaries and nomadically stumble along the contours of the body (Erb, 2019). This means recognising that the outer shell of the body—its impulses, conscious and unconscious expressions—matters, as it is the intraaction (Barad, 2007) of stumbling along these contours—of shapes, sizes, smells, movements, disability, colours, race, and economics—that welcomes

Body 1: What am I doing here? Writing, using words? Using words in order to make sense of something that was beyond the word? Was that the point of it? Maybe it was not but maybe it was. Maybe it was and is not about excluding the word but about bringing the body and the other forms of expression in, giving them room, seeing how they interact with the word. Body 2: How can I make people think, feel, experience, and respond? Moving together is the only way to start social change, I would say. Body 3: Is it actually writing down the body? Or up? Or about? Or into? Or on? Or just plain writing the body?

16 The Bodies Collective

Figure 0.7 Bodyography badges, Edinburgh 2019. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

each of us into dialogue. We use Karen Barad’s term intra-action to remind ourselves that it is in the boundary drawing between body and mind, self and other, subject and what is perceived as an object that they constitute each other. This is profoundly political work, and we call for (re)positioning the body back into its place as an agent in intra-actions, leaving the Cartesian mind-body split behind. *Sarah:

I am struck by looking at the badges we created in 2019, when we invited people to talk about bodies. I think if we were to produce a badge now, we might invite people to talk and feel from within as well as about bodies; much less snappy but much more complete and intra-active*.

Introduction 17 Becoming Bodyographer: A Snapshot into Writing the Body *Reader, can you imagine your body as an unknown land? Where would you like to start in this discovery of untravelled landscapes?*

Deleuze and Guattari (1987) demanded a call to arms, for those to break away from the ‘state apparatus’ of how things are supposed to be done, what is allowed to be talked about, and to challenge what is often unquestioned. This book is designed to be a call to arms, as we consider the body to be a vital knowledge source and a valuable tool for research. Each chapter adds to this wider conversation, or call to arms, each of us in our differing countries, continents, and social environments, resounding differing themes on the body. To this effect, The Bodies Collective works as a diffractive process, much like light bouncing from the varied sides of a crystal. From the very start of this book, you are shown what is at stake in tackling a topic such as ‘body’ and Bodyography. In Chapter 1, Jess shows the why behind why this matters as a work of research through an in-depth exploration of how the body has been (mis)used in everyday thought and the silences that still pervade in academia. Jess, Alys, and Davina further explore this through the theme of abject and how writing the body into academy is often met with disbelief, the insistence of re-writes on writings for journal publications, and the impact this can have. This call to arms can wary its nomadic sojourners, perhaps like Alys and Davina were when they were, yet again, attempting to publish a piece on bodies and friendship and were constantly met with arborescent—or top-down—processes that push against this work and treat its contents with anything but enthusiasm (see Alys  & Davina, Chapter  2). Having set the scene of how the body falls out of research and prestige as it is relegated as lower to that of the mind, we then start to show what the body can do (Braidoitti, 2011). In Chapter  3, Alys illustrates the power of our relationship with underwear and the role of using participants voices in creating audio found poetry, while in Chapter 4, Ryan troubles with the idea of having a body as they navigate what it means to be non-binary and also their on-and-off struggle with body dysmorphia. In Chapter 5, Davina powerfully shows the complexity of what happens when we lose the body of another through death, their presence living in, on, and around us. In Chapter  6, Claudia then playfully takes us through the culinary art of the six prompts for researching through Bodyography. Mark walks himself through a rainy London in Chapter 7, struggling against the linguistic turn and how to work with matter as mattering (Barad, 2007). Finally, in Chapter 8, Sarah addresses how to navigate the body through the screen—how can we research with and within the body, how can we feel and feel what others might feel while being separated by miles, countries, oceans, and continents. Adding to the innovation of the book, between each chapter, there are dialogic exchange pieces/resonances that complement and extrapolate

18  The Bodies Collective upon the themes explored within each chapter. Members have engaged with the text by responding to it and adding their own questions to the work. In this way, again, you, the reader, are welcomed into the ongoing dialogue between readers, writers, and researchers and the iterative process of bodily engagement. Through this, we work collaboratively to create a constructive work that challenges hegemonic writing regimes but also models what could be done differently within academia through the embodied turn. One clear way we do this is by showing this book as a form of becoming (Barad, 2007; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987); it is never finished but is rather an affective tool for conversation, engagement, and movement. References Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Biggs, J., Hawley, P. H., & Biernat, M. (2017). The academic conference as a chilly climate for women: Effects of gender representation on experiences of sexism, coping responses, and career intentions. Sex Roles, 78, 394–408. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11199-017-0800-9 Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. University of California Press. Braidoitti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (2nd ed). Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Ellingson, L. (2017). Embodiment in qualitative research. Routledge. Erb, J. (2019). Stumbling through the contours of bodily appearance: Nomadic embodiment of the email counsellor [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Edinburgh. Erb, J. (2021). Politics of appearance: Bodily transference and its implications for the counselling relationship. Psychotherapy and Politics International, 18(2). https://doi. org/10.1002/ppi.1538 Frank, A. (2004). The renewal of generosity: Illness, medicine, and how to live. University of Chicago Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press. Hastrup, K.,  & Hervik, P. (Eds.). (1994). Social experience and anthropological knowledge (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203449646 Helps, S. L. (2019). Exploring first conversations with children and families: Responsive, pivoting improvisation within systemically-informed practice [Doctoral thesis]. University of Bedfordshire. https://uobrep.openrepository.com/bitstream/ handle/10547/624009/Repository%20HELPS%20Sarah.pdf? Hervey, L. W. (2012). Embodied artistic inquiry. Dance/movement Therapists in Action: A Working Guide to Research Options, 2, 205–232. Kesselring, R. (2015). Moments of dislocation: Why the body matters in ethnographic research. Basel Papers on Political Transformations, 8.

Introduction 19 Lang, P., Little, M., & Cronen, V. (1990). The systemic professional: Domains of action and the question of neutrality. Human Systems, 1(1), 34–49. Leigh, J.,  & Brown, N. (2021). Embodied inquiry: Research methods. Bloomsbury Publishing. Mendus, A., Kirkpatrick, D., & Murray, F. (2021). What is feminism in troubling times? To stay standing together. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(2), 258–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720978743 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Snowber, C. (2016). Embodied inquiry: Writing, living and being through the body. Springer. Springgay, S.,  & Truman, S. (2018). Walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: WalkingLab. Routledge. The Bodies Collective. (2021). Bodyography as activism in qualitative inquiry: The bodies collective at ECQI19.  International Review of Qualitative Research,  14(1), 104–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720970140 The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)centring the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy and human flourishing. In T. Chemi et  al. (Eds.). Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing (pp. 157–180). Routledge. Weiss, G. (1999). Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. Routledge.

1 Voicing the Unspeakable Body The Politics of Appearance and the Silence That Pervades Academic Discourse Dr. Jess Erb DPsychotherapy Introduction The physical body is a myriad of forces: It is political, ever-changing, supple, rough, invitational, performative, creative, moving, and powerful. The body does something within and to each space it exists in or is imagined in (Braidoitti, 2011; Butler, 1990; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). It is from within this multifaceted milieu that I  write about the complexities and baffling messages that each physical body navigates. Braidoitti (2011, p. 25) writes of these complexities when discussing the topic of ‘being woman’: one speaks as a woman, although the subject ‘woman’ is not a monolithic essence, defined once and for all, but rather the site of multiple, complex, and potentially contradictory sets of experiences, determined by overlapping variables such as class, race, age, lifestyle, and sexual preference. Some may argue that this is an obvious observation; however, following Gannon and Gonick’s (2014) understanding of ‘becoming girl’ it is in these obvious moments of day-to-day experience, that when ‘cracked open’ grant the opportunity to analyse ‘the routinized social, embodied, and affective processes of “becoming girl”, making them visible in new way’ (2014, p.  3). It is in the mundane, everyday, navigation of having a body that our bodies are assessed and determined, and we fall into its performance (Butler, 1988, 1990). Yet, the recognition of the import that bodily appearance has in navigating experiences is an oft neglected topic. In this chapter, I  show how the tension between ‘obvious’ and ‘neglected’ body narratives creates an intricate dance together, fashioning a complicated movement as we think of the corporeal body in various spaces, such as within the field of psychotherapy, the academy, conference spaces, in our relationships, and especially in our relationships with our bodies. This tension is even more complicated when writing a book on Bodyography—it begs the question: How can we celebrate the body’s physicality and hold space for its presence while subjecting it to stiff, flattened DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-2

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 21 pages of academic writing? Would that not in itself flatten the shape and fullness of the body? Deaden its smells, its curves, its fluids? Yet, this is the very space in which Bodyography emerges; it appreciates that we as bodies are never divorced from the typed page—our fingers, with their painted nails, tap the keys of the laptop, our brains spark and fly as we string together sentences (that delicious moment when the words just seem to come out of nowhere). Our shoulders slump and get tired from writing, our stomachs grumble and cause us to pause mid-sentence—pondering what is in the fridge. We write within the body and thus our writing is influenced by our bodies. Place yourself in the scene of writing and ask yourself:

What influences you as you type? Does the glare of the computer screen impact your retinas? And where are you sitting? The desk? The office? Are you tired? Stressed by having to write? Do you feel the strain of the polyamorous relationship between chair, desk, light, computer, time of day? Do you feel how these forces impact your posture and writing performance? For me, I slouch on my couch, neck bent in its ever-progressing tense position. While I am comfortable on this quiet June afternoon in the Toronto sun, I also do not want to be on this couch. The heat of the apartment is stifling. I want to be outdoors in my light pink romper. But, like my posture, I feel the tense pressure to finish this chapter, so I can hand it over to another collective member (Ryan) for editing; so that I  feel I  have proverbially ‘pulled my weight’ in this project. Work must be done, and I have been putting off writing in favour of suntanning for far too long. (Ryan, reading this, says that they want a picture of me writing—that my writing calls for it. I realise I always hesitate when putting in pictures of myself because it feels exposing. But I do so below to show my body at work on my computer, always with my companion Maggie— my own form of ‘voicing the body’).

Linking to my musing in the vignette above, I question: What is it that makes me hesitate to show my body on the page? Is this not the very thing that I am challenging and writing about now? Yes. Yet, I still feel bound to this dance of wanting to discuss bodily appearance without showing my own appearance. While I  have written of how my body can and does impact my work as a psychotherapist, what I call bodily transference (Erb, 2021), I still contend with what my body may say about me, even as I attempt the performance of a ‘good scholar’. I do worry that my long blonde hair, my femaleness, my shape, may undermine my voice in this work; that it might speak louder than my own voice. What do you see when you see me? Please don’t tell me.

22

Jess Erb

Figure 1.1 Jess Erb writing with her dog Maggie. Source: © Jess Erb.

This is the challenge of Bodyography: An appreciation and a call to attention that our physical form is never divorced from our academic endeavours. It cannot be. Our bodies, their physical form and appearance necessarily shape the work we do as scholars. Even within qualitative research, many have worked hard to place the material body back into prominence, recognising that the appearance and form of the body can be dangerously ignored, and even shamed for its placement in the academy (Braidoitti, 2011; Erb, 2020). A body that speaks volumes is also a body that is taken for granted and silenced within writing—and links to my own desire to silence my body on this page. Why is this? In the next section, I  speak into this apparent silence by showing some of its philosophical roots. But first, let me personify the silence placed on the body through narrating a haunting scene: My first research presentation on the topic of ‘bodily appearance’s impact in the counselling space’ at a psychotherapy conference in Edinburgh, UK. I do this as a way to show how mundane (Gannon & Gonick, 2014) everyday power structures inform how we see ourselves, even as scholars.

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 23 The Body as Silenced in Academia: A Narrative The first question I  am asked comes from a middle-aged cis-man, a professor: ‘Jess, I  get that you seem to value appearance quite a bit, but what about this topic actually makes it academically rigorous? Or even interesting for that matter? I don’t mean to sound harsh, but wouldn’t you agree that you have picked a rather ‘superficial’ topic to address?’ The power of this man, and of his question, grips me—and squeezes at my throat as I struggle in vain for a response. I cough up a reply that this topic ‘feels quite important to me and how my clients see and relate to me and other practitioners’. Unphased by my meagre reply, he continues with more vigour: ‘You use Deleuze and Guattari in your presentation. Where would you say that they talk of appearance? To use it in the form of ‘becoming animal’ would be a loose reading of their work . . . Beg my pardon, but I  am simply struggling against the relevance of this topic for our field’.

The above is not necessarily a ‘remarkable’ memory. In fact, many early scholars have admitted to the ways in which they have felt silenced and have simpered to more dominant voices in conference spaces. However, as Gannon and Gonick (2014) state, our lived accounts need not be remarkable; in fact, ‘its very everydayness makes it a potent and productive site for unravelling the processes of gendered subjectification in the world’ (p. 21–22). In their work with those telling of a choir practice, they show how it is in these unremarkable moments that illustrate how we may be shaped, haunted, and how we navigate power in our everyday experiences. On that chilly day in May  2016, I  still remember the silencing effect those words had on me as an inexperienced academic junior. Before the presentation, I was sweating through my blazer in the cold of the gothic stone building. I continued to perspire when I got called up to present my thesis topic, not registering that out of the three other presenters (all cismen), I was the only academic introduced as ‘lovely’ by the moderator—making me wonder if this was supposed to be a reassuring description of who I was and what I might offer in this space. Lovely. What a lovely word put into an ugly context, with its silencing, misogynistic, and demeaning effect in an academic setting. The usage of this word in a conference setting did something; it perpetuated a norm—a usage of language that continued to bind me to my ‘girlhood’ (Gannon & Gonick, 2014), even as I struggled in an attempt to challenge

24  Jess Erb and disrupt these normative structures (Butler, 1990). To go back in time now, I would have referenced that this use of the word ‘lovely’ is the very reason why my research was important, wondering out loud why the only woman presenter was described this way. I would cite my womanliness, my personality associated with appearance, and I  would risk the label of being a ‘raging feminist’ (Savigny, 2020) to show the here-and-now example of how bodies are assessed before they speak. I would have taken up arms (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) to fight against the shackles that many women conference presenters and academics face on a consistent basis. But this is ‘present-day Jess’ wanting to fight against an injustice that I did not yet have words for at the time. Instead, I sat down that day defeated, suppressed, and seriously considering if I should pick a more ‘digestible’ topic for my doctoral thesis. Though perhaps this is just it: What does it mean to be indigestible as a call to arms? To pick a topic that is not easily chewed up and swallowed? To fight the very ubiquity that often constrains the individual into silence? Allow my blonde hair to become snakes that snap at the normative assumption that I am lovely, charming, based on my appearance. The Silenced Academic in Navigating Body Narratives The physical form of the body is never a neutral entity; each body fits in a society that communicates (whether consciously or not) what to infer about that body, how it might take up space, and whether one can relate to it as ‘lovely’ or ‘intimidating’ (Butler, 1990; Lacan, 1977; Orbach, 2003, 2004). Tropes on physical appearance impact all bodies; all bodies are addressed, acknowledged, and silently judged before the body even has a chance to speak (Bordo, 1993; Butler, 1990; Erb, 2019, 2021; Grosz, 1994). How the body is formed, dressed, groomed, and the apparent sex of the body—all these factors impact how the body is related to. Yet, as Orbach (2003, p. 6) quips, [b]odies in the current psychoanalytic session are adjuncts to mental processes: sometimes they stimulate affects, sometimes they become diseased, sometimes they represent memory . . . But mindedness to the body, as a body which is speaking for itself, is peculiarly absent’ There is something about the appearance of the corporeal body that makes it feel like an untouchable topic within various disciplines; certainly, it is not a readily accepted topic within academic spaces. Grosz acknowledged this predicament in her important book ‘Volatile Bodies’ almost 30  years ago (1994). She argues that bodily appearance is laden with messages, yet it is also deemed of lesser significance to the sophisticated workings of the mind. The physical form is often associated with

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 25 words such as shame, vanity, shallowness, baseness, or primitivity (Erb, 2019; Grosz, 1994). Consequently, Grosz also faced a certain level of shame when she started writing her book in the 1980s. She writes of her own experience (Grosz, 1994, p. xiii): This book is the result of a protracted project, ten years in conception, three years in writing . . . It was deflected and put off by many other projects and commitments and by my own anxieties and uncertainties regarding its political and social commitments. The product of passion and intense fascination, it has also been fueled by the energy of profound theoretical insecurity and the full awareness that I have skated along the brink of a theoretical precipice overhanging extreme political isolation. For me, Grosz’ work on the body was one of the first I  read that granted me space to elucidate the importance of bodily scholarship, and the above quote gave me breath as I  recognised that even an established writer understood that the topic of the body is not one that is easily broached. What is it about the body that alienates thinkers from addressing its importance? In the next section, I take up this question to explore the body’s relegation and its oft placed associations with, as Grosz puts it, other lower binarised pairs. The Shallow Body As Grosz and other feminist writers acknowledge, to place importance on the body is to associate the body, and oneself, within the binary that celebrates mind-over-body (Balsam, 2012; Boadella, 1997, 1999; Erb, 2019; Grosz, 1994; Priestman, 2015; Young, 2006, 2008). The binary of mind-over-body is certainly not new, with many scholars illustrating how profound this dualism has been in the neglect of the body. In fact, Grosz posits that this binary can be seen in almost all discourses since the philosophical musings of Descartes’ mind/body dualism, which conceived Descartes’ infamous phrase Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I  am). Let me briefly unpack the conception of the mind/body dualism: As Descartes struggled against existentialism and epistemology, his main quandary was how to know without a doubt that one exists and was not being deceived by outside demons/gods. After much deliberation, Descartes came to realise that as long as one maintains thought, one can know that the mind is working and, therefore, one can have confidence that he/she exists (Descartes  & Cress, 1993; Descartes  & Moriarty, 2008). The very process of thinking retains the person’s ‘selfhood’. As a result, the mind becomes elevated as it necessitates a ‘thinking individual’—something that enables confidence in one’s existence. Consequently, however, this elevation of the mind relegates

26  Jess Erb the body to a demoted shell, whose only purpose is to provide housing for these sophisticated thoughts to take place. The body becomes primitive, ‘subordinate’, in the mind/body dualism. For Irigaray, the Cartesian ‘self’ is disembodied, not affected or caused by anything, and certainly not in relationship with others, especially as the self becomes the new basis for representation (Donovan, 2002; Irigaray, 1985). She further argues that Descartes positions the body as a passive vessel, whereas the mind is the reliable, individual, mode of reason. Grosz takes this further by stating that this is not a solipsistic binary; the mind/ body dualism is always associated with similar binarised pairs. As she states (1994, p. 3): Lateral associations link the mind/body opposition to a whole series of other oppositional (or binarised) terms, enabling them to function interchangeably, at least in certain contexts. The mind/body relation is frequently correlated with the distinctions between reason and passion, sense and sensibility, mechanism and vitalism, transcendence and immanence, temporality and spatiality, psychology and physiology, form and matter, and so on. In this way, to think of one binary (mind/body) is to link it with other lower pairs, relegating the body to that which is shallow, immanent, and purely matter. The body can be thus defined as the opposition to ‘the operation of the mind, a brute givenness which requires overcoming, a connection with animality and nature that needs transcendence’ (Grosz, 1994, p.  4). The association with these lower, binarised terms immediately sets up the body to be devalued, and breaking the silence on the body by acknowledging its role in academia and sense-making can also place the academic in a problematically ‘low’ position. I recall the feelings of shame and perplexity I  first experienced when choosing a thesis topic on bodily appearance. I intuited that appearance impacts one’s experience of the world, and I desired to speak into the ways in which representations of/on the body affect our relations with others. Nevertheless, I  feared telling others about my topic. I felt shallow and vain, and I was ashamed to admit to others that I thought this topic mattered; it was like I was choosing a flimsy topic that would not stand up to academic scrutiny, and I deeply debated if staking my academic credit before I even had any was worth it. Reading the feminist scholars who have paved the way before me illuminated for me why I felt shallow when deciding to write about physical appearance, for I  was positioning my interests within the lower of the binarised pair. It also showed me why speaking about the body still deeply matters today; even after over 30 years of scholarship on the role of the body, talking about appearance is still tackling a ‘macroscopic hierarchy’ (Grosz,

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 27 1994, p. 173), with its ubiquitous power structures that still demean the body and appearance’s impact on our day-to-day relationships. Lacan (1977) is helpful here in unpacking what scholars mean by the term ‘macroscopic hierarchy’. For Lacan, the macroscopic hierarchy could also refer to what he dubbed the Symbolic Order, which is a structure that ‘pervades our relations with others based on societal scripts’ (Erb, 2019, p.  69). These societal scripts not only dictate a ‘normalised’ body schema but also help spell out how others should view a body. The Symbolic Order’s messaging is ubiquitous and hard to tackle, for messages are intuited and sensed rather than dictated through overt communication. How do these Symbolic Orders and comments on the body become internalised? And even more pressing, why are these Orders so hard to resist, even after scores of feminist theories have shown how the permeation of the body ideal is problematic, often impossible to attain, and detrimental to the health of those subjected to striving for these ideals (Asevedo, 2004; Bordo, 1993; Workman, 2010)? Foucault’s (1977) concept of ‘Bio-power’ is invaluable at answering these troublesome questions, as he shows how discourses get implemented not through top-down processes but rather through internalisation. Bio-Power literally means, ‘having control over bodies’ and he conceptualises this as, ‘[the] explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’ (Foucault, 1977, p.  140). For Foucault, modern power is encoded in subtle forms of social practices that ‘shape expectations on how subjects are meant to live and is a key ingredient for the success in Capitalist societies’ (Erb, 2019, p. 62). Bio-Power is ever-shifting and adaptable based on societal and cultural adaptations, thus making it impossible to target and fight against because messages on how to live are encoded, internalised, and passed down through each generation (Foucault, 1978). These Symbolic Orders on how a body is viewed feel natural and innate through techniques such as Bio-Power; as Workman (2010, p. 28) posits, these images on bodies are often ‘automatically and unconsciously processed’ so we are much less likely to fight against them. Linking how Symbolic Orders are passed down through Bio-Power illustrates how addressing a topic like ‘the importance of the corporeal body’ necessarily falls outside of the acceptable norm of what one is allowed to think/ talk about to be categorised as academic. It means taking on an overarching, arborescent, Symbolic Order (Deleuze  & Guattari, 1987; Lacan 1977) of mind-versus-body that has permeated discourse for centuries, illuminated and unwittingly transformed/founded by Descartes. The mind/body dualism has infiltrated a plethora of modalities, including the field I  work in as a psychotherapist, education, as well as the research The Bodies Collective does within the qualitative discipline. Which begs the question: How do The Bodies Collective and other researchers navigate these overt, if ubiquitous, Symbolic Orders?

28  Jess Erb She asks who the hell I  think I  am to write about appearance and the female body in the academic space. She says it with a laugh, indicating that she is just teasing me, but the impact of the question is also quite clearly a challenge. I am in Urbana-Champaign, a town outside of Chicago, in 2017. I feel more confident in my writing now but am still aware that to talk of the body is to bring up questions and challenges such as this. I ask her to elaborate on this challenge—’Why do you feel that I shouldn’t write about appearance? What about this topic makes it feel like a taboo subject?’ She says she doesn’t know, but afterwards tracks me down while I am milling about the wine area during the conference break time. ‘I was very angry with you as you were presenting your topic, Jess’. ‘Yes, I  noticed! Have you given more thought as to why?’ I  am genuinely curious—it might have potential as something to explore for my thesis. ‘Yes, and it is shameful to admit . . . but I will to you. My supervisors have actually said that I  show too much cleavage as a bigger woman—if I want to be taken seriously as an academic, I need to cover up. Today, I  wore this scarf over my chest, even though it is fucking hot outside. When you started to talk about this topic, I was angry because you get to say this, while I  just have to deal with being fat and having breasts that make every top I wear “suggestive”. I wanted to scream “fuck you” to you because I was jealous of you’.

Where to Go in a Lower Binarised World? I, in turn, wanted to embrace this woman at the conference because of her vulnerability, her openness to express her anger—rage—at being silenced. I refrained from hugging her; to do so would be to pacify an obviously poignant, self-reflective, vulnerable, answer. We spent the hour during break drinking a ‘borrowed’ bottle of wine from the conference in the outside courtyard, discussing her experiences as a woman, as an academic, and as someone who has also felt the constraints of how her body is used in both of these contexts. She is not the first to realise the impact that her body has in the academic space. Many feminist thinkers have spoken of their journey of being ‘woman’ and the need to hide their bodies to feel relevant and ‘neutral’. In fact, it was shocking to learn how many women psychotherapists also feel this need to cover-up their body to feel more professional (Erb, 2019; Gurung et al., 2018). I intuitively understand what the psychotherapists were highlighting, as I have felt it myself. I can immediately think of clothing that I would happily wear to lunch with friends that I would not want to wear in the counselling room. This is not because they are provocative or untasteful; it is simply because they are feminine. In fact, I remember once wearing a floral dress for a day out with

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 29 friends, yet rushing home to change before seeing clients because I didn’t want them to see me as young and feminine. This again links to Gannon and Gonick’s (2014) work on ‘becoming girl’, and how the social construct of being a girl is a symbol of ‘innocence and purity, as symptoms of a society out of control, or as hope for the future’ (Gannon & Gonick, 2014, p. 2). They question how these symbols—or symbolic orders—create meaning-making for femininity through one’s experiences. Even so, I wonder, why is being feminine associated with unprofessionalism or even seen as unacademic? Grosz (1994) shows that the answer to this can again be viewed through the lens of the Cartesian mind/ body dualism. She contends that the female body, more than the male’s, is often associated with the lower, binarised, body and, like other insidious pairings with the mind/body dualism, being linked with the body means that the woman is consequently associated with passion, immanence, baseness and shallowness; or, in the psychotherapists’ words: with ‘unprofessionalism, incompetence and inexperience’ (Erb, 2019, p. 146). If the Symbolic Order on the appearance of the body is apparent within stories of academics needing to look professional by hiding their body, I  can also see how the Symbolic Order is also maintained through societal ‘policing’—which happened between the academic and myself in the above vignette; her challenging me for even speaking to this topic. Foucault labels this type of social control ‘Disciplinary Power’, and below is the definition I used to expound on this Disciplinary Power in my doctoral thesis (Erb, 2019, p. 63): Disciplinary Power is akin to Bio-Power in its mode for control of populations, yet its focus is on how one personally polices such societal expectations, or Symbolic Orders. To this end, the individual adheres to self-surveillance in order to maintain the status quo. Foucauldian analysis illuminates the ways in which power structures need not put people in chains, for subjects fetter themselves through constant surveillance—both of themselves through Bio-Power and of others through Disciplinary Power. This self-policing, or self-surveillance, becomes its own power enforcement in perpetuating how one should look and behave. In fact, ‘Disciplinary Power necessarily makes power structures invisible while the objects of its power become highly visible’ (Erb, 2019, p. 64). As Bordo (1993, p. 27) writes of Disciplinary Power, ‘there is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze’. In this way, conforming to the Symbolic Order does not necessarily feel like social control but rather a normalised practice (Wolff, 1990; Henderson et al., 2001). It is here that we see an interweaving of how dominant philosophies impact not only the academic space, and the professional space of the therapy office, but also how one may adopt these Symbolic Orders on the body in each of these spaces. It is simply easier to abide by the unspoken norms. To detach from the feminine/womanly/base body enables academics to feel that they can be taken seriously and respected within their respective fields, while also perpetuating the Disciplinary and Bio Power that shackles and silences them.

30  Jess Erb While this chapter elucidates the ways in which the body is silenced and demeaned, the work of The Bodies Collective is to express and expose the body in order to relegate it back to relevance within the academic field. Through Bodyography, and in the rest of this book, we strive to voice the body (Erb, 2019) and show how it can be used, assessed, and controlled, while also celebrating the body, complicating its placement as abject, and struggling against its confines. In the final section, I discuss how highlighting these complexities rather than hiding from them, or denying their import, can enable deeper engagement in the topic of Bodyography. The Beautiful Body Helps Us Navigate the World: Conclusion

The Bodies Collective are in Edinburgh, for the 2019 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry. We have only just finished our panel presentation on who we are and why our work matters in an academic setting when a woman in the back shoots her hand up: ‘I get that this topic matters. But let’s face it, you are all beautiful.’ A comment more than a question, but the pause at the end implies she expects us to account for our beauty. Alys turns to me and says, ‘Jess, can you answer this one?’ I breathe in and start to expound on everything I have been researching and learning about over these past few years: ‘beauty can and should say something, for beauty has a space in the academic world. To think that it does not would be to fall into the Symbolic Order that implies that beauty is only skin deep and therefore does not necessitate deep thinking. This is a fallacy. Yet, while I appreciate the importance of recognising that we each have privilege in this space, I  am also wondering what beauty means to you. Your question implies that we think we are beautiful. This is interesting to me because it places an assumption upon us that we did not ask for; but even bigger, it shows exactly what we are presenting on: That the body is not neutral. It fills a space with others’ expectations.’ Her comment will haunt the group for the remainder of the year, and for years to come, but in that moment we learned that we can challenge the Disciplinary Power that might ask a seemingly shaming and unanswerable question—and it feels big. Giving importance to the academically rigorous body means not denying its place in others’ opinions/assumptions but rather using their understandings to do something with it. What does it mean to be young? To be older/established? To be white? To be BIPOC? To have a body that is able-bodied or not able-bodied? To feel the comforts of health versus unhealth? What assumptions

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 31 can be placed on your body that impact how you write or engage in academia? What assumptions do you make of another’s body? This all matters—the body matters as matter (Barad, 2007). When the body is at its full potential within the academy—within conference spaces, writings, and the classroom—there is movement, a dance of knowledge between body and mind. A  symbiose complexity that beckons engagement. It is also a call to arms (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). To speak out against Orders that insidiously deny speech, to engage with an indigestible topic. Breaking out of these constraints requires the academic to look at their body, how it functions, and what it does, and to see that the body is telling us something through its placement in the world. One such instance came in 2018, back in Edinburgh, at another student conference. I was the last to go on stage. And rather than my sweaty self, two years before, I felt powerful with knowledge and confidence in my body. ‘On the topic of Politics of Appearance, we invite Jess Erb up to speak’. I get up from the awkward desk I was sitting in and walk up to the front. There was a table at the front of the room and many of the presenters stood in front of it. I, instead, opted to sit on it and allow for a moment of silence. ‘Take just a moment and look at my body. And ask yourself, “what assumptions do I make of this woman before she even speaks?” ’ I hear a muffled stir of surprise and quickly add, ‘please don’t tell me! I don’t know if I could handle your comments on my body just yet {laughter}. Just allow yourself to honestly think of what my body may say about me before I do’. Taking up space in the body, allowing appearance to come into a space and say something is risky academic work. However, it grants space for the discomfort and fear that can often be associated with the body. For one attendee, a manager at a psychotherapy clinic, my provocation made him feel nervous and put him on the spot. During the question time, he reflected that my invitation to the group made him question whether he actually could look at me and think thoughts that were probably present subconsciously and yet consciously forbidden. What does it mean to allow oneself to take the Symbolic Order and use it rather than be controlled by its Bio-Power? Or, better yet, how can we remind ourselves that power is not monolithic, but can flow both ways when we engage with it and allow ourselves to appreciate that power is not bad, it simply is? This remembrance gives us the chance to renavigate power in the academic sphere if we allow ourselves the risk of voicing it. Bringing the body back into the academic space means voicing the body, elucidating how our bodies have been used, assessed, demeaned, and controlled (Erb, 2019). I have done this in this chapter by highlighting my ever-prevalent

32  Jess Erb experiences in the conference space. I show that this ‘shallow topic’ is much better conceptualised as an unsafe one. A topic wrought with pain, struggle, shame, and years of personal expertise on how our bodies can dictate our treatment before we even open our mouth. In the context of academia and research, it is important to see the body for what it is: a valuable source of information. It is our first point of contact with the world. And thus, by paying attention to this and granting it import in how we understand the world around us, we can further bulldoze the ubiquitously felt mind/body dualism by bringing the body back into its rightful place as a proxy for knowledge. References Asevedo, H. (2004). Self-perceptions of body image, among women with doctorates in counselling and psychotherapy [Published PhD thesis]. University of New Orleans. Balsam, R. (2012). Women’s bodies in psychoanalysis. Routledge. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Boadella, D. (1997). Awakening sensibility, recovering motility: Psycho-physical synthesis at the foundations of body-psychotherapy: The 100-year legacy of Pierre Janet (1859–1947). International Journal of Psychotherapy, 2, 45–56. Boadella, D. (1999). Somatic psychology and somatic psychotherapy: A chronology over four centuries. Energy & Character, 30, 95–106. Bordo, S. (1993). Unbearable weight: Feminism, western culture, and the body. University of California Press. Braidoitti, R. (2011). Nomadic subjects: Embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (2nd ed.). Columbia University Press. Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory, Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Descartes, R., & Cress. D. A. (1993). Meditations on first philosophy. Hackett Pub. Co. Descartes, R., & Moriarty, M. (2008). Meditations on first philosophy: With selections from the objections and replies. Oxford University Press. Donovan, S. K. (2002). Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray: Feminist resources for overcoming oppressive exclusions [Published PhD thesis]. Villanova University. Erb, J. (2019). Stumbling through the contours of bodily appearance: Nomadic embodiment of the female counsellor [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Edinburgh. Erb, J. (2021). Politics of appearance: Bodily transference and its implications for the counselling relationship. Psychotherapy and Politics International, 18(2). https://doi. org/10.1002/ppi.1538 Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Penguin. Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality (Vol. 1). Pantheon Books. Gannon, S., & Gonick, M. (2014). “Choir practice” in three movements: Analyzing a story of girlhood through Deleuze, Butler, and Foucault. In S. Gannon & M. Gonick

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 33 (Eds.), Becoming girl: Collective biography and the production of girlhood. Women’s Press. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press. Gurung, R. A. R., Brickner, M., Leet, M.,  & Punke, E. (2018). Dressing “in code”: Clothing rules, propriety, and perceptions. The Journal of Social Psychology, 158(5), 553–557. Henderson-King, D., Henderson-King, E. I., & Hoffman, L. L. (2001). Media images and women’s self-evaluations: Social context and importance of attractiveness as moderators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 1407–1416. Irigaray, L. (1985). Speculum of the other woman. Cornell University Press. Lacan, J. (1977). Ecrits: A selection (A. Sheridan, Trans.). W.W. Norton. Orbach, S. (2003). There is no such thing as a body. British Journal of Psychotherapy, 20(1), 3–16. Orbach, S. (2004). What can we learn from the therapist’s body? Attachment & Human Development, 6(2), 141–150. Priestman, A. (2015). We the human animals: Exploring an embodied, relational and wild approach to therapy. Self & Society, 43(2), 138–147. Savigny, H. (2020). Cultural sexism: The politics of feminist rage in the #Metoo Era. Bristol University Press. Wolff, J. (1990). Feminine sentences: Essays on women and culture. Polity Press. Workman, J. R. (2010). Biracial daughters perceptions of self-mother relationships and body image: An object relations informed study [Published PsyD thesis]. Alliant International University. Young, C. (2006). One hundred and fifty years on: The history, significance and scope of body psychotherapy today. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 1(1), 17–28. Young, C. (2008). The history and development of body-psychotherapy: The American legacy of Reich. Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, 3(1), 5–18.

Resonances to Chapter 1: Conversation with The Bodies Collective Around Power and Privilege The Bodies Collective The conversation starts with the group grappling with the idea of the conference presentation and the professor challenging a thesis topic on the impact of the body within the psychotherapeutic relationship (Erb, 2019). To recite the section of the vignette in question: Jess, I get that you seem to value appearance quite a bit, but what about this topic actually makes it academically rigorous? Or even interesting for that matter? I don’t mean to sound harsh, but wouldn’t you agree that you have picked a rather ‘superficial’ topic to address? The power of this man, and of his question, grips me—and squeezes at my throat as I struggle in vain for a response. They each are thinking about power, as well as how Jess was introduced—a reflection that only came after the presentation. Sarah: OMG—makes me think of being introduced as Sarah rather than with my full title to a room of men (all the men were introduced filly and academically)  .  .  . and of being utterly unable to correct the way I  was introduced but simply smiling at them, as if my two doctorates and two other degrees, all the rest had suddenly evaporated. Mark: And what would you (or I as a ‘man’) be if I was not also introduced as lovely? Davina: Your chapter asks me the question—How do we allow ourselves to be silenced? I think of Alys and my struggles with trying to get the No One Comes paper published, how it stripped away my confidence, seeded doubt in my ability to read, comprehend, and make sense of theoretical ideas and concepts. (Alys and I talk about this in Chapter 2). I recall my own experience as a formative PhD student of how any questions or feedback was silenced at a conference by a female moderator who after my presentation on grief and loss—said something like ‘that was so moving, let’s just leave it there’. I didn’t challenge that, though I wanted discussion and questions, just smiled and sat down. Luckily, people approached me afterwards, but I still wonder DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-3

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 35 if she was expressing her own discomfort with vulnerability, death, loss, and grief. Was she trying to protect me because of an assumption that because I had shown vulnerability that I was not robust enough to be questioned, and if that was the case, how much of that was gendered? Jess’ Response: It felt like an exercise in psychodynamic psychotherapy, going back and speaking as if I were past Jess. I could feel her in that corridor, even though it has been years and I am so much more confident in my voice now; I  could feel her shivering and nervous about having to talk about this lower binary. I felt writing back into this I could do her justice. Sarah, I really resonate with your OMG moment—it was an attendee of the panel, rather than myself, who realised I had been called ‘lovely’. When they told me that, and that this is exactly why I am writing about the body’s voice before it even speaks, I felt like this person completely understood my work, and how easy it is to fall into these societal scripts due to their ubiquity. Davina, I also think about how others silence us when our voice may threaten the status quo, or we are not easily palatable. I do link this with Deleuze and Guattari (1987), though I do know that you do not love these thinkers, but their aspect of how the ‘state apparatus’ may do various things to subvert and subject the ‘nomad’ (or the radical thinker/speaker) in order to allow for the status quo to this maintained. I wonder about that in your own silencing—be it the book or also the in your work of presenting as a PhD student. It shows why voicing the body isn’t a privilege for the voice, but rather a first act of rebellion—and it is not simply auditory. I am thinking of Ryan painting their nails as voicing the body. Or when they put on earrings that are fabulous and bright and so camp! Voicing the body is not just about saying something, it is allowing the body to be and do something with its voice. It may not be auditory, but it is always political. Davina: I  also think about my own very conscious process of curating my appearance depending on the situations I find myself in and the interplay between the conscious choices I  make and the unconscious affect of symbolic order and bio-power. Binaries and Becoming Indigestible Mark: There is so much that resonates with me in this chapter. But somehow, I  keep coming back to the binary. I  think binary might only exist in language (I come to that in my chapter). The whole notion of attractive vs unattractive, male vs female. . . Ryan: I want to link back to that passage about binarised terms. I can’t help but wonder about all that was happening in the conference space with the professor: The association with these lower, binarised terms immediately sets up the body to be devalued and breaking the silence on the body

36  Jess Erb by addressing its importance in academia places the academic in a problematically ‘low’ position. Given this description (which was great!) the aforementioned professor wasn’t asking critical questions but was dropping bricks from 3 floors up . . . 3 floors of power and privilege, further emboldened by looking down from his ‘transcendent heights’ at your ‘material lows’ . . . perhaps thus feeling it was safe and ‘right’ to abuse his power-over to ‘correct’ you. Enraged. Mark: I guess even the notion of higher and lower, mind and body, only exists within language. Are bodies more earthbound (Haraway, 2016)? Within the group of those that can talk and use words, there can then be created the hierarchy of how well they can talk, with the professor at the top of the hierarchy. Fascinatingly, if someone threatens that position of power, privilege, and entitlement by being just as eloquent, like the examples of Jess or her colleague at the conference, the body and physicality get employed again to dismiss them. It seems a nice arrangement for white, male, cis profs. Ryan: I  resonate with this call into the ethics of not choosing a ‘digestible topic’. Do they want us to produce cutting-edge research or just replicate their own preconceived notions? I love your new call to action: become indigestible . . . become a stomach irritant. May we all be so powerful. Mark: Would we find it easier to see ourselves as equals amongst other critters and matters if we had not talked (using language) into some kind of social reality that we are special because we have language? Some kind of selffulfilling language game (Wittgenstein, 1953)? The logic (logos = the word) might go a little like this: I think, therefore I am (Descartes, 2017). And because I can talk about what I am thinking and others (organic and inorganic ones) cannot (or at least not in a way that I can understand them), I do not give them the same level (and rights) of existence. Jess’ Response: Even the understanding of hierarchy comes with a sense of binarisation—that we have to fit into these particular modes of existing and some are better than others. The concept of the Nomad, fighting against the standard worldly ‘comforts’, works well here (Deleuze  & Guattari, 1987) or even diffraction (Barad, 2007; Haraway, 1997), which shows the multiple ways in which we come to understand the body. Diffraction does not posit a singular thinking subject, but rather a ‘multiplicity of affects, flows and unfoldings’ (Erb, 2019, p. 31). As Van der Tuin, citing Haraway, says, ‘[r]eading diffractively, the body incorporates images of patriarchy, reproduction and male lust, of feminism, generativity and female desire as constantly changing ‘with age and psychic transformations’’ (Haraway, 1997, p. 273, cited in van der Tuin, 2014, p. 234). Diffraction shows that it is never just a binarised conception of reality but a multiplicity of forces coming to play. Ryan, I am not saying exactly that this is what it means to be indigestible, but it is something like this. To fight, knowing that there

Voicing the Unspeakable Body

37

Figure 1.2 Maggie showing off her personality—one that always wants attention and all your focus: She’s such a diva! Source: © Jess Erb.

are a myriad of forces that try to keep us in check. Mark, I love the idea of taking away our specialness through being with ‘critters’ (what a great word!). Maggie (my Samoyed dog) has a total personality; even without language, she makes her presence—and her desires!—very known. She has taught me what it means to listen without words, and without humans. The Polyamorous Relationship to Academy and Our Lives Ryan: I am grinning surreptitiously in a cafe while reading your Chapter 1. I love this concept of the polyamory of writing. It makes me think of the polyamorous relationship with academia. Alys: I LOVE this analogy Ryan, so true!

38  Jess Erb Ryan: The polyamory of writing, and the many other things that make up the Ryan assemblage . . . the pull towards my other (paid) work, the pull to the home, to the partner, to the down time and suntanning. Jess’ Response: I have to admit, I was going to take it out because I thought it was a bit ‘over the top’! But it also captured exactly how I was feeling on that warm June day. Maggie was staring at me, wanting to go outside. I did not want to be on my couch inside. I want to be out, basking in the sun. Yet, I felt the pressure to write, to produce, and to be a good collective member! It felt like all these relationships were coming up against me! Hauntology Her comment [that we are beautiful] will haunt the group for the remainder of the year, and for years to come, but in that moment, we learned that there is an answer to a seemingly shaming and unanswerable question—and it feels big.

Ryan: Oh, I love thinking of it as a haunting. Jess. This is it. This is the refrain of this book. We are haunted by this moment. I  want it in every major chapter . . . each one of us has had a big reaction to it, and it is relevant to each thesis. They said this to us even though we are bodies from different cultures, bodies presenting in second languages, bodies that experience their shape as shameful, bodies that have self-harmed, bodies that will create life, and bodies that can help heal others. And you thought ‘beautiful’ captured this? Not even close. Alys: Dawne Fahey et  al. (2023) wrote poetry to explore hauntology and the collective ghosts from our respective PhD journeys. I  wonder-with the stories and theoretical positions that Jess shares in her chapter about how they linger  .  .  . how these stories continue to haunt our bodies. Is this an example of collaborative Bodyography? Fitzpatrick’s description that ‘My PhD was a collaboration with whānau (family), ghosts (Derrida/ hauntology), and incredible colleagues’ (p. 200) can be seen as similar to our experience as The Bodies Collective when we were all described as ‘beautiful’. The essence of that statement hangs around in our bodies as ghosts, affecting our family (those in the collective) and wider colleagues. . . Jess’ Response: It does seem big, doesn’t it?! How do the narratives we hear about our bodies also haunt our bodies, creating ghosts that also interpret how our bodies are viewed? It seems, as ever, there is more to be done here. Claudia: To me, this is also about the question, if we—as Bodyographers— should advocate for body liberation (Taylor, 2018). I  experience your work, Jess, also as a contribution to this endeavour, a deep-rooted theoretical stance on this political issue. As someone in a bigger body, I am experiencing frequent discrimination on all levels. I  am even done with giving examples, because the list is endless and tiring. What is important to me is asking myself: how can I take on responsibility for body liberation,

Voicing the Unspeakable Body 39 how do I show up in my social environment relating to this issue, and what options do I have to shape and create around body liberation? I believe that Bodyography is especially powerful in the latter regard, and it is the kind of endeavour I most enjoy. Approaching my body and my body being with other bodies in this world collaboratively, playfully, and by means of the arts has the potential to transform transgressing experiences into empowerment, care, and the joy of creating. My body is not an apology (Taylor, 2018)! Jess’ Response to Claudia: I think that it is a part of body liberation, as a way to follow in the footsteps of incredible academics like Grosz, Haraway, and also Taylor. For me, it is putting a voice to what is happening in these ubiquitous and silencing narratives that allows for further liberation to happen. I have a lot of trauma attached to my appearance, a childhood spent with adults trying to make me ‘tougher’ or less ‘naive’ because of how they saw my blonde hair and my joyful smile. I dyed my hair for years to overcome this image. Yet, I am also done with this—my body cannot be an apology, even as others see me as they wish. Because in finding a voice to the bodily forms of subjugation, we can start to have more power in how to notice it, speak about it, and change it. I hope that is what we are doing in this book. References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. Descartes, R. (2017). The principles of philosophy (J. Veitch, Trans.). Anodos Books. (Original work published 1644) Fahey, D., Fitzpatrick, E., & Mendus, A. (2023). Cracking through the wall to let the light in: Disrupting doctoral discourses through collaborative autoethnography. In Deconstructing doctoral discourses: Stories and strategies for success (pp. 191–211). Springer International Publishing. Haraway, D. J. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium: Female Man_Meets_ OncoMouse: Feminism and technoscience. Routledge. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/detail. action?docID=4649739 Taylor, S. R. (2018). The body is not an apology: The power of radical self-love (1st ed.). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Van der Tuin, I. (2014). Diffraction as a methodology for feminist onto-epistemology: On encountering Chantal Chawaf and posthuman interpellation. Parallax, 20(3), 231–244. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. Anscombe, Trans.). MacMillan.

2 Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography When Is It Ok to Talk About Cis Women’s Bodies and Sex? Dr. Alys Mendus and Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick Introduction A call to vulnerable inquirers What do we risk when we share stories and with whom? We fix and pin ourselves Upon the page Map our positions, call out our perceptions Less wiggle room than an aural, in the moment telling of tales.

Now let us begin.  .  .  . Once upon a time, there were two bodies (both cis white British women), Davina and Alys, who met in Champaign Urbana, Illinois, USA, at the 2015 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry and became friends. In 2017, they returned to the conference with a paper to present, which they ultimately never got published in a journal. This chapter weaves an entangled web of their embodied friendship developed through the complexities of sharing explicit autoethnographies at conferences and in print. Tracing Our History Alongside the Paper Who are we now compared to then? Although this chapter follows chronological time, we also acknowledge that time has an iterative nature and we are still grappling with many of the issues we both wrote about in the original paper and continue to live through. This chapter takes writing from the different times of our lived experiences and reflections, looking back and forward. The stylistic decisions of this chapter are to help the reader navigate changes in voice—an individual voice of Alys or Davina is indicated with an indent, sections from the original performance paper are placed within a box and given a ‘Box’ number. DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-4

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 41 Our Bodies in 2015

Alys sat behind me in an autoethnographic workshop by Carolyn Ellis and Art Bochner. What prompted our conversation? How did we start to talk about sex? It was your mustard yellow cardigan, your bright scarf and overflowing bag that caught my attention. I thought ‘Ooh, I like the look of that person!’ and we got talking. Realising that we were both from the UK we soon found ourselves eating pizza in an outdoor cafe on the streets of Champaign-Urbana giggling and urging ourselves on to share cheekier and cheekier life stories. Kindred spirits, new to the academy, flamboyant energies and nothing to lose. Conferences often create spaces of liminal intensity and a particular intimacy, a bit like being on a blind date (see Mendus et al., 2021) or being on a long train journey where secrets get shared quickly. I  often feel I  am performing a shinier version of myself (Ibid). Our Bodies in 2016

Alys’ intention for us to be in control of how and who we presented with prompted her to initiate a panel for ICQI 2017 and for us to write collaboratively (Davies & Gannon, 2006; Kirkpatrick et al., 2021; Speedy & Wyatt, 2014). We have employed an autobiographical and autoethnographic collaborative narrative inquiry method of physically and digitally cutting and pasting sections from the original performance piece. We utilised the Pockets method, from Artful Collaborative Inquiry ‘assemblage, following themes that emerged through our writing and art-making experience’ (Kirkpatrick et al., 2021, p. 156), that more closely align with practice as research methods from arts-based research. Theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time that practice is informed by theory. This double articulation is central to practice based research (Bolt, 2007, p. 29). We both lived in the United Kingdom but were geographically distant, so we had to find a way to write together, developing trust and empathy. We decided to utilise Google Docs, as this meant being able to work contemporaneously in real time on each other’s writing, but also keeping a record of the development of the paper and previous edits. We combined this with phone calls so we could talk through the comments and discussions we were having within the Google Doc. Our Bodies in 2017

In May 2017, we presented a paper called No one comes: the art of female ejaculation and other stories, as part of a panel entitled Shame? The paper

42  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick was aimed to generate conversation and was really framed to tease out what we felt was the connection between the choice of conference paper title and the number of people who decided to attend the session. No one comes was written as a performative piece between the two presenters and was filmed and afterwards it generated much conversation around the conference. It caused quite a stir—whispers came back to us that at the invite only Friday night conference dinner there had been talk that ‘anything is allowed these days. There was even a paper on orgies’! Some people responded with friendship to the raw vulnerability of the explicit autoethnographies, and the collaborative narrative inquiry we shared. The Emergence of The Bodies Collective Later that evening in the pub, an international group of Early Career Researchers sat around sipping beer and talking about sex, sexuality, and the stories shared in No one comes. It was suggested that we all meet up and talk more about the role of the body in research. Ines, mentioned her parent’s holiday house in Spain as a place to meet in September, and we all agreed. This helped form a nascent community of scholars that went on to become The Bodies Collective, and also a discussion of whether we had created a new subsection of autoethnography that of abject autoethnography. VOICE FROM 2022: But was it really abject? Abject autoethnography (is discussed in the Dialogic Exchange after this chapter). For this chapter, we are positioning these stories as explicit autoethnography (this term will be explored later in the chapter). Embodied Friendship The embodied nature of our friendship allows for a performance of friendship in our research methods and writing. This is intended, as Raymond (2001) suggests, to be a ‘thoughtful passion’ that engages our ‘thinking hearts’ so that we may better understand the circumstances in which we found ourselves, and for linking the personal and political. We position this chapter through our friendship seeing similarities with Owton and Collinson’s (2014) understanding that there becomes a blurring between the role of researcher and friend when people inquire together. However, we recognise that we are iteratively both friends and researchers at the same time, so that we ‘research with an ethic of friendship, a stance of hope, caring, justice, even love’ (Tillman, 2004, p. 735). Mackinlay and Bartleet’s (2012) approach to friendship ‘through and as research’ influences our own performance of friendship throughout this chapter as like them we are ‘enacting personal narratives and intellectual conversation’ (p. 76) to bring criticality to our shared experiences. The paper No one comes  .  .  . provided a performance to draw the audience into hearing and feeling this ‘performance of friendship, enacted

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 43 through personal narrative’ (Mackinlay  & Bartleet, 2012, p.  76) and to use the voice as an ‘erotic tool that enters bodies and works in them organically’ (Freuh, 1996, p. 22). Our different styles of writing show our individual voices and what we were comfortable revealing, or not, which we endeavoured to allude to within the performance. As Noddings (1984), Ellis (2007), and Pelias (2014) advise, we practise an ‘ethic of care’. Following Ellis’ guidance, we are aware to ‘not negatively affect [our] lives and relationships, hurt themselves, or others in their world’ (2007, p. 25). This ‘ethic of care’ allowed us to be conscious with whom we share our explicit autoethnographic stories with and when, but there is a balance between care and being silenced by a need to not upset others. We argue that there is a time and place for some explicit stories and that through our embodied friendship that we hold a position of aware witness to each other.

Box 2.1  Body 2 Standing Forward, Open Stance, Slightly Conspiratorial Celebration of the unexpected and edge pushing madness of my life and the sexual experimentation and deep connections that happens once the flood-gates of possibilities are open. The gin and conversations flowed. Our friendship gelled. I’m not sure how it happened, really. . .   .  .  . upstairs we laid down the waterproof sheet on her bed (who doesn’t have one of those?!) and together on the bed removed our clothes and I watched with keen observation and awe. The long mirror at the end of the bed elongated and framed our bodies The firm and pert older one and the curvaceous younger one. Beautiful, erotic and so much in the feminine power. Here I was learning a secret of womanhood, a passing down of sex magic and skills to release me from my current box of identity.

The excerpt from the performance piece above shows an example of writing in the style of embodied friendship, drawing on not just the physical bodies of the friends but also the matter and mess, the non-human and more than human aspects that make up friendship, as ‘we relate, know, think, world, and tell stories through and with other stories, worlds, knowledges, thinkings, yearnings’ (Haraway, 2016, p.  97). We also resonate with Haraway’s (2016) call for ‘making kin’ with the more-than-human world. Perhaps, through sharing our stories in this performance piece, we were not

44  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick just making-kin but actually developing ‘oddkin’ defined by Haraway as ‘unexpected collaborations and combinations’, (2016, p. 4) as the sympoiesis of our explicit autoethnographies and our deepening friendship. We makewith each other a knotting (Haraway, 2016) of relational-encounters arguing that it is through the storytelling of these unlikely companions that the heart of this chapter grows. Box  2.2 below shows a way that the performance piece explored the importance of our developing friendship, or ‘oddkin’ (Haraway, 2016).

Box 2.2  Body 2 With you, not with other friends, as they are spectators, with you our sexual stories are becoming entwined. . . The words of Anais Nin gives new meaning to our friendship ‘Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born’ (1934, p. 45).

This chapter presents a dimension of autonomy as pedagogy (The Bodies Collective, 2021, 2023) within embodied friendship, using our tacit knowledge to skilfully share sexuality and liberation. These specific knowledges were to teach female ejaculation and to expand sexual experience by being invited to an orgy. Learning the skill of female ejaculation provided a bodily skill to improve orgasm/self-love, expand knowledge of one’s own body, add to a personal sexual lexicon, and experience the power that arises from being in control of how one’s body responds to pleasure. Freuh (1996) equates beingwith pleasure as a way of transforming unhappiness and self-loathing. The excerpt below shares reflections on autonomy as pedagogy in action after the first skill sharing experience. However, in the process of trying to get our explicit performance paper published we were reminded by the peer reviewers how we had not told the readers what it is like to ejaculate as a woman or what it is (see Box 2.1 as an example from our performance paper). Bodies in 2018

By now, we had submitted our original performance piece and an ever-adapting supporting paper to five journals and been through outright rejections and extensive peer review. The complexity of putting different foci on the paper demanded by the peer reviewers felt like an endless

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 45 Box 2.3  Body 1 Standing Forward Why did she suggest teaching her, because once an educator always a fucking educator? Because it was a way of connecting the raw sense of power and control it gives her to the stories of transgressive and extreme sexual acts being told to her. Containment, control—so much of our lives, her life is about trying to control her body how it looks, smells, functions but it’s illusory this containment there is a tussle, a power struggle; she can feel stretched and straining, like the very seams of her being will rip. She could talk lyrically of the dripping, fecund ripeness of re-awakened sexuality and eroticism that is like an embodied Dylan Thomas poem, all alliterative vowels and rolling, lilting exuberance. She could talk of possession, feeling like some external spirit, possibly that of her dead mother or dead partner is invading, unsettling her sense of self, getting her to step ever nearer the edge of extremity.

push me/pull me process that lost the original energy and intention of the performance paper. We were left feeling we had created something that was not authentic to us and confused by the message we were attempting to communicate. Bodies in 2019 Alys—six weeks postpartum, Bundjalung Country, Australia—my brain somewhat alert again, babe sleeping on my breast, laptop on my knee I bravely attempted to dig through the pain of yet another harsh peer review. Wanting this story, our story of friendship and edge-dwelling to be published. Worth even less sleep to get our story out. Davina—finishing my post-doc on living with pain, questioning where I  fit in the academic world. Starting to work with medical students helps provide validity and a new perspective on creativity. I feel further away from our original intention with the paper, lost between being a good girl and trying to please, and wanting to pull back from the reviewers demands.

The Silenced Body If Bodyography is the study of the body, then have we inadvertently silenced the body in our bodily stories? We see how this connects to Chapter 1, The Unspeakable body actually speaks volumes, ‘how bodies are viewed, assessed,

46  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick and used/misused’. We wonder if we too were so ensconced in avoiding the uncomfortable that we skirted around the explicit and the abject even in our paper designed to call it out. For example, one journal was keen for us to reframe the whole performance under the position of abject autoethnography (this term is explained in the Resonances that follows this chapter) which was only a small focus of our original work. Freuh (1996, p. 16) talks of how it is still important that women ‘speak as a lusting subject and a carnal agent . . . for women have yet to profoundly develop their erotic faculties for themselves through talking about and operating within the discipline of sex’. We endeavoured to do this in the performance piece. However, we argue that the paper and this chapter are about the embodied friendship of two cis women sharing connection and depth through a shared vulnerability of explicit autoethnographic stories about when the body is silenced and when it can be spoken about. Yet, the peer review process has taken us on a rollercoaster, our confidences shaken, was it that we couldn’t write well or was it the subject matter? The journals defended their inclusive stances arguing that they would publish a paper on female ejaculation, so that left us questioning our own abilities to write. By 2020, we had stopped trying to get the paper published. We could barely talk about it, let alone go back and look at the carnage of edited versions. In 2022, we gathered all of the versions of the paper from the development of the original performance piece through the detailed versions from the multiple critiques from peer review and tried to look with a fresh lens at the body of work. This was painful and enlightening at the same time. It was through looking back at the papers and the feedback that we began to see themes emerge and realise that the final version of the paper was a long way from where we started. We realised that we had bent to the wishes of the reviewers when reading our paper which was not where we wanted to be. Reflecting whilst theorising on our original writing we realise that we silenced the experiences—the thoughts and feelings and were never really clear on what female ejaculation is. (No one comes, 2018 version) We were then surprised to read our 2019 version, where we clearly explain how to ejaculate in the paper. Was this really what we started out to do? We shared a lot, but not necessarily what the critics/audience wanted to hear, there was a balance to be found between what sometimes felt like the prurient interest from reviewers and acknowledging our need for safety. When writing about embodied experience, does writing have to answer all the questions? How much is explained? See Boxes 2.4 and 2.5. Explicit Autoethnography How much do we share? What do we risk by sharing? What responsibility do we have to our current selves by sharing our sexually explicit and vulnerable stories?

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 47 Box 2.4  Body 1, Touching Body 2 on the Arm Oh my God, really, you really want to say that? Like that, so brazenly? What ethical responsibility do we have to be aware of each other’s uncomfortableness/embarrassment? Box 2.5  Body 1, Standing Back Who are we? Two women, one post-menopausal and the other pre-menopausal meet and become friends. They both have a story to tell in terms of their own relationships to sex, sexuality, and sexual liberation. Their journeys collide and share deeper intra-actions These two events involve both in different iterations of peripheral and central participant. Their dialogue and personal journeys help them to deepen their friendship and to start to unpick their lives with shame/identity connected to sex-positive identities. Body 2, Standing Back Or a pre-climacteric and post climacteric woman, as Greer (1991) would insist, knowing that ‘menopausal’ is a social construct that smacks unhealthily of a prurient interest in a male-dominated medical profession, a wish to deny the grief of a body ageing and changing; though her argument, it seems, does not encompass the re-discovery of a more sexed body. We have realised through writing this chapter that the original paper and this chapter are not about abject autoethnography, that was a label emplaced upon us, (possibly deriving from the Shame? Title of the session we ran); they are actually about explicit autoethnography. Explicit autoethnography refers to how we clearly and graphically show our experiences without censure, showing the complexities inherent in our lived experiences. Margrit Shildrick, Professor of Gender and Knowledge Production, is keen to point out that postmodern feminism is tackling the subtleties of ‘integrating the excluded without losing touch with specificity, (this) places new emphasis on reclaiming the body in both its corporeality and its desires, as the site of multiple subject positions’ (1997, p.  172). Therefore, we argue there is space for sharing explicit autoethnographies without the possible cultural shame linked to an abject experience as well as acknowledging the multiple subject positions we occupy within our embodied friendship. A good example of an explicit autoethnography that explores the embodied nature of sexuality is art therapist Susan Moir Mackay’s PhD (2021, p. V), where

48  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick she ‘write[s] the raw, explicit, profane, beauty, struggles, and complications of pleasure pain sex’. We see connections in the style of our piece ‘No one comes’ with the methodology of Mackay’s (2021) thesis, where she says, ‘I write my sexual experiences through the graphic, and fractured language of my body and art . . . This creative-relational inquiry is intimate, close to my skin and emotions’ (p. V), a similar style can be seen in Boxes 2.1–2.5 as examples from our performance. There is also the aspect of celebrating the full juiciness of an embodied experience with explicit autoethnography. Sheldrick (1997) reminds us that what matters ‘for the ethical affirmation of the feminine, is that an acceptance of the leakiness of bodies and boundaries speaks to the necessity of an open response’ (p. 216). Explicit autoethnography and embodied friendship allow for messy, real, bodies to speak and to be spoken about without the silencing of societal norms. Bodies in 2022

Davina: So, what exactly did we want to come out of that paper, Alys? Alys: Well, I think we felt that, for me as a Graduate student and you with your new Doctorate (Kirkpatrick, 2017), we thought we had nothing to lose, but of course we always have something to lose, as Jess Erb said in response to reading these words ‘Nothing is unconditional— even in friendship. What does it mean to ‘risk’?’. I think we also felt that there seemed to be a space in conferences and some journals to share autoethnographies that presented an alternative to normativity, so why not our story? Davina: But what exactly was our story? I am not sure it really was just about our sex lives. Alys: Agreed, although, we hadn’t heard much at conferences or read many journal articles about explicit sexual liberation and cis-women’s lives. Davina: True, but our paper was about embodied friendship. About giving voice to a cheeky and fun friendship of a post-climeratic and pre-climeratic woman. Now, with time, the rawness still aches—we live with the rejection but, having put all the versions away, we have taken time to think-with some comments and question others, we appreciate how we didn’t clearly define our intention and let others guide and define this. Alys in 2015 and Alys in 2022 are very different beings. Same body, different beings. What would Alys the parent, Alys living as a settlercolonial-academic on stolen land in Australia, Alys who live(d)ing through a pandemic, say to Alys in 2015? Davina carries a variety of selves, as we all do. Between 2015 and 2022, and years of therapy, she became a more aware witness to these multiple selves. She went from pre- to post-climacteric and reassessed

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 49 the meaning of success in her life. The deaths of her mother and partner became more chronologically distant yet still resonant. Conclusion What do we Alys-Davina say now? We take heed from Donna Haraway’s positioning of ‘staying with the trouble’ (2016) within feminism. Troubling the effect that not getting published had upon our bodies and how the conflict stayed with us. Acknowledging how our embodied friendship has deepened and grown through the process. Our bodies are growing older, yet the connection is still there. It was easy to share explicit autoethnographies when we had ‘nothing to lose’ but when you want to get published and you get so many rejections, it becomes tricky. We allowed ourselves to be silenced through self-doubt from rejection. Bodies in 2022

Davina: What if we reframe our whole outlook on the experience? Alys: You mean we question what success is? Davina: Yes, perhaps once we realise that getting No one Comes published was not the outcome that was needed and that it was a success after all. Alys: Wow! Yes! Presenting No One Comes at ICQI in 2017 led to so many fruitful conversations, new friendships, and academic networks in its own right. Davina: Exactly The Bodies Collective would not have existed if it wasn’t for that paper. Alys: Maybe we are arguing for a change to another hierarchy within the academy, the one where being published in a high-point journal is the only outcome for success? Davina: Yes, once we realise that the learning journey of this paper provided us with a model of success that was about communication and bringing people together talking about explicit autoethnographies. Alys: And what is funny is that without realising it, we had allowed ourselves to be sucked into the neoliberal machine, forgetting that one of the main aims of The Bodies Collective is to trouble hierarchies. Davina: So, we hope that this chapter offers readers another version of success and scholarship. References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bolt, B. (2007). The magic is in the handling. In E. Barrett & B. Bolt (Eds.). Practice as research: Approaches to creative arts enquiry (pp. 27–34). I. B. Tauris.

50  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick Davies, B., & Gannon, S. (2006). Doing collective biography. Open University Press. Ellis, C. (2007). Telling secrets, revealing lives: Relational ethics in intimate research with others. Qualitative Inquiry [online], 13, 25. Freuh, J. (1996). Erotic faculties. University of California Press. Greer, G. (1991). The change. Women, ageing and the menopause. Penguin. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/detail. action?docID=4649739 Kirkpatrick, D. (2017). Grief and loss; Living with the presence of absence. A practicebased study of personal grief narratives and participatory projects [PhD thesis]. University of the West of England. Kirkpatrick, D., & Mendus, A. (2017, May). No one comes: The art of female ejaculation and other stories. [Conference paper]. International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Champaign-Urbana, IL. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbhI1XNdPhg Kirkpatrick, D., Porter, S., Speedy, J., & Wyatt, J. (2021). Artful narrative inquiry. Making and writing creative qualitative research. Routledge. Mackay, S. M. (2021). Troubling pleasures: A  creative-relational inquiry [PhD Counselling Studies]. The University of Edinburgh. Mackinlay, E.,  & Bartleet, B. (2012). Friendship as research: Exploring the potential of sisterhood and personal relationships as the foundations of musicological and ethnographic fieldwork. Qualitative Research Journal, 12(1), 75–87. Mendus, A., Kirkpatrick, D., & Murray, F. (2021). What is feminism in troubling times? To stay standing together. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(2), 258–265. Nin, A. (1934). The diary of Anais Nin, Vol. 1: 1931–1934. Harcourt. Noddings, N. (1984). Caring, a feminine approach to ethics  & moral education. University of California Press. Owton, H., & Collinson, J. (2014). Close but not too close: Friendship as method(ology) in ethnographic research encounters. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 283–305. Pelias, R. (2014). Performance an alphabet of performative writing. Left Coast Press. Raymond, J. (2001). A passion for friends: Toward a philosophy of female affection. Spinifex Press. Sheldrick, M. (1997). Leaky bodies and boundaries. Routledge. Speedy, J., & Wyatt, J. (Eds.). (2014). Collaborative writing as inquiry. Routledge. The Bodies Collective. (2021). Bodyography as activism in qualitative inquiry. The Bodies Collective at ECQI19. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(1), 104–121. The Bodies Collective. (2023). Recentring bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy and human flourishing. In Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing (pp. 157–180). Sense Publishers. Tillman, L. (2004). Friendship as method. Qualitative Inquiry, 9(5).

Resonances to Chapter 2: Abject Autoethnography: A Conversation Jess Erb, Alys Mendus, and Davina Kirkpatrick

This abject spectre, which continually haunts the ego and seeks to disrupt the continuity of body image, is all the more terrifying because it is a ghost incarnated in flesh, blood, spit, mucus, faeces, vomit, urine, pus, and other bodily fluids. Hence, the boundary between the body image and what it is not is not (merely) a symbolic one; rather it must also be understood as a corporeal refusal of corporeality. (Weiss, 1999, p. 90) What Is the Abject? Alys and Davina began using the term ‘abject autoethnography’ to describe their work in 2017 after giving a paper at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (Kirkpatrick & Mendus, 2017). In an unpublished paper from 2019, Kirkpatrick and Mendus defined abject autoethnography as that which disturbs identity, order and system (Kristeva, 1992). It [the abject] is transgressive in its sharing of personal, political stories that sit in the liminal spaces of comfortable-uncomfortable, that dance between the periphery and the centre of what is acceptable to share within and outside of the academy. Since writing this unpublished definition of ‘abject autoethnography’ Kirkpatrick and Mendus (2023, Chapter 2 of this volume) have realised that ‘abject autoethnography’ was a term that they only used to describe their work as a response to critical peer review of their subject matter when trying to submit a paper on female friendship and sexuality and not an accurate reflection of their work. Kirkpatrick and Mendus (see Chapter  2 of this volume) have chosen to move away from describing their work as ‘abject autoethnography’ to use ‘explicit autoethnography’ instead.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-5

52  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick But What Is the Abject? In this Resonances section, Davina, Jess, and Alys attempt to grapple with the use of the word abject in relation to their bodies. Through sharing our dialogue, we hope to stay with the trouble (Haraway, 2016) of a word that has its own agency and power to silence within academia and, at the same time, resist the urge that using such a term means that we agree with its premises. Essentially, we hope this Resonances invites readers to think about what gets left out of academia because it is abject and thus disavowed? We acknowledge there is a close relationship between abject autoethnography, explicit autoethnography and queering autoethnography. Abject or explicit autoethnography gives voice to the uncomfortable as queering autoethnography is ‘disorientating and disrupting, to impermanence and change’ (Holman Jones  & Harris, 2018, p.  4). However, as abject or explicit and queering autoethnography aim to ‘disturb the order of things’ by creating dissonance around what passes as ‘normal’ and ‘normative’ (Holman Jones & Harris, 2018, p. 7), they both have a key role to make changes within what is acceptable and what is published; they work against ‘that which passes as stable, coherent, certain and fixed’ (Ibid, p. 7). The Conversation Begins. . . The start of the conversation: computer screens glaring white light and Wi-Fi signals across the globe (Cornwall, UK; Toronto, Canada; Darumbal Country, Australia) as Davina, Jess, and Alys begin to talk about a topic of ‘abject/ abjection’ that they have been toying with writing about for a couple years now. Davina: Abject was a description that was placed upon us [by other scholars], after the conference paper (2017) And when we started writing our chapter, we realised that maybe what was being talked about was the explicit rather than the abject. Abject, still for me, feels like it has a layer of judgement. Jess: Yes, it does, doesn’t it. Davina: Why should messy female bodies be put with that label? Or put under or in that box? Alys: And shame, wasn’t it? Davina: Yes, that is right! And that there is a link between abjection and shame. And of course, that is what our original panel had been: ‘Shame?’—with a question mark. But maybe it is useful to ask, what is inside the question mark? What does the question mark suggest—that we have not really thought about. Jess: Yes . . . I mean, the early feminist scholars’ understanding of abject—they used this word not as a word that they like but rather what others’ label as the abject: ‘You call this abject’. So, like female ejaculation, periods, shit—all the good stuff {laughs}—They show how we are not allowed to

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 53 talk about that. It’s what Weiss (1999), and Grosz (1994) call abject. Their work recognises what is gross or taboo in literature and we ask why. Davina: And I wrote about Kristeva (1992) and I was told I did not understand her understanding of the abject. Which was weird because I thought I did. Jess: You did? That is so rude! Davina: Yeah, and it felt like being back at college. Like ‘No Davina, you got that wrong’. But she does use the abject like that, doesn’t she? Like the taboo. I haven’t got that wrong. Davina’s understanding of the abject speaks back to what Weiss (1999, p. 90) recognises as both exclusion of the bodily as well as the impossibility of this rejections. As Weiss says: Abjection is necessary because some aspects of our corporeal experience must be excluded to enable the coherent construction of both the ego and body image, but it is also impossible because, as Grosz, Butler, and Kristeva all suggest, that which is excluded is not eliminated altogether but continually ‘erupts’ and therefore disrupts the privileged sites of inclusion  .  .  . These aberrant body images which are usually at odds with societal attitudes, individual and social expectations. What Weiss (1999) is saying here is that for the body to be socially acceptable, it must exclude parts of it that may be at odds with the ego—secretions, the taboo and dirty. She also maintains that these disavowals are impossible. Alys: So, I  think the connection that we are making here is that abject autoethnography is really taboo autoethnography. But when we (Davina and Alys) were writing our paper (in 2017) or even now, we didn’t want the subject matter of our work to be seen as taboo or shameful, but by describing it as abject then it could be argued that we accepted that it is! This is triggering. If we use ‘explicit’ instead that makes more sense as abject as a concept is too broad and scathing. I’d argue that our work is more nuanced than that. Jess: I think that you both have a good point, and I am just sitting with it right now and grappling with it. Because if we do what feminist scholars have been trying to do in showing the abject, it is a calling out of what cannot be called out. But you are saying that it is even in this calling out, that can create an acceptance that it is abject—an acceptance that ‘yes, this is abject’. Rather than what others are saying this is what others think it is. . . . Are we allowed to have a label that might implicate us? Davina: Explicit is less judgemental. Abject has a wrongness attached to it. Like a dichotomy between abject and wholesome. It feels like they are two ends of a seesaw.

54  Alys Mendus and Davina Kirkpatrick Alys: It is a little bit more complex than that. From a new materialist perspective, I’d argue that we are looking more at entanglement (Barad, 2007) rather than at a binary. Our work could be titled as ‘abject autoethnography’ but it is much more complex than just abject. For example, some may see it as abject and others may see it as explicit. However, our paper is not just explicit autoethnography. The words used in the title do matter. I keep going back to what does abject autoethnography mean? I see a link with what Jess said about the abject bodily functions—but that is society’s understanding of abject and perhaps not ours? Thinking about the links to my chapter (3) about underwear. But is underwear mundane? Mundane autoethnography. {ha-ha, and pulls up her top after breast feeding her child}. Davina: As she puts her tits back. As we grapple back and forth with definitions, meanings, and struggling against the constraints that abject means, might mean, and forces us to think it means, we are drawing closer together—a friendship through the abject borders of what can and cannot be said (Weiss, 1999). As Grosz (1990, p. 89) says, ‘the abject entices and attracts the subject closer to the edge. It is an insistence on the subject’s necessary relation to death, to animality, and to materiality. The Abject demonstrates the impossibility of clear-cut borders, lines of demarcation, divisions between the clean and the unclean, the proper and improper, order and disorder’. We are ‘staying with the trouble’ (Haraway, 2016) our fear of words that bind, while also recognising that by doing so, we grant more light into the unsaid, the unthought knowns of what we feel we cannot say, but do not know why. Jess: Let’s take a second and look at the terms rejection and abject . . . That would be where I see the abject. In your paper being rejected—even in journals saying that they are open and progressive. And yet they do not want to hear about the female experience of an orgy. Your paper was tender. But they just saw the gritty bits. This is where the abject comes in. And why I would not want to get rid of the name. It is a moré. We need everything to be Victorian and genteel and nice. Why did they make these things abject? Can we have a double layer to the abject? Alys: So you are saying perhaps we could find a way of taking back the abject? Jess: Yeah. And what people have placed upon us and silenced us with. Alys: That is what I was thinking! Yeah. Jess: In taking back a word, we are not using it in the same way. We are making it our own. Why is ejaculation, or shit, or dancing naked, or breasts, or Alys breastfeeding bad? It feels like a double entendre—this is what you say it is and this is what we are going to do with it. And show how and why it is shamed and silenced. Davina: I think that it is about women’s bodies being messy and how that is described.

Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography 55 As we are writing, talking, and grappling, it feels like we are surrounded by scholars that have once done this with us: Kristeva, Butler (1988, 1990, 1993) Grosz, Weiss—they have all grappled with abjection and the abject. They want to do with it what we are. And yet, 30 years later, we are still grappling. As Weiss grapples alongside us: We cannot dispense with the abject without dispensing with our own identities since the latter are founded upon the former. On the other hand, we can hardly ‘embrace’ the abject without its ceasing to be the abject, a process which will, inevitably it seems, force the creation of a new abject object to take the place of the old one. (Weiss, 1999, p. 96). So, we ask you, reader: what do we do? How do we speak of that which is taboo, explicit, abject, and what affect does it have on our bodies? Do we use the term and recognise how it has been used? Or is doing so, in itself, abject? References Butler, J. (1988). Performative acts and gender constitution an essay in phenomenology and feminist theory. Theatre Journal, 40(4), 519–531. Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. Routledge. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex”. Routledge. Grosz, E. (1990). Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction. Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994). Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Indiana University Press. Haraway, D. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Holman, J. S., & Harris, D. (2018). Queering autoethnography. Routledge. Kirkpatrick, D., & Mendus, A. (2017, May). No one comes: The art of female ejaculation and other stories. [Conference paper]. International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry, Champaign-Urbana, IL. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbhI1XNdPhg Kristeva, J. (1992). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection. Columbia University Press. Weiss, G. (1999). Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. Routledge.

3 (Un)dressing the Body Underwear Stories and Audio Found Poetry Dr. Alys Mendus

Introduction Let’s talk about (un)dressing the body, removing your outer layers of clothing until all that is left is your underwear! Following Steele (1996), who explains that underwear signifies a liminal space where the wearer is ‘simultaneously dressed and undressed’ (p. 116), this chapter is written to talk about the body wearing underwear! As you read this chapter, I invite you to think about the stories that share an autoethnography of everyday life (perhaps seen as abject or explicit by some, see Chapter 2 in this volume): the body and the underwear connecting through the aromas, the secretions, as well as just the mundane nature of wearing underpants (Entwistle, 2001; Tsaousi, 2016; Tsaousi  & Brewis, 2013). As Watts (2013) reminds us, ‘Every morning when you put on knickers [or don’t], you interact with hundreds of years of ideas and cultural debate by slipping your limbs into a small piece of cloth’ (p. 66). So, let’s talk about that (small) piece of cloth, about the agency of an often ‘silent small’. This chapter shares a research project from 2021 (Mendus, 2023), where I  gathered audio stories from 14 participants from around the world, and myself, talking about underwear. From these audio stories, I  created two audio found poems. Audio found poem 1 is ‘General Underwear’ and audio found poem 2 is ‘Dress Code Red!’ Audio found poetry is an audio rather than written response to creating found poetry from a data set, using not just the words but ‘listening for the poetic’ (Penwarden & Schoone, 2021, p. 350) and the voice of the participants to create a new audio poem. Here are the links to the two audio poems on YouTube (Mendus, 2022). I recommend you listen to these poems first, then read the chapter. This chapter explores the wider literature on underwear, the stories shared in the audio found poems, and the connection of the body within these stories. It asks, ‘What aspects of Bodyography can be seen in an everyday object?’ ‘Here Come the Girls!’—The Role of Underwear in The Bodies Collective The dialogic section between Chapters  1 and 2 (this volume) explored the concept of Abject Autoethnography, adding to Chapter 2 where Davina DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-6

(Un)dressing the Body 57 Kirkpatrick and I  ended up defining our work as Explicit Autoethnography instead. Chapter  2 discusses a paper that Davina and I  presented at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in 2017. The paper was controversial in content and style. We knew we were being cheeky and doing things differently. Yet the audience did not know that I had bought us both a pair of knickers from a supermarket in the United Kingdom that had a bold logo across the front saying, ‘Here come the girls!’ We both wore those pants to present the paper! Tsaousi and Brewis (2013) note that underwear is usually hidden from view, so no one else at the time knew we were wearing matching undies! And yet, I realise that we are not actually that radical, as we have almost walked straight into Tsaousi and Brewis’ (2013) imagination where they suggest that they: can conceive of situations in which women might deliberately wear socially inappropriate underwear—such as a university tutor choosing sexy underwear for work to incorporate elements of her sexual partner. . . [identity] . . . into her professional persona. (p. 18) So, there we were performing our ‘sexual partner identity’ or ‘relational embodied friendship identity’ into our professional persona making me wonder, what about other people? What underwear do they wear, and why? Who wears feminist underwear and gifts them to their friend?! What conversation does feminism and underwear have? What agency is in this silent small? What happens to these used and well-worn garments? Can we make sense of the power, secrecy, stains, conquests, silences, excitement of these items? Where do we store them? What do they say about us and our bodies? In this chapter, I often use the term ‘knickers’ which Fields (2007) explains originally began being used in the 1880s in the United Kingdom and is a diminutive of knickerbockers. When I  talk about knickers, I  am meaning closed-crotch panties, as women’s underwear historically moved from opencrotch drawers to closed-crotch drawers by the 1920s (Fields, 2007). Theoretical Positioning and Literature on Underwear The majority of the limited academic research on underwear focuses on its role in women’s identity (Amy-Chinn et  al., 2006; Jantzen et  al., 2006; Tsaousi & Brewis, 2013; Watts, 2013) and influences from consumer markets on women (Amy-Chinn, 2006; Attwood, 2005; Storr, 2003), often with themes

58  Alys Mendus of ‘consumption’ and identity around underwear (Jantzen et al., 2006; Tsaousi, 2016). A  key aspect of my work was to include more than cis-women’s viewpoints and to encourage voices from all gender identities and underwear choices. However, my project is not directly linked to identity construction, although it is present. It is looking at the body and agency of the underwear itself. There is perhaps more correlation between my project and that of Ward (2016) and Meyer (2021), who also invited people to share underwear stories in arts-based projects. However, in my work, I asked for the recorded voices of participants. I can draw similarities with Meyer’s (2021) ongoing international project, Cunt Quilt/Underwear Audit. Meyer (2021) runs feminist art workshops that have space for conversation and time for worn underwear to be sewn into quilts and other art installations. Whereas Ward (2016) created an exhibition with ‘large thong panties’ (p. 209) with embroidered words, alongside which an audio recording was playing of people speaking other participants’ words about sex and sexuality. The important difference with my work is that Ward’s recordings were not directly talking about underwear. Viewing underwear through the lens of Bodyography, as a situated bodily practice (Entwistle, 2001; Merleau-Ponty, 2011), brings embodiment into focus as the ‘body’ stories what the ‘thing’ (the underwear) carries. As Bennett (2004) would argue, the ‘thing-power’ of the undies gives it agency, which could be seen to contradict with Entwhistle’s description that being dressed makes clothes ‘alive and fleshy’ (2001, p.  36), as once clothes are taken from the body they almost seem alien and not alive any more. However, I  think that this binary is not helpful. Underwear in this project is alive and fleshy and has agency when it is being worn as well as when it is not being worn and lies in a bag of old knickers under your bed! This directed my methodology by viewing knickers themselves as non-human participants who have stories of their own. My research hoped to discover and share some of those stories through collaborative audio poetry. The use of audio rather than written poetry was also important, as it allowed me to play with the normativity and hierarchy of the written word. I argue that your body feels different when you hear the words of multiple participants talking together compared to reading words (silently in your head) from the page (see Mark’s work in Chapter 7 of this volume). I wanted the audience to listen to the poetry and share in ‘catching someone in the act of being: flickering into life’ (Penwarden  & Schoone, 2021, p. 356) through the audio found poetry. Underwear, itself, can be seen as a political action, if we think with Entwistle’s (2001) reminder that ‘Human bodies are dressed bodies . . . Dress embellishes the body, the materials commonly used adding a whole array of meanings to the body that would otherwise not be there’ (p. 33). There are multiple complexities involved in the choice of underwear and its role with/ on/to the body/other bodies. The underwear speaks. Underwear, with its own affect, on the embodied experience of the listener and the storyteller.

(Un)dressing the Body

59

I ask you here and I  will ask you again, What stories could your underwear tell? New materialism helped me look at underwear differently. I  recognised that this project embodies the new materialistic space of intra-action (Barad, 2007), where multiple aspects are interconnected in an ever-changing variety of ways, creating an entanglement between the human and the nonhuman. See Figure  3.1, where the unity of the washing line in the cyanotype print illuminates this entanglement, or getting our knickers in a twist! Figure 3.1 helps conceptualise this project, as Davies (2021) explains, ‘the entangled dynamics of social, material and semiotic flows and forces make up the diffractive movements through which life emerges, assembles itself, and endures’ (p.  2). Therefore, positioning my thinking with Jusslin and Höglund (2020), who argued that by thinking with new materialism allowed a ‘performative

Figure 3.1 ‘I have a bag of old knickers. Do you?’ Cyanotype and paper cut, shown as a black and white image. Artwork and photograph by Alys Mendus. Source: © Alys Mendus.

60  Alys Mendus approach to meaning-making’ (p.  251), I  realised that I  was thinking-with underwear as a participant, as stories, as something that is in relation between human and non-human entities (Barad, 2007). Therefore, by gathering people’s (human body) stories (more-than-human body) about underwear (non-human body), the entanglement is relational and, as Jusslin and Höglund argue, the meaning-making occurs ‘in relations between matter and meaning’ (2020, p. 251), opening a space for the underwear to share its stories. Methodology In March 2021, I put out a call on Facebook and in international arts-based email groups for audio stories about underwear. Using voice recordings on messenger apps and email, people choose to share stories (Phillips & Bunda, 2018) of their relationships with underwear and to submit them electronically. Participants who sent me their audio files also gave their consent for the recordings and their voices to be used for research. I ensured that I followed the four ethical principles from the National Statement on Ethical Conditions for Human Research in Australia (NHMRC et al., 2018) of Research merit and integrity; Justice; Beneficence and Respect. The research participants have been kept aware of the research process, following Ellis’s (2007) approach for an ethic of care and an ongoing relationship of trust, and all participants have been kept anonymous. This project, although aware of the more-than-human notion of underwear, focuses within the methodology on the role of the voice. The Bodyography of voice, the study, role, and agency of the voice itself through audio found poetry. I aim to be ‘poethical’ (Krøjer & Hølge-Hazelton, 2008, p. 32), which acknowledges that choices are made and representation is never completely inclusive and always political in how the poet decides to ‘make access for, who we wish to speak to (not for), and who we think might profit from what we are saying in the way that we say it’ (Krøjer  & Hølge-Hazelton, 2008, p. 32). Therefore, I work with the voices and sounds around the participants on the particular day that they chose to make a recording for this project. I  respect my participants’ feelings and hope they feel fairly represented (Faulkner, 2009) in the audio found poems, but I craft independently with a belief that the final project is my view on what I think is happening and not expecting the participant to think or feel similarly (Ellis, 2004). In terms of inclusivity, I  am very aware that these voices are privileged and that the English language—although not the first language of every participant—is given dominance. There is one included voice that is speaking in Swiss German. The 14 participants come from the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America, and Australia. This chapter hopes to invoke a personal interrogation of Bodyography through the notion of voice. Even within the limited range of voices, I invite you to listen for the differences in volume, pacing, tone, reverberation, vocabulary, and ability to communicate. I hoped that by cutting up and entangling all 14 voices that I would be able to

(Un)dressing the Body 61 let the piece ‘speak in multiple mitigated voices’ (Bhattacharya, 2007, p. 84), reminding myself and the listener that, ‘our bodies don’t end with our skin’ (Werner, 2019, p. 561) and that audio, or ‘radiophonic space’ (Werner, 2019, p. 561), offers so much potential for creativity and play in ‘the narration and dispersal of a self’ (Werner, 2019, p. 561). For me, the originality in this work is in using the original voices of the participants in the final poetry, aiming to inspire a newness in what/how voices (and therefore bodies) can be in the world. As Roberts (2017) points out, audio gives a space for ‘listening to people speak’ (p.  116). When do we really do that or allow our audience to do that as researchers? In terms of underwear, something rarely spoken about but very alive in our imagination, understanding the research data through audio found poetry makes sense. As Werner (2017) explains, we become closer to the real point of the work through listening to an audio much more so than from reading. Discussion of the Two Audio Found Poems Audio Found Poem 1: Practical Underwear

Audio poem 1 focuses on practical and everyday underwear. It uses many different names for underwear and discusses that certain underwear styles like boxer shorts have cultural connotations and that, in some cases, underwear consumption can reconstruct gender identity (Tsaousi, 2016). A  story is shared about the experience of buying boxer shorts as a woman and feeling watched and classified for choosing what society (and the shop assistants?) deign to be ‘an inappropriate size or colour of underwear’ (Tsaousi & Brewis, 2013, p. 11). Another key theme arose when discussing if the chosen underwear was comfy? Amy-Chinn et al. (2006) ask an important question here, ‘But, what is comfy?’ (p.  380). Is ‘comfy’ what you actually feel when you wear the underwear, or are your understandings of comfort connected to what society tells you (Entwistle, 2001)? Could you be directed by what Tsaousi (2016) explains as the influences from your mothers’ cultural capital. One participant shared a reminder from their mother to ‘Always wear clean underwear’! This theme of comfort, and who defines comfort also appears in Audio-Poem-2. Participants also shared stories about how they chose their underwear connected to a set purpose: ‘Doctors appointment panties’ ‘Empowerment pants’ No one wants to be ‘jiggling at meetings’ A sigh of happiness when describing ‘just right pant, pants’. There were stories on choosing your underwear to avoid VPL (Visible Panty Line) as well as sharing differing views on when (or if) they chose to

62  Alys Mendus wear strings/thongs. Linking to stories on age and what age to wear certain types of underwear. For example stories were shared about ‘granny panties’ (high waisted underwear) which were also worn by pregnant and postpartum people. This links to Tsaousi and Brewis’ (2013) work who saw in their research that underwear has a key role in both pregnancy and ‘ “becoming” a mother’ (p. 6). Perhaps, it could be gleaned here that at this time in people’s lives it is more socially acceptable to be talking about your body and underwear as it is connected to caring for the changing body of the new parent? One of Tsaousi and Brewis’ (2013) participants actually said that they ‘turned into their mum wanting plain cotton underwear with big knickers’ (p. 13). The ethics of underwear were touched upon—stories of cheap bargains and throw away knickers were shared alongside others who were making their own underwear as they could not find anything suitable. ‘A stitch in hand . . . desperate times’ one participant exclaimed! The discussion on new underwear bought or handmade links to the wondering of what to do with old underwear. Some people get rid of it, and others, like this author, collect old pants in a bag that sits under their bed. One participant mentioned the challenge of getting rid of old underwear, as they hold such a personal connection from being worn on such an intimate part of our body that we traditionally keep covered. How do you dispose of this garment? What would your knickers say if they could talk? What have they seen?! Whilst discussing these political issues of talking about and disposing of an ‘unmentionable’ item, several participants actually share that they do not wear underwear anymore. Within this conversation of talking about something worn by many people it is important to reflect that it is not worn by everyone and as one participant pointed out ‘Underwear is not essential!’ Those rejecting underwear argue that it is more comfortable to not wear underwear than to try and fit into the stereotypical underwear-wearing role. As Tsaousi and Brewis argue, their participants also found that as underwear is hidden from view it ‘is just a case of feeling good about themselves’ (2013, p. 15) and comfy for some folx means going commando. ‘Life is too short to worry about other people’. Audio found poem 2: Dress Code Red Audio found poem 2, Dress Code Red, explores stories shared discussing the relationship between sexuality, feeling sexy, sex and wearing underwear. As Tsauosui and Brewis point out ‘underwear can make you feel sexy produce

(Un)dressing the Body 63 feelings of sexiness’ (2013, p. 16). Entanglements can be seen here with audio found poem 1 as one participant asked: ‘Who do you wear underwear for?’ Amy-Chinn et al.’s (2006) research which focussed on consumption of underwear acknowledged that although women often bought underwear for themselves they also often bought with their ‘(male) partners in mind’ (p.  389). In this poem voices discuss end objectives, often choosing to put on certain styles of underwear with a (future) partner in mind, ‘Preparing for the end of the night’. This raises questions on who owns the body and what are appropriate ways to dress? Entwistle (2001) would argue that ‘the body is both the property of the individual and the social world’ (p.  46) linking back to influences from childhood on what type of underwear to wear and for whom, seeing underwear choice as a method to perform one’s identity. However, with a feminist lens I wonder with my participants key questions such as are we really performing our identity if we are succumbing to the power of another? Arguing that it is not a society we want for our children, where there is pressure to dress for others and thinking of the other person instead of yourself. Why should we be wearing uncomfortable underwear to fit a societal ‘acceptable’ mould? One story shared discusses a pair of uncomfortable lacey pants kept, unworn at the bottom of a drawer, bought at a time that they ‘imagined myself a different kind of pant wearer’. This idea of owning pretty but also uncomfortable underwear was also corroborated by Tsaousi and Brewis’ participant (2013). Another voice in the poem wonders if ‘have I been taught that lacey underwear under my clothes makes me feel more sexy or powerful? Is it really true?’ Jantzen et  al. (2006) explain that underwear is saturated with erotic cultural connotations so just putting it on (or in the case of the earlier participant, just owning the lacey pants) can produce an increased sexual awareness. I wonder, who has told these participants these tales and made these connections, or is it as Storr (2003) argues from their research in Ann Summers’ parties that the connection between sex and underwear is often taken for granted? This links to the story that frames the title of the audio found poem about an old couple with dementia and the moment when in a care home, the old woman’s underwear is being changed and she is being dressed in white knickers. The story is told in the voice of her partner, who shouts out in response to her distress, ‘Dress Code Red’ as it had been an old joke as ‘Life is too short for white underwear!’ This story suggests that the old woman is not having her underwear choices respected, perhaps as Amy-Chinn et al.’s (2006) work suggests that age determines women’s underwear purchasing habits or what is seen to be suitable? Others voices also reject white underwear as ‘they want to look nice’ and white underwear was seen as not ‘nice’ perhaps not sexy enough? But again, for whom?

64  Alys Mendus Perhaps something that can be taken for granted is that some folx choose underwear not for aesthetic reasons but for how it ‘feels’ on the body. AmyChinn et al. (2006) suggest if you treat underwear as a technology you can look at how it contributes to ‘the creation or production of bodily sensations’ (p. 383). I’m thinking back to those lace knickers, and, of course, the sensuality of what feels fabulous to one person may be very different to another. AmyChinn et  al. (2006) draw an important distinction between the sexual and the sensual, arguing that sensual is a more encompassing term that sexual, as ‘sensuality should be understood as hedonic well-being: the production and enjoyment of bodily sensations, not necessarily related to sex’ (p. 383). This draws the body itself into focus in our discussion and gives agency to the materiality of the underwear. Amy-Chinn et al. (2006) make a link from their data between buying certain underwear and self-gratification asserting that choosing certain underwear is an act ‘auto-sex (masturbation)’ (p. 383). Therefore, it could be argued that as underwear is being worn on intimate areas of your body and the sensations of wearing these items can give multiple feelings such as comfort, irritation, confidence, embarrassment and that the wearer could also be feeling aroused. Or it could all just be for fun, as Watts (2013) suggests, dressing up in fancy lingerie is ‘the closest thing you find, as an adult, to the dress up boxes of your childhood!’ (p. 67). Conclusion That was my brief description of my feelings towards underwear.

This chapter has explored the complexities of talking about underwear, acknowledged as something worn by most people, yet rarely candidly discussed. Where Mendus (2023) shares the development of the methodology of audio found poems, this chapter focuses more on the Bodyography of the human knicker wearers and begins to tease at the agency of the underwear themselves. The key themes arising from these audio found poems are the need for comfort, yet at the same time, the political issue of who do you wear your underwear for. Perhaps those ‘lacey pants’ or that ‘thong’ is being worn not for the wearer’s comfort or needs? The style in which the audio found poems have been crafted leaves open-ended questions for the listener to ponder and gives the opportunity to critique wider society’s influence on such an everyday, yet rarely seen, item of clothing. This work draws on Spry’s (2011) understanding of the important role of performative autoethnography as something that keeps doing the work beyond the initial sharing. Every time I listen to these stories new sensations wash over me, and I am centred down in my undies. Smiling as I think about the ones I am wearing that day and thinking back to myself in different stages in my life when I was a different type of pant wearer!

(Un)dressing the Body 65 Another aspect of Bodyography explored in this chapter is one that hopes to give agency to the non-human small piece of cloth to share its own story. However, it is important to note that at the moment this chapter allows the knicker-wearer to be the voice of the underwear, and research into the wear and tear of the objects could be an interesting avenue. I am intrigued by the work of Peter et al. (2022), ‘Beweisstück Unterhose’ (Evidence Underpants), in their creation of a composting underwear app from the University of Zurich in Switzerland which uses underwear as a way to research soil composition. Although this project is more about soil science than underwear, I  see connections to an extension from my own work as it explores the end of the underwear’s life with links to consumerism, recycling, and reducing the impacts of climate change. I envision a further arts-based project capturing images of the life cycle of a pair of undies from first being bought/made until they fall apart, which could be fascinating with the underwear itself sharing a story of its own vibrant physical materiality. So, next time you pull on your drawers, think about the political game you are playing and the role that something so small can have in making sure (in current society’s ideals) that you are (un)dressed.

Who do you dress for? References Amy-Chinn, D. (2006). This is just for Me(n): How the regulation of post-feminist lingerie advertising perpetuates woman as object. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6(2), 155–175. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540506064742 Amy-Chinn, D., Jantzen, C.,  & Østergaard, P. (2006). Doing and meaning: Towards an integrated approach to the study of women’s relationship  to underwear. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6(3), 379–401. https://doi. org/10.1177/1469540506068685 Attwood, F. (2005). Fashion and passion: Marketing sex to women. Sexualities, 8(4), 392–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460705056617 Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bennett, J. (2004). The force of things. Steps toward an ecology of matter. Political Theory, 32(3), 347–372. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591703260853 Bhattacharya, K. (2007). Voices lost and found: Using found poetry in qualitative research. In M. Cahnmann & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (pp. 83–88). Routledge. Davies, B. (2021). Entanglement in the world’s becoming and the doing of new materialist inquiry. Routledge. Ellis, C. (2004). The Ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. AltaMira Press. Ellis, C. (2007). Telling secrets, revealing lives: Relational ethics in research with intimate others. Qualitative Inquiry, 13, 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800406294947 Entwistle, J. (2001). The dressed body. In J. Entwistle & E. Wilson (Eds.), Body dressing: Dress, body, culture (pp. 33–58). Berg Publishers.

66  Alys Mendus Faulkner, S. (2009). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Left Coast Press. Fields, J. (2007). An intimate affair: Women, lingerie, and sexuality. University of California Press. Jantzen, C., Østergaard, P., & Sucena Vieira, C. M. (2006). Becoming a “woman to the backbone”: Underwear consumption and the experience of feminine identity. Journal of Consumer Culture, 6(2), 177–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540506064743 Jusslin, S., & Höglund, H. (2021). Entanglements of dance/poetry: Creative dance in students’ poetry reading and writing. Research in Dance Education, 22(3), 250–268. https://doi.org/10.1080/14647893.2020.1789088 Krøjer, J., & Hølge‐Hazelton, B. (2008). Poethical: Breaking ground for reconstruction. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 21(1), 27–33. https://doi. org/10.1080/09518390701768773 Mendus, A. (2022, December). I’ve got a bag of old knickers. Do you? [Online conference presentation]. International Symposium of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry (ISAN). www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwNxbdDT0HA Mendus, A. (2023). I’ve got a bag of old knickers. Do you? Underworlding your underwear through audio found poetry. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2011). Phenomenology of perception (D. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203720714 Meyer, C. (2021). Projects > cunt quilt/underwear audit. www.coralinameyer.com/ projects/cunt-quilt-underwear-audit/ National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australian Research Council (MRC) & Universities Australia (UA). (2018). National statement on ethical conditions for human research (2nd ed.). NHMRC. www.nhmrc.gov.au/about-us/publications/ national-statement-ethical-conduct-human-research-2007-updated-2018# Penwarden, S., & Schoone, A. (2021). The pull of words: Reliving a poetry symposium through found poetry. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 6(2), 347–368. Peter, N., Van der Heijden, M., & Bender, S. F. (2022). Willkommen bei Beweisstueck Unterhose. www.beweisstueck-unterhose.ch/ Phillips, L. G., & Bunda, T. (2018). Research through, with and as storying. Routledge. Roberts, D. (2017). Finding the poetry. In J. Biewen & A. Dilworth (Eds.), Reality radio, Second Edition: Telling true stories in sound (pp.  154–165). University of North Carolina Press. https://doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469633138.001.0001 Spry, T. (2011). Body, paper, stage writing and performing autoethnography. Left Coast Press. Steele, V. (1996). Underwear. In V. Steele (Ed.), Fetish: Fashion, sex and power (pp. 115–141). Oxford University Press. Storr, M. (2003). Latex and Lingerie: Shopping for pleasure at Ann summers. Berg Publications. Tsaousi, C. (2016). ‘What underwear do I like?’ Taste and (embodied) cultural capital in the consumption of women’s underwear. Journal of Consumer Culture, 16(2), 467–492. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540514521084 Tsaousi, C.,  & Brewis, J. (2013). Are you feeling special today? Underwear and the ‘fashioning’ of female identity. Culture and Organization, 19(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/14759551.2011.634196

(Un)dressing the Body 67 Watts, M. (2013). Slip: An essay, of sorts, about women’s underwear. The Lifted Brow, 20, 66–67. www.theliftedbrow.com/liftedbrow/slip-an-essay-of-sorts-about-womens Ward, A. (2016). Deconstructing panty pennants and revealing absent presence. Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 1(1), 208–233. https://doi. org/10.18432/R20593 Werner, K. (2017). Autoethnography as a way of being (radiophonic).  International Review of Qualitative Research,  10(1), 97–100. https://doi.org/ 10.1525/ irqr.2017.10.1.97 Werner, K. (2019). In praise, in praise of the radio autoethnography: A radio collage. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(6), 561–562. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418801374

Resonances to Chapter 3: The Academic Life of Knickers Discussion The Bodies Collective

Sarah Helps: I was so happy to engage with this project, Alys. Can you say any more about your method of gathering the ‘data’? and consent? Can you say anything about how people responded to your invitation—with caution/curiosity/repulsion? Most folx I share the topic of the project with were intrigued and would begin to tell their own underwear story wherever we were—the coffee shop, the beach, on the phone . . . As it was a research project where I asked participants to record their own stories and send them over to me as digital files I was not around for the recording of the data just the receiving. Perhaps, others hoped to send a recording but never did? (Alys) Claudia—I am the Swiss German one. I  chose my underwear poem to be in my native language, although I knew that very few would understand my words. In my perception, underwear and native language express an interestingly similar level of intimacy. Underwösch (Underwear) Wänn drüber gredt wird, dänn isch es meischtens schschsch. . . (When talked about, then in silent . . .) Dräckigi Wösch wird gwäsche— (Dirty underwear gets washed—) au sie wird irgendwänn zu Äsche. (she will become ashes one day too.) I approached Alys’ call for underwear audio very playfully and spontaneously. I am excited to have experienced what a long way this project and topic have come to date. Sarah: In reading your description of the project, I  stated to wonder about control—what if we want to do one thing and our bodies ‘force’ us to do another—what if we’d like to go commando but the challenge of periods/leaky DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-7

(Un)dressing the Body 69 bladders means that this might be a really messy project. What if, in doing something for myself (not wearing underwear), this disturbs someone else. You raise such important aspects here such as the privilege of choice about underwear (or not) and the cultural aspects as well. I think the stories hint at some aspects of control such as the story of the elderly couple. However, a less privileged cohort of participants may have led to some very different stories in relation to control. (Alys) Academic Knickers

Sarah: I also started to think about academic knickers! I started to think about discourses around how academics should present (the old trope around tweed jackets patched at the elbows for men) and how I dress for work— how I want to show up for my patients and students, when I want to be as near to a neutral, blank canvas as I can be, and when I want the room to know I’ve arrived. This leads me straight to power, to who has it and who doesn’t, to who gets called out for being inappropriately attired and who doesn’t. What did you notice about your own choices in relation to underwear as you went through this project? And now? Ha! This is a funny one and well documented in the recent conference performances of the two poems as I  hang up my bag of old knickers and see the rise in plain black comfy pants that my parent body seems to prefer and look wistfully at my cheeky old undies and wonder when I will wear them again! (Alys) How do we ‘measure’ how engaging with a research topic such as this draws the attention of the reader/influences the reader to play/explore (I guess a broader question is how do we know that autonomy as pedagogy is happening), Autonomy as pedagogy, for me is about permission, about freedom to do things differently, be that quietly smiling as you choose a certain pair of knickers, flaunting them on your washing line (as discussed at a The Bodies Collective workshop I  ran at ECQI 2022 online) or something else. I  see connections with performative autoethnography (Spry, 2011) where the outcome and impact on the audience is unknown and beyond the body of the author (and the knicker storyteller). (Alys) Claudia: It seems that the underwear topic hits the academic glass ceiling just like Davinas’ and Alys’ paper about female ejaculation (see Chapter  2). I am delighted to be a first row witness to their talent to hit straight forward on the important topics of our times.

70  Alys Mendus As Alys got feedback from conference reviewers recently, that her work about underwear is potentially triggering and should not be a topic for an academic conference workshop, we started a discussion among us about what does ‘triggering’ mean related to the body, who decides what is triggering, and how do we—as individuals and as The Bodies Collective—want to deal with this topic. Maybe there is a link between autonomy as pedagogy and trigger warnings—something about where the ethics of care which we talk about in Chapter  2 intersects with personal/collective responsibility/ accountability? (Davina) Sometimes, I  cannot help but become angry about the contradiction between the claim of being postmodern, political, and feminist, but please do it outside the holy grails of academic conferences, scientific journals, and researchers’ working places. After allowing my anger to take up some space in my solar plexus, shoulders, and mind. —Reader, by the way, where do you feel your anger in your body?— I ask myself: as I  am part of the academic system too; how do I  take responsibility for dealing with the academic glass ceiling manifesting itself repeatedly, and in what ways I  may also support the maintenance of this ceiling with my own actions and values? One answer we found as a collective was to offer a workshop at ECQI 2023 about: ‘TRIGGER WARNING!!!!: Trigger warnings and The Bodies Collective’. Mark: Yes, this is political. The other chapters are too, but with this chapter, it resonated and made me think about the body and its relationship with other entities, other physical bodies. Underwear is a good example—clothes generally are. What do they do to the body? Conceal/reveal? Protect/make vulnerable? And sometimes that depends on where you are, physically as well as culturally. Imagine being just in your underwear by yourself in the arctic. You are probably vulnerable in a different way than you would be if you were just in your underwear on a bus during rush hour. So where does it start or stop? It probably does not. Mutual influences everywhere: between bodies, pieces of fabric, other bodies who produced them for more or less money in particular societal and economic conditions, the weather, climate, thoughts, physical sensations, intensities, sexuality. In their relationship and mutual influence they envelop each other, conceal, and reveal. They are together becoming (sympoieisis) as well as the opposite: fading, dying, transforming (into ash, like Claudia says).

(Un)dressing the Body 71 Davina: The cyanotype image conjures in my memory print images you made on the Remembering Sue workshop held by ANI-net (now CANI-net) members and culminating in the Remembering Sue chapter in Artful Narrative Inquiry (Kirkpatrick et al., 2021), as a response to memories of making knickers with a cheeky pocket for a condom on the Pockets workshop also written up as chapter in the same book. The serious play of using materials, (be that fabric, print, or voices) to intra-act with allows a blossoming of other connections, stories, and knowledges and aligns with my experience of how arts-based practice research methods in my own work allow an expanded narrative and unexpected results. References Kirkpatrick, D., Porter, S., Speedy, J., & Wyatt, J. (Eds.). (2021). Artful narrative inquiry. Making and writing creative qualitative research. Routledge. Spry, T. (2011). Body, paper, stage writing and performing autoethnography. Left Coast Press.

4 Uncovering the Non-binary Body Using Bodyography to Discover Gender Identity and Combat Body Dysmorphia Dr. Ryan Bittinger I am discovering what it is like to be in a non-binary body  .  .  . I am discovering that this is a non-binary body. Did I know this before? How long have I known this and not allowed the voice of my body to tell me about it? I muse and list questions in a months-long attempt to provoke some writing out of my disorganised thoughts and the indescribable feelings that chase across my skin and through the layers of my flesh. God, I hate lists of questions in academic writing. Lazy. I offer myself this excessive criticism as I struggle to get into the writing headspace, a headspace that I have not been able to enter for some time. Still, I can do this. I have been in an overworked, overstressed, torn-between-priorities body for too long now. A  body that moved six times during COVID-19 and is facing another likely move soon. Most of those six places weren’t my own, rather they were places in which I was temporarily welcomed with generosity by friends or family for as long as we all could bear. And of course this is time limited—the sudden press of additional bodies in a home, a refuge from the world where one only interacts with the bodies of those they have chosen to surround themselves with; this generates discomfort and conflict, expectations upturned on their heads. It is hard to suddenly have additional people crowding your safe haven. In fact, I  often bid parts of myself to leave an apartment overcrowded by the ghosts of two people and the many facets we each bring to a space ( Bittinger, unpublished). This is the real challenge to my process of unearthing, discovering, and shedding authenticity on my body and gender identity. I can do this on my own and in isolation, but gender identity outside of society and social interactions seems to lose some of its meaning. There is only oneself to grapple with, no one else to convince, ask for recognition from, seek approval from, or despise seeking approval from. If a queer queers inside the closet and no one hears, does the queer really queer at all? Memories of Dysmorphia Denver, CO, Fall 2021 I take a look in the mirror as I go through the motions on the elliptical in the basement of my apartment building. Depending on the angle I look from, how DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-8

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 73 I tilt my head, how my posture is, how I position my shirt, I feel positively or negatively towards my body. I want to love my body so badly. My body is me and I am trying to become. Do I look like a man, or a woman? If I close my eyes, no. I don’t. I just feel like too much.

Body dysmorphia is a tricky and slippery thing. It comes and goes. Yesterday morning, standing in the mirror before getting dressed, I thought to myself—damn, you’re looking good; maybe I’m actually sexy after all. I can appreciate the contours of my body, the strong frame, the proud beard, and mane of wavy hair. Sitting in this coffee shop right now and typing—my body feels that it is spilling out of the confines of my clothes, everyone can see my enormous excess, my features that are hard and masculine but also soft and feminine—not enough of either and too much of both at the same time. For example, shopping for a suit for a family wedding a few weeks ago was an utterly miserable process. I don’t wear suits, let alone black suits. First, I went with my partner to an H&M, geared towards young people and, apparently, thinner people than me. The largest suit in the entire store will not even stretch around my body. If it were ill fitting that could be counted as ‘progress’. The rare garment in this store that fits me is cut like a literal box. I have a bigger body than many people, but it is not shaped like a moving box. The social and commercialised distortion of size and shape means that in one store a 52R suit does not fit at all, and then at Macy’s, a more traditional store geared towards middle aged folks but attempting to capture all folks if it can, a 46R suit hags off me like a garbage bag. What am I to say my size is? Tell me who I am, clothing stores, and brand names. A couple weeks later, I  went to Urban Outfitters because the teen/early twenties part of myself is still seeking acceptance and reclamation of a part of my life in which I was too repressed to live freely, mostly because of the same body dysmorphia and gender confusion that I am still periodically levelled by. I also wanted to go because I saw they had some cool looking corduroy trousers. I selected a few pairs to try on and took them to the room of torment/ fitting room. My usual size is so tight the two sides of the waist don’t even come together. These were the biggest sizes they had in the store. I still liked the fabric so I checked the website to see if I could order a larger size. Big no, their size 36 that fits like a size 32 is the largest one they make. Yet again, I  do not fit in the largest size that is apparently possible. Am I  allowed to exist here? I tried on a pair from the women’s section with an elastic waist. It fits, but like most large sizes, it offers no shape, no contour, and nothing flattering at all. The message—your body is not meant to be flattering, no curve should be accentuated—they should all be masked behind shapeless billowing material. Hide your body, it’s really the best we can offer you. May 2019, Edinburgh, Scotland I’m at the gym, on the elliptical. I check my emails to manage a produce delivery I  get. I  see the continuation of emails from The Bodies Collective. So many

74  Dr. Ryan Bittinger beautiful people and voices that I’m proud to be a part of, proud to own my body and collaborate with our bodies as we chip away at the layers piled on top of us by society. They’re so excited and engaged, it seems. I do not feel excited about my body today. Sometimes I really do. In fact, I did for most of last week. But it hit me like a wave when I was supposed to be heading to the gym—my body doesn’t fit. Now I’m at the gym, feeling too big and too small at the same time. My clothes must be too tight. But I  like to show the booty, right? The waist is too tight. Does my stomach hang over it? It must. My shirt is too tight on top, too baggy on bottom. I race away on the elliptical, trying to love and grow my body, not punish it. Or am I punishing it? By trying to work out and feel more comfortable in my skin, am I only reinforcing stereotypes and body expectations? In the wider social setting and in my own mind both? That’s all for now, got a high intensity interval of booty work now.

Buying the Non-binary Body When I say I am non-binary, this feels good to me, body and mind. It is a rejection of the normative expectations of my body, it is to enter a ‘something might happen’ ( Bittinger, 2020; Wyatt, 2019) space of potential for my gender expression. I don’t feel fully like myself or at home in the normative expectations of men or of women—similarly I don’t feel at home in either of those binarised groups’ fashion and clothing. I like to wear odd and striking clothing, some of it picked from each part of the store and some of it picked discerningly off a thrift store rack. In the realm of non-binary, I am an explorer of my flesh and my sense-making of my relationship with my body by tracing my own sensations and seeing where desire is produced (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984; Federici, 2020). I feel free to discover what feels good. Still, the fast fashion industry sneaks up on this space of potential, seeing potential and undefined areas as ripe for profit—this is the way of capitalism and profit driven systems of commerce. Marketing to non-binary folks and marketing of gender-neutral clothing has increased. In fact, Kim et al. (2022, p. 18) determined that between the years 2018 and 2020 ‘genderless fashion’ ‘increased remarkably’. In terms of consumer posts and media news, the number of mentions of genderless fashion more than quadrupled between 2018 and 2020 (Ibid, p. 8). It is a joy to see small companies begin to make designs that feel good to folks who reject or move through/beyond the gender/ fashion binary. However, as large brands and expectations of bodies begin to populate the space of potential they have pulled non-binary fashion back into the arborescence (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) (picture options laid out like a decision tree that whose trunk is ‘normal’ and first branches are ‘Masculine’ and ‘Feminine’, and everything else deriving from those) and limited options of gendered fashion. Non-binary bodies that are thin are celebrated with corsets, cropped styles and lacey tops for the femmes and ‘masculinising’ cuts of T-Shirts and sweaters to de-emphasise curviness for trans-masculine folks. In fact, I  would suggest that, in Deleuzo-Guattarian terms, the ‘take-over’ of non-binary, undefined, in-between space by binarised fashion, fueled by

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 75 capitalist interests, is a re-territorialising. The Reterritorialising of the smooth space of potential (non-binary) in order to both make a profit and make sense of non-normative folks by creating a limited field of options that aren’t too ‘upsetting’ or ‘offending’ to typical gender expectations. The non-binary cannot be the little plot of land, the stable and clearly defined conceptual area—for then it ceases to defy and can be seized. I propose gender not as binary options, not as multiple arborescent options, not as a spectrum; rather gender as haecceity. Haecceity essentially means the ‘thisness’ of something or someone within relationships—that quality which determines how we connect, completely different from others despite, perhaps, many similarities or overlapping identities. Deleuze and Guattari state: ‘haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest . . . capacities to affect and be affected’ (1987, p. 304). Focusing on the haecceity of us and others opens up the possibility of intimacy, and a deepening of the erotic. When we live outside ourselves, and by that, I  mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s. (Lorde, 2018, p. 12) In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial. (Ibid, p. 13) Intimacy cannot be built upon predication that relies on external forms— real intimacy (whether intimacy with self or intimacy with others) comes from listening to the erotic voice within self and other. This is so aptly captured in the transfeminist and former social worker Kai Cheng Thom’s writings, where magic, desire, rebellion, and community flirt together as a young trans woman seeks out her erotic guide within. In Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girls Confabulous Memoir (Thom, 2016) ‘Ghost Friend’ is a non-corporeal character that listens and waits for permission when touching the main character’s body, and it is only with Ghost Friend that the main character is able to find and embrace pleasure, to orgasm, because they take the step by step instructions ‘so slow, so barely substantial, so responsive to my direction’ that come from the main character’s inner desires—’you can touch my shoulder . . . you can touch my chest . . . you can touch my thighs’ (p. 23– 26). With this attention to the inner erotic voice, the shaman of haecceity, bodies outside the gender binary (and anyone who dares listen, whether trans+ or cis) are always shifting, always in a state of becoming. Thus, understanding self and determining identity are slippery and difficult to grapple with.

76  Dr. Ryan Bittinger Bodyography and the Non-binary Body In my exploration of my gender and my body dysmorphia, I have sought to implement the methodology of Bodyography as a form of self-research as I strain within the space of potential that we queers grapple to keep and yet within which we ourselves become agents of arborescence. Six activities that Bodyography uses to understand and learn from the body were developed by The Bodies Collective: Create Safety; Become Pro-Motion; Activate Ventral Vagus; Employ Arts-Based Approaches; Collaborate; and Embrace Flourishing (The Bodies Collective, 2023). I will explore my approach and implementation of each activity, embracing and troubling them along the way. Create safety, which we agreed is an essential first ingredient. How can I create safety for this when society and most subcultures are unsafe for me, even close friendships are not spaces which will all understand and embrace my they-ness, my defiance of gender and declination to ‘pick-one?’ I can produce a litany of complaints and fears about this, which is absolutely valid and I love when others in this space of potential point out such issues and concerns. Yet, I do think I can do this at times and in only partial measures. My place of work has varying degrees of safety in this regard. It is the first place of work that ever asked me what my pronouns were, and it was then that I realised I could share what feels right to me and expect it to be respected and even protected by my colleagues. Pockets of safety are all that can be granted, however, and they are precarious pockets (Holman Jones  & Harris, 2019) that can be taken by violence, intimidation, or revocation of rights hesitantly granted for a few years. Once the rights are questioned or revoked, a mocking voice lingers (is it mine or another?) ‘you didn’t really believe we thought you mattered, did you? How naive’. This is the voice of precarity, and it comes to me when that sense of defeat arises, when I  regret not being hypervigilant to watch for the backsliding after the progress. Rights being questioned or revoked, (for a recent example, see the passage of a bill by the Tennessee House of Representatives banning drag performances outside of adult cabarets, (Brown, 2023) suddenly annihilate the possibility of lives being livable—forget about being out and proud in Tennessee. Perhaps you had begun to think that marriage is possible for you after a lifetime of being told it was ‘sinful’, but you can forget that life (e.g. the passage of California Prop. 8 years ago, banning non-heteronormative marriage after it had been legalised). These ‘mundane annihilations’ serve as reminders that we are indeed not on ‘the inside’ but are sometimes allowed to exist there temporarily, as guests of the insiders—at their discretion only (Holman Jones & Harris, 2019, p. 35). This voice I heard is the internalised homophobia and shame that is reified by precarity. But in all the tumultuousness we erect small zones of safety for one another. A friend’s apartment. A bedroom, an office with a door closed. We build these pockets for ourselves and others, the maternal therapeutic impulse—you may have trampled me but do not dare to come into here where I help those like

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 77 me. Plaster queer ass art on the walls, eclectic interplays of colourful and muted textures along with thriving plants (again, the impulse to nurture others). Many of my most poignant scenes of body dysmorphia and gender dysmorphia occur outside of these pockets of safety—in the gym, at the family gender reveal party, out on the street. The cost is that this gets imported into the pockets in our minds—similar to but different from Franz Fanon’s recognition of the psychoaffective cost of colonisation on the minds of the colonised (Fanon, 1963). And so, there is no safety in dysmorphia because the self has been mobilised against us by social conditioning, operating as Foucault’s disciplinary power wherein the panopticon gaze becomes internalised and self-shackling (Erb, 2019; Foucault, 1977). Thus, I  perhaps leave the expectation of safety behind and instead seek a making-safe, perhaps not dissimilar from The Bodies Collective. In The Bodies Collective’s safety in workshops this is a making-safety-together through cultivating a room of people who respect and acknowledge one another and constantly practice this through self-awareness and mutual accountability, all despite slip ups, mistakes, and feelings of unsafety that come and go: as we smooth the space, wrinkle(striate), smooth the space, wrinkle, ad infinitum. Safety is not a state of existence, but rather a practice of being, of working and reworking the fabric of shared reality. Scholars of education, diversity, and multiculturalism; activists, and marginalised bodies and more have worked at the questions and practice of safe spaces for far longer than I  have, so I  will step away from this for now, knowing that I am not always safe as I embark on this Bodyography but can have moments of safety with trusted others. Perhaps these moments will suffice as integrative therapy, not unlike the integration of confusion, fear, awe, and divinity offered by psychedelic integration therapists. Following the guidance of The Bodies Collective (2023), next I  become pro-motion. Notably, the moments I feel most aware-of and able to grapple with thoughts and feelings of dysmorphia I am in some form of movement, viscerally shaking off the demons of doubt that leave me stuck in the same ruminations of too-much/not-enough. On an elliptical/cross-trainer in the University of Edinburgh gym, walking to the store to buy trans flag coloured nail polish for my brother’s child’s gender reveal party, basking in the underground cave clothing optional hot springs, strutting to a club or concert in some deliciously outrageous outfit. At these moments thoughts spring to me and I  write notes (or wish I  was writing notes but acknowledge the difficulty of doing so on a dance floor—I’ll do my best to record the thoughtsfeelings later). This practice becomes an auto-ethnography replete with doing a practice in which stagnation is the enemy and my body-mind only connects when movement and change encourage it. I  cannot write scarcely a word of this at my desk in the guest bedroom. I  have to set out to coffee shops, rooftop pubs, and any balcony or patio I can find. Notes scrawled on paper or tapped into the phone in unlikely venues. Becoming pro-motion really does something to promote less stagnant thinking, smooths the striations, beckons

78  Dr. Ryan Bittinger to the animal/lizard brain where body and mind co-exist as organism rather than bifurcated objects of cold research, monetisation, and quantification. Late 2020, Aurora, CO I receive a text message from my mom. I  open and read the invitation for a gender reveal party for my brother’s next child. I am outraged. I feel hurt and diminished. There is a weight and a sense of tenderness in my chest. I  want to hide. I  am experiencing shame. What must they think of me? How can I make them understand? Living abroad, it was honestly so much easier to feel comfortable about my gender. My family could only see what I showed them, and I never felt out of control. I could explore and play with gender to my heart’s content. Crashing back to reality, I  recall that I  am living in my home country again. I don’t have to go to this gender reveal party, but I’ll probably go because that is easier. There will be fewer questions about why I didn’t come, and I won’t be faced with having to explain that I  don’t know what I  am, and I  wish we wouldn’t shove gender norms down people’s throats before they even have a chance to be born. Anyways, I  go and I’m miserable and can’t wait to leave. I paint my nails the colours of the trans flag in quiet rebellion.

Putting this to paper after living with it for so long feels difficult, diminishing perhaps. To put words to paper begins to acknowledge scar tissue, rushing blood, the thump of my heart, and the rolls of my flesh. Things that crave and need acknowledgement but for whom the light of day brings the searing light of being known, of being perceived. In this solipsistic inquiry about the faults of gender socialisation, how do I activate the ventral vagus? Vagal theory suggests that this happens through socialisation, acknowledgement, being met in excitement and pain (Porges, 2021). My phone rings, my beloved writing partner Jess Erb checking in to make sure that I have actually finally written something about this after months of gentle and kind encouragement. When we made this plan to collaborate, for her to help me through this a few days ago, she said ‘I know that after you start, you’re going to say “I forgot writing could be so fun!” ’’ I now tease her by saying it almost every day, it has become a loving refrain, a begrudging ‘you were right(write!)’. Our spots of connection throughout my writing time allow me to feel that acknowledgement, that social pull to come out of myself and delight in growing awareness and our ability to create. My blood sings as shreds of truth find their way, hesitantly, onto the page. With this mutual support it becomes possible to not only know the self but also connect with others and feel that it is possible, delightful maybe even, to be authentic and not need to wear extra body armour (amore will do just fine). Employing arts-based approaches helps me to draw connections and distil self-understanding about who I am and how I move through the world in a way that just writing, or thinking can’t. And, indeed, employs more of the senses and more variety of movement than only typing/writing does. Painting

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 79 nails is one small way that this begins—painting my nails allows me to offer the physical and artistic manifestation of my gender and mood. It is also a signal to everyone about who I am, a small statement of difference from the norm, and a gay bat signal to those who can relate or celebrate. This appears to be an increasing trend made popular by social media and celebrities, and I get more compliments on my nails now that it is mainstream. This positive trend feels good in some ways, and yet it is another space where queerness has been absorbed into the mainstream. On one hand, this allows for some of the progress that has always been desired—everyone should be welcomed to paint their nails if they wish, regardless of gender. Yet, while nail painting becomes more embraced, queerness retains its precarity. In fact, according to the ACLU as of 1/28/2023 (ACLU.org, 2023), there were 184 (up to 351 on 3/2/2023) anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in U.S. state legislatures. The current wave focuses mostly on placing restrictions on folx transitioning to another gender, especially young people—however there are also many attacks on whether schools should be allowed to teach about the existence of LGBTQ+ people and our history. Sometimes, I meditate on these gender dynamics and how much they hate us while I paint my nails. Usually this is with joy, as my nails become a banner of pride and resistance—the polish is mightier than the police state? (Another curt nod to Foucault, 1977). Of course, other times, less often, I wonder what other people will think and if I will be safe where I am going. Anyway, I have deviated from the topic and the social norm. It stands that one of the most common forms of my arts-based approach to body and gender understanding are in getting ready to go out. Putting together an outrageous outfit, doing a splash of makeup and doing my nails. When I  am able to join others in the creativity of going out this is even better, as the ventral vagus is activated socially and then carried through the arts-based exploration of gender and self. This often results in an experience of Gender Euphoria when done with folks who are fully embracing one another. Palm Springs, CA, Jan. 2023 I committed this year to painting my nails more often—at least 24 times. I was feeling disappointed or like I wasn’t living as myself when I would go a month or more between painting—This was usually just due to being busy and not protecting the time. But I  found myself in a house with disco lighting owned by a drag queen in the desert. I  was surrounded by friends old and new in a radically accepting environment that made me both stressed and excited. Anything could happen! Non-binary folks, queer men, straight men, queer women, and straight women all dancing, appreciating one another’s bodies and personalities. We started painting one another’s nails! I  shared the paint I  brought and so did another friend. I painted many toes and fingers and others painted mine too. We gave compliments and encouragement, eager to share love and generosity. The weekend was filled with challenges and confusion, my own anxiety, jealousy,

80  Dr. Ryan Bittinger and shame battling my compassion, earnestness, joy, and lust. But I felt out of my head and in my body in that moment of nail painting and mutual care, felt myself, felt celebrated, and celebrated others.

This point brings me gayly to the next activity within Bodyography— collaborate. Collaborating on nail painting with these queer folks in Palm Springs while preparing fun and scandalous outfits for the club was enlivening and allowed me to be so fully in my body, moving and loving as myself. Collaborating also shows up in other arts projects—I found a pair of hand-shaped bookends in a Toronto vintage store when visiting Dr. Erb, and she suggested I spray paint them gold! What an idea. Now, months later in Denver, I added nail polish and a clear coat to the hands, and they strike me as stunningly queer and capture a fleeting image of the divine within myself, made all the more meaningful by the collaboration around them that forged something that no one of us thought of alone—My ideas, Dr. Erb’s ideas, and whoever first thought to make, buy, and resell those delightful hands. A collage of collaborative queerness linked with queer time, as if we were all practically together creating this in one moment (Halberstam, 2005). Embrace Flourishing (The Bodies Collective, 2023). A perfect circle back to where I started—embrace what I have learned and lean into the practices that have felt good and life-giving. This has been part of what influenced me to commit to painting my nails more regularly this year—I know this is a practice that helps me express myself and feel like my body and gender are aligned. While Flourishing does not erase the past and certainly does not eliminate the fear, desire, and hesitation to express myself and live as myself, it does mean I  am able to consciously grapple with how and who I  am. Flourishing, in this regard, is for me about being engaged in the turbulent process of making-self and accepting self. This includes accepting my body, accepting my desires—and it also means accepting that the parts of me that doubt, hesitate, sometimes need to hide are just as much a part of the process and the practice of flourishing. References American Civil Liberties Union. (2023, March 2). Mapping attacks on LGBTQ rights . www.aclu.org/legislative-attacks-on-lgbtq-rights Bittinger, R. (2020). Homos in the woods: Queer shame and body shame in the context of trekking experiences [Doctoral Dissertation]. The University of Edinburgh. Bittinger, R. (Unpublished). Setting loose the shadow: How i become-sorcerer and free multiplicity. Brown, M. (2023, February 23). Tennessee house passes controversial drag show bill. The Tennessean. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1984). Anti-Oedipus (R. Huyrley, M. Seem, & H. R. Lane, Trans.). Bloomsbury.Deleuze, G.,  & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus (B. Massumi, Trans.). Bloomsbury. Erb, J. (2019). Stumbling through the contours of bodily appearance: Nomadic embodiment of the female counsellor [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Edinburgh.

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 81 Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Federici, S. (2020). Beyond the periphery of the skin: Rethinking, remaking, and reclaiming the body in contemporary capitalism. PM Press. Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. Halberstam, J. (2005). In a Queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives (Sexual cultures). New York University Press. Holman, J. S., & Harris, A. (2019). Queering autoethnography. Routledge. Kim, H., Cho, I., & Park, M. (2022). Analyzing genderless fashion trends of consumers’ perceptions on social media: Using unstructured big data analysis through Latent Dirichlet Allocation-based topic modeling. Fash Text, 9, 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/ s40691-021-00281-6 Lorde, A. (2018). The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Penguin Books. Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal safety: Attachment, communication, self-regulation (IPNB) (pp. 75). W. W. Norton & Company. The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)Centering the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy, and human flourishing. In T. Chemi, E. Brattico, L. O. Fjorback,  & L. Harmat (Eds.), Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158790 Thom, K. C. (2016). Fierce femmes and notorious liars: A  dangerous trans girl’s confabulous memoir. Metonymy Press. Wyatt, J. (2019). Therapy, stand-up, and the gesture of writing: Towards creative-relational inquiry. Routledge.

Resonances to Chapter 4: The Presence of Absence and Other Refractions of Gender Identity The Bodies Collective Ryan challenges me (Claudia) repeatedly to reflect on gender identity and how it is embodied. I love that they do so, and how they do it. At the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in 2022, they offered an exercise about feeling the presence of absence of gender identity. Ryan’s Exercise about Feeling the Presence of Absence of Gender Identity This activity requires a camera (any device is fine) and any other accessories that help you think about various genders. 1. Stage a photo in which you feel most like your own gender (woman, non-binary, man, trans, agender, gender-fluid—all are welcome!). Save the picture for later. a) Write down how you feel. Notice the feelings in your body too. What did you do to express your gender? 2. Stage a photo in which you feel like a different gender than the one you identify with. Feel free to challenge yourself, but do not choose a gender expression that might be too intense for you (e.g. some folks may not wish to ‘put on’ a previous gender identity). Save the picture. a) Write down how you feel. Notice the feelings in your body too. What did you do to express your gender? 3. Reflect on this exercise. How did your experience with each of these expressions feel for you? What did you do differently. What parts of yourself came out in each photo? a) How would you feel entering various social situations presenting like each of the photos? When is your gender most visible, and why? Scenarios to explore below. i) Walking into work ii) Walking into a meeting with a mentor or boss

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-9

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 83 iii) Alone on a dimly lit street at night iv) Meeting a friend in a crowded place (restaurant, bar, coffee shop) v) Going to a family function vi) Going to the gym 4. Answer this question—What makes the gender of you and others most present? As the conference was online and the sessions were on a Whiteboard, I added the following sticky note after trying out exercise 3a)—(i) –(iv): I feel a resistance in staging different genders; just everything seems and feels like me . . . Nevertheless, I just tried out the different ‘walking styles’ you suggest in 3). I  noticed that to me, it is not so much an embodiment of different gendered walking styles, but more differences in my postures and tensions within the body. For example, • Walking—work, boss: impulse to be upright, pulling shoulders a little up, shortening of breath • Walking alone at night: accelerating my pace, bending a little forward, pulling the shoulders up, shortening of breath • Meeting friends: deeper breath, softening my upper body, relaxing the shoulders

I now think that I ‘only’ entered the very first stage of this exercise—to mindfully notice what happens in my body when I am trying out the different sub-exercises. My initial resistance to stage genders might point to the heart of engaging with gender identity beyond my individuality. Staging genders in this way will make gender concepts physically visible, that are influenced by individuality, socialisation, and cultural norms. Ryan (Jan 23) via messenger: Thank you for what you wrote. I really hear the discomfort in trying different gender expressions—and honestly that right there says everything about the discomfort of pre-determined and enforced gender in society. Dear Ryan from Alys (sat in the passenger seat of the car as we drove down to Oxford), As the parent to an almost four-year-old, trying hard to bring them up with the space, respect and agency to live their whole lives as their

84  Dr. Ryan Bittinger true selves your chapter offers insight and storying to the challenges of today’s current societal understandings of gender and fashion. I wrote these two poems as a response, hoping to find ways to be part of the change. What if? There had been freedom to choose, to explore who you are earlier in life? What if? Life was not put in a box of pink or blue when in-utero? What if? Clothes fit people not shaped to an image of ‘perfection’ (Whose?) What if? Can we. . . Unsettle, Transform culture and Radicalise society? Market ‘non binary’ fashion further Play with this neoliberal, capitalist world If there is money to be made in ‘non binary’ fashion then let’s make it ‘mainstream’ Soyini Madison wrote of the politics of fashion The revolution does begin at home Let’s dress our children in rainbow colours Let’s Celebrate that a new life is growing not its genitals Let’s Say they and let them be who they really are in their body. Mark: Ryan’s chapter felt so personal and at the same time so universal. I am asking myself now: who am I? How do others see me? How do I fit and not fit into these categories? Of gender, of race, etc.? (Apart from that I seem to clearly fit into the category of those that use lists of questions in academic writing. Shame on me.) I think now this is it for me, but I cannot articulate it well. Language fails me (and not only English). There is something very personal and specific, and there is also something about this being together with others. In doing Bodyography, I feel this company and complicity that defy the categories that exist in words. Yes, we can work together to trouble language and create new language(s). And that feels so important, especially when language is oppressive, as oppressive as the material conditions (including garments) that get created with it, through it, and in it. Symbolic resistance and safe spaces! Nails painted in transcolours! Being supported to use pronouns makes one feel more fitting. And then there is also resistance in dynamic movement, in body meeting body and creating movement and reality together. Caring for each other!

Uncovering the Non-binary Body 85 Being playful with each other. Being more than what we are allowed within our allocated category. I do not want to give the impression that one activity is more important than the other. No body over mind to get even! That would still be separating mind and body! But what resonated so much in this chapter was how they are the same. Davina: Ryan’s words: is a re-territorializing of the smooth space of potential (non-binary) in order to both make a profit and make sense of non-normative folks by creating a limited field of options that aren’t too ‘upsetting’ or ‘offending’ to typical gender expectations. I think of the furore created in the United Kingdom by the musician Sam Smith’s latest video, his Brit Award performance, and an opinion piece I read online at news.com.aus by Mary Madigan that placed pictures of Harry Styles and Sam Smith wearing virtually identical outfits and how Harry is lauded for ‘challenging masculinity’ and Sam is vilified, which is both fat shaming and homophobic, the writer suggested. The vitriolic response on social media has been picked up by other commentators, all of whom have reached similar conclusions. Jess: As I  have been thinking about my concept of Voicing the Body (Erb, 2019), I find I am struggling against its emphasis on something that I do not necessarily intend: The Voice. And I am thinking about your colourful nails, Ryan. You take such beautiful pride in their colouring, their sparkle. And it makes me so happy to know that you could provide this to others so recently—in that fabulous party where everybody could come together. The book-end hands with painted nails, it feels like they were just in that vintage shop languishing before you could take them home and make them fully realised—alive. It makes me think of Mark’s work on puppets and their coming to life (Chapter 7). All of this is a Voicing of the Body, and it matters as matter. When I read of your quiet rebellion, of trans-nails as activism, I see it as a way of being indigestible—as a voicing of that which is often made to be silent. I am also thinking of your earrings—they are also a way for you to allow your body to speak, and not say certain things! Similar to the earrings you wore to the 2019 conference in Edinburgh (picture below), I  feel that you have a way of subverting power with the loudest voice that has no auditory component.

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Dr. Ryan Bittinger

Figure 4.1 Jess Erb and Ryan Bittinger at their presentation of ‘Where does power go if no one wants it?’ at ECQI, 2019. Source: © Jess Erb.

In this piece, you show, instead of shying away from, this struggle—both in the body and in writing the body—of how we can speak and not speak, with words and not words. And because of that, you again welcome the reader into something intimate, vulnerable, and relatable. Thank you, friend. Reference Erb, J. (2019). Stumbling through the contours of bodily appearance: Nomadic embodiment of the female counsellor [Doctoral Dissertation]. University of Edinburgh.

5 Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick

‘What is it like to be doing what you do?’ He asks. I think he is asking, what affect/effect does your research have upon you, to be immersed in personal grief stories, my own and others? It’s a difficult question to answer because I don’t know how I would have been if I had not made the decision to pursue a PhD that focussed on the presence of absence and personal stories of grief and loss, though I  do remember my supervisor checking if I really wanted to focus on that topic. I think he saw the future implications. However, I attest to the lived reality that it would have felt too hard to pull my attention to anything but grief after sudden and unexpected death. In my experience, we don’t ‘get over’ grief, that is not a helpful narrative to place over the experience. We learn to walk alongside grief, changed by the experience. The relationship continues between the living and the dead, it is not distilled into a single moment when one of the bodies stopped being alive. Although that moment is the biggest rupture, the relationship continues to change and evolve. I continue to have conversations with my mother, my partner, my friend and academic mentor. In the case of my mother the conversations are often easier because I  can invent the dialogue for both people, I  can get her to respond in kinder, more helpful ways. The daily irritations of living with my partner for 12  years mellow and his questions become more supportive and less combative. The love from and to my friend/mentor has been transposed into the unconditional love I  receive and give to the red dog she bred and who I  exchanged with her for a large stained-glass window, that did not get completed until after her sudden death. Being part of The Bodies Collective brings life, spontaneity, a different form of intensity, and bodily focus that helps counter living with the dead.

Introduction In this chapter, I  look at how the affect of experiences are disrupted by absence by paying attention to the flow of expectations, the effects and affects absence creates, and the relationship between absent people, places, objects, clothes, sexual encounters and present time. DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-10

88  Davina Kirkpatrick Developing Brendan Stone’s,1 (2009) ideas that creative and artistic modes of expression can produce findings and insights not readily discoverable via more conventional research methods. (2009, p. 67) And playfully approaching his use of feminist theorist Judith Butler’s theoretical notion of ‘enigmatic articulation’, the chapter dances between the coherent, seamless storied self and the possible truth that lies within ‘moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness’ (2005, p.  64). These resonate with The Bodies Collective idea of autonomy as pedagogy (2021) and the opportunity to flatten hierarchies of knowledge. I  use extracts of autoethnographic writing and revisited and reimagined artwork to continue to explore how visual arts knowledge threatens and destabilises expectations, providing a bridge and place of safety for ‘the emptiness that threatens established expectations and practices’ (Meier et al., 2013, p. 432). I  demonstrate how personal narratives, explored through contemporary arts practice and the participatory, performative act, result in access to, the potentially restorative space of mourning. The power of metaphor and story alters the self, gives back a sense of choice and control, and finds equivalence to the intensity of grief, both for a body ageing/changing and for the presence of absence through sudden and unexpected death. There is an intra-relationship between grief, loss, pain, the messiness of an ageing body, and grief from a feminist post-climacteric standpoint (Abadie, 2023). Creative and Artistic Modes of Expression When I  write about creative and artistic modes of expression I  am thinking about creative writing, and visual creative processes. As an artist I  have been educated and thus am situated within contemporary arts practice.2 I work with specific materials—glass, enamel and print processes, alongside performative ritual processes that provide opportunities to visually explore transparency, translucency and opacity and consider the metaphorical implications in relation to grief and loss. As I say in my PhD thesis, Central to my practice led research is the use of narrative and the metaphorical to reveal multiple layers of meaning and how they work in relation to what continues to exist, and what is missing in the physical world, as artist and academic Vera Klement (1994, p.  73) argues: There is no precise language to name death, to accept death and our dead. Without such a language we cannot integrate it. Integration requires metaphor and ritual. (Kirkpatrick, 2017, p. 16)

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 89 Participatory Performativity The participatory performative act refers to both artistic works and specific sexual experiences that combine ritual, embodied experience (through and with the body), and objects/images/writing created out of these. I  am using the term ritual to indicate a recurring process that allows an openended quality of ‘multiple variability’ as defined by the anthropologist Victor Turner (1982, pp.  22–23). To him ritual is concerned with complexity and ‘continuously changing social life, murky and glinting with desire and feeling’. Ritual recognises the potency of disorder and that it symbolises both danger and power (Douglas, 1966, p.  95). Absence is given agency, experienced sensually ‘when absences become object-like’ (Fowles, 2010, p. 27), fuelled by subjectivity and desire (Fuery, 1995; Rose, 2009) through the interaction and transformation of processes and materials. The made objects/images/ writing are something fixed, solid, and defined amidst the maelstrom of loss. Equivalent Intensities The need to find equivalent intensities to the intensity of grief is at the heart of my practice research, encompassing the literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s (2004, p.  99) ideas of moments of intensity within aesthetic experience that are fleeting and therefore need to be found over and over. The repetitious nature of the experience and the creation that is generated by it link to my experience that grief is non-linear, as suggested by the health psychologists Margaret Strobe and Henk Schut’s (2010) revised dual process model of grief, in which grief fluctuates between new practical tasks and falling deeply into the pain of loss. Butler’s suggestion that, ‘The past is there and now, structuring and animating the very contours of default relationality’ (2005, p. 68) speaks to my lived experience of time being both cyclical and linear and my need to share my own and others stories of grief and loss. The notion of equivalence is helpfully described by the artist Karen Abadie in her PhD thesis, as ‘a drawing together or drawing apart’ she cites Bachelor’s idea of ‘showing areas of likeness among apparently dissimilar things, or . . . showing forms of unlikeness among apparently identical things’ (1996, p. 16). She talks of ‘gathering material in this way is similar to journal writing, allowing my body to guide the process in order to let the visual story emerge’ (2023 p. 82). The idea of interaction between bodies and materials is pertinent to the Tying the Threads project. The project developed from my body being with others, being in and responding to a specific site, and gathering images and thoughts to take back into the studio to engage in creative serious play (Owens, 2013). Serious Play Serious play, troubles at established ideas, marking ‘the unaccountable gaps between language and intention’. Play, in this context, theatre scholar, Craig N. Owens says,

90  Davina Kirkpatrick names the slippage in the system, like the play in a car’s steering, introducing a more or less viscous fluidity and an aleatoric dynamic that makes thinkable alternatives to reifications of all kinds. (Owens, 2013, p. 11) It feels like a radical act in the face of pain. Yet I  know from my own purposeful playfulness during both my master’s and doctoral research how it assisted in walking alongside grief and loss. As I  mentioned earlier, my fine art practice involves being playful with materials and exploring their potential to be repositories of metaphor. I  take pleasure in repetitive, often meditative, processes of making. The combination of thoughtful choice of materials and the potential for layered visual exploration, combined with my experience of creating work, gives a tangible dimension to the processes of gaps and slippage in language. By making art, serious play, and poetry I am offering a new understanding and knowledge that goes beyond the cerebral and towards the transformational. The creative serious play within The Bodies Collective improvised workshops also provides another equivalent intensity. They are akin to my experiences of attending theatre scholar and practitioner, Richard Schechner’s Raza Boxes3 workshop at The Barbican in 2011. I experienced, in both, through safely held ritual improvisations, the ability to fall fully and bodily into and out of a variety of emotional states and respond to other people. The ritual creative process provides an open structure that allows listening and responding to mine and others’ bodies, as The Bodies Collective have stated previously, How does this perceiving body relate to others? The body is never divorced from its environment . . . Bodyography enables us to access this embodied knowledge—researching with and through the body. (2023 p. 158) Tying the Threads The original Tying the Threads project in 2013, a collaborative project of personal memorialisation and ritual making, came from a remembered image of seaweed caught on a fence at Black Rock nature reserve whilst working from a transect line4 created with the artists Mollie Meager and Penny Somerville, both of whom had helped in the funereal rituals I created following the death of my partner in 2011. Mollie helped me rip up his two favourite shirts and tie the tatters to the fence, whilst Penny documented the process. The documentation and held awareness that this was both ritual and art project allowed a useful stepping back at times, applying a macro/ micro lens to our actions. The act of ripping had a cathartic physicality and involved my hands and arms straining and ripping the worn fabric, as well as an olfactory quality as Mollie’s studio filled with the embodied smell trapped within the fibres of this now absent present man.

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Figure 5.1 Tying the Threads, April  2013. Coloured photograph printed on archival paper shown as black and white image. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick

Figure 5.2 Tying the Threads, June  2015. Coloured photograph printed on archival paper shown as black and white image. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

92  Davina Kirkpatrick I then visited each month for two years, to coincide with the moon cycle, to photograph. This allowed time to sit on the pebbled foreshore, noticing and documenting the changes to the tatters being washed by the tide twice a day, weathered by wind and sun, storms, and tidal surges. Noticing and documenting the shifting emotional changes occurring within me. I  liked not knowing quite where the tide would be, my only hint was the height of the River Severn5 as I crossed over one or other of the Severn bridges, whether the tatters would be visible or hidden by the water. The linearity of tide and time, decay, and decomposition rub against and offer up a counter narrative to the cyclical nature of grief and loss. Having choice over the location for Tying the Threads and the times when I would visit gave me back control, even though it is a public spot. I liked the opportunities the public placement enabled—ease of access and interesting conversations with dog walkers about grief and loss. Another challenge to certainty and a timely reminder of our fragility was the top part of the fence disappearing in winter storms, leaving only the part that had the tatters. It is this corporeality of the tatters of the shirts that once contained his body, a body no longer accessible to me, that speaks to literary scholar Laura Tanner’s theory of corporeal grief: ‘Visualizable but untouchable and untouching, the lost body of the loved one taunts the survivor with its absent presence’ (2006, p. 89). The Intra-relationship Looking at the intra-relationship between grief, loss, pain, and the messiness of an ageing body and grief from a feminist post-climacteric standpoint, the project began in the early stages of my grief and when I was perimenopausal. At the same time, I was seeking to find equivalent intensities of grief through sexual encounters. I am still unsure how much of the desire was driven by grief and how much by my sexuality exploding from my perimenopausal body. The writing below was written in 2015, two years into the Tying the Threads project. I want to be wild, headstrong (which internal voice is putting those labels on my behaviour) really enjoy letting that sexy, kinky part of myself out to frolic but it’s ridiculous to not imagine there are consequences. I keep thinking of Professor Lauren Berlant’s keynote (2015)—On being in life without wanting the world; living in ellipsis.6 The sexual encounters elicited from sex dating websites bring me so fully into ‘being in life’, feeling the rush of boundary pushing, being in control of what I  reveal or don’t, the power of desire and being desired, letting myself go into a world of explicit conversations, multiple assignations, multiple orgasms but the other part of that statement carries equal importance ‘without wanting the world’, suggests distance, dispassion, wanting to be done with it all.

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 93 I have reached this conclusion before, about what I  would class extreme fucking, that I want to be taken to the most vulnerable place. I yearn to wail but don’t because I don’t want to do that with a virtual stranger. Happy to have oral, anal, gush all over them but weep and wail, I don’t think so! It seems that’s the deep dark need at the heart of my sexuality, I want to get to that smallest darkest place where I am shivering and exposed and let myself fall into it. It feels like it’s connected to peri-menopausal desire and to my dead partner, his sudden and unexpected death, my anger, guilt, lack of control. Control—trying to control the future when I  don’t know what will happen, fear of what might happen, trying to second guess and stay ahead of an event before it happens but not knowing what that might be, trying to think through the possible outcomes of a situation. Then distracting myself with a displacement activity because the possible outcomes of thought about situations and then potential un-thought about unknown situations overwhelms me and does leave me sobbing, breathless and scared at how my control of my emotions has slipped and faltered. It is interesting to reflect on this writing because it relates directly to issues of what we can control and what is out of our control and the body, both present (mine) and absent (his), that I  was striving to explore in Tying the Threads. Now I  am post-menopausal and revelling in a newly sexualised body with the re-plumping that’s occurred recently with HRT and a renaissance in possibilities after the hiatus of COVID lockdowns and pandemic fear of infection. I wonder whether the balance between my need for intensity and my experience of grief has shifted. Certainly, revisiting the Tying the Threads project has a different cadence, the rhythm of the ostinato, to borrow a musical term, has changed, though I still find comfort in repetition, variation, and development of practice. Tether and the Empty Fence The ten-year anniversary, no time and all time, of my partner’s death and an ongoing artwork conversation through letter writing with artist Annabel Pettigrew-Macpherson7 (www.throes ofgrief.com) prompted reconnection with the embodied, creative ritual act of Tying the Threads, a revisiting of the fence at Black Rock Nature Reserve, and a development of further artwork in the Tether and the Empty Fence series. I am discombobulated, disorientated, and slightly giddy in my body. I know I am in the right place but can’t locate the exact spot I am searching for because I am looking at a changed fence before realising the top sections of the fence have been removed by tidal force. I photographed this missing, empty fence with a Polaroid camera. The choice to use an old Polaroid camera means I am less in control of the results, and to only the possibility

94  Davina Kirkpatrick of eight images focuses my attention on what I specifically want to record. I hope the specific qualities of Polaroid film images will complement the inbetween space this place holds—between land and river, between presence and absence, between time passing and time circling back on itself. I then discover fragments of the barbed wire with tiny thread traces of shirt fabric buried in the mud, which gives me a bodily sense of the fragility of life.8 I can’t resist taking these home with me. They provide physical matter that links then and now. As the theorist Karen Barad states, ‘Mattering is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance’ (2007, p. 3), and these fragments are physically, emotionally, and culturally entwined. Back at home, in a drawer, I discover two shirt fragments I had saved and forgotten about. I remember that I had not been quite able to let go of all of them. Social scientists Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey (2001, p. 120) talk of how ‘mundane’ items can become charged as sources of sorrow and cite the anthropologist Pels (1998, p. 100) suggestion that ‘materiality resides in the sensuous processes of human interaction of things’. I  had taken objects that had been most frequently close to his body and transformed them because they were too worn to send to a charity shop, they had no commercial worth but were potent objects in terms of the wear emphasising his physical absence. The tearing had been a transformative act, a taking back of control, and a placing into a different environment. Now, ten years on, the revisiting of the place and the playful interaction with what remains in both a material and an emotional sense allow different reflections around ideas of continuing bonds. I take these remaining fragments and the Polaroid photos into my studio and begin to play. I enlarge the polaroids to fit on A3 and print them, playing with shifting the hue and saturation. The original polaroids have a liminal, eerie quality, which I feel is heightened by increasing the scale. The repetitive processes of Photoshop, inking and printing the tatters, and then creating screen prints allow entry into a ‘flow state’ (Csikszentmihalyi, 2004) where time slips and stretches, ‘there’s this focus that, once it becomes intense, leads to a sense of ecstasy, a sense of clarity’.9 The artist researcher, Patricia Cain, talks of the activity of drawing ‘as a recursive co-dependent process between the practitioner and the drawing’ (2010, p. 44), and I think this could also be applied to printmaking and collage processes. Her idea that, knowledge which emerges from drawing might be ‘brought forth’ through the practitioner’s own recursive circular patterns of human processes and his or her interactions with the environment. (Cain, 2010, p. 48) Calls to my own repetitious interactions between a chosen place, an experience of time passing through the changes on specific materials, and how this relates to grief and loss through an intuitive process of creating artwork. I love the push me/pull me quality of the two images—soft colour, hazy shapes, and textured black tatter imprints. The screen prints give greater definition and detail and appear to float above the background of the fence.

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I feel they speak of time past and time present. The images come through a process of entanglement of idea, memory, and experimentation, working with the materials, how my hands respond to the materials and my tacit skills, and are akin to ‘Creative thinging’ (Malafouris, 2010 pp.  149–150), a specific creative, material engagement to help me make sense of the world. These experiments became two new series of prints: Tether and The Empty Fence. Finding a resonant title that suggests sense-making and supports the poiesis of the images surfaces as the images develop and help new questions form in my mind. Thinking about the origins of the word Tether, Late Middle English from Old Norse tjóthr, from a Germanic base meaning ‘fasten’. Does my tie to this place and to him restrict me still or hold me firm? The Empty Fence series moves the question into how I hold the feelings of absence: what do I do to fill the empty space? Absence can have materiality, be spatially located, and have agency. The projects allow a creative, embodied walking alongside grief and continuing to walk with the presence of absence of the dead.

Figure 5.3 Tether black collagraph over coloured giclee print, shown as black and white image. There are seven variations each in an edition of 10. Size of print 26 × 26 cm on A3 archival quality paper. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

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Figure 5.4 The Empty Fence black screen print over coloured giclee print, shown as black and white image. There are seven variations each in an edition of 10. Size of print 26 × 26 cm on A3 archival quality paper. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

The next and possibly final step in this embodied ritual artwork process, once I  have printed the edition of ten of each of the seven images, is to take the two remaining tatters, now blackened with ink, and tie them to a clootie tree10 at Madron Well. A circular, cyclical action that calls back to the original Tying the Threads but brings the focus back to Cornwall, a place of significance to my dead partner. Conclusion A woman who saw me present, at the International Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in 2015 said to me

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 97 You have explained the irrational process of knowing I  was choosing an unsuitable relationship but the compulsion I  felt to do it, after my mother died. Craving the intensity of the experience of her dying and then trying to recreate that intensity in the aftermath describes my emotional state so accurately you have just revealed something that has troubled and remained unresolved in me. As Johnathan Wyatt11 says, ‘I long for intensity, for connectedness, though it is not always an easy experience’ (Gale et al., 2013, p. 167). There is a link between the intensity and control of creating artwork and an ongoing need for the intensity of the one-off encounter to have controlled sexual experiences to find an equivalence to the intensity of sudden and unexpected death (which I also refer to in Chapter 2, Embodied Friendship and Explicit Autoethnography with Alys Mendus). I demonstrate the transformative power of creative, ritual processes to give back a sense of control and power in the ongoing relationship to death and the presence of absence of dead, loved people. References Abadie, K. (2023). Humanity undone, a practice led enquiry into self-injury [PhD thesis]. University of Plymouth. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway. Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Batchelor, D. (1996). Equivalence is a strange word. In I. Cole (Ed.), The sculptural imagination (pp. 16–21). Oxford: Museum of Modern Art, (2). Berlant, L. (2015). On being in life without wanting the world; living in ellipsis. Keynote Conference paper at 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh. www. academia.edu/12942789/5th_International_and_Interdisciplinary_Conference_on_ Emotional_Geographies Accessed on 09/09/2022. Butler, J. (2005). Giving an account of oneself. Fordham University Press. Cain, P. (2010). Drawing. The enactive evolution of the practitioner. Intellect. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2004, February). TED talk.  www.ted.com/talks/mihaly_ csikszentmihalyi_flow_the_secret_to_happiness?language=en Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger (2nd ed.). Routledge. Fowles, S. (2010). People without things. In M. Bille, F. Hastrup, & T. Sørensen (Eds.), An anthropology of absence, materializations of transcendence and loss (pp. 23–41). Springer. Fuery, P. (1995). The theory of absence: Subjectivity, signification, and desire. Greenwood Press. Gale, K., Pelias, R., Russell, L., Spry, T., & Wyatt, J. (2013). Intensity: A collaborative autoethnography. International Review of Qualitative Research, 6(1), 165–180. Gumbrecht, H. U. (2004). Production of presence: What meaning cannot convey. Stamford University Press. Hallam, E., & Hockey, J. (2001). Death, memory and material culture. Berg.

98  Davina Kirkpatrick Kirkpatrick, D. (2017). Grief and loss; living with the presence of absence. A practice based study of personal grief narratives and participatory projects [PhD thesis]. University of the West of England. http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/29973. Klement, V. (1994). An artist’s notes on aging and death. Art Journal, 53(1), 73–75. Malafouris, L. (2010). Metaplasticity and the human becoming: Principles of neuroarchaeology. Journal of Anthropological Sciences, 88, 49–72. Meier, L., Frers, L.,  & Sigvardsdotter, E. (2013). The importance of absence in the present: Practices of remembrance and the contestation of absences. Cultural Geographies, 20(4), 423–430. Owens, C. N. (2013). Serious play. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 45(2), 7–15. Pels, P. (1998). The spirit of the matter: On fetish, rarity, fact and fancy. In P. Speyer (Ed.), Border fetishisms: Material objects in unstable spaces. Routledge. Rose, M. (2009). Back to back: A response to Landscape, absence and the geographies of love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35(1), 141. Stone, B. (2009). Running man. Qualitative Research in Sport and Exercise, 1(1), 67–71. Strobe, M., & Schut, H. (2010). The dual process model of coping with bereavement: A decade on. Omega, 61(4), 273–289. Tanner, L. (2006). Lost bodies: Inhabiting the borders of life and death. Cornell University Press. The Bodies Collective. (2020). Bodyography as activism in qualitative inquiry: The bodies collective at ECQI19. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(1), 104–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720970140. The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)Centering the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy, and human flourishing. In T. Chemi, E. Brattico, L. O. Fjorback,  & L. Harmat (Eds.), Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003158790 Throes of grief. www.throesofgrief.com Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. PAJ Publishers.

Resonances to Chapter 5: The Presence of Absence and the Twelfthtide Nights Through Creative Serious Play The Bodies Collective The Presence of Absence

Mark: The presence of absence—indeed! It was a week ago that I first read Davina’s chapter. And I tried to write a response right away. But I could not. The absence of words felt very present for me. And maybe that is what resonates with me. I felt this chapter more than I understood it. Something of the quality of words that goes beyond them, beyond their content. Something I  can almost touch but not quite touch. It has a shape, but I cannot trace it. Is that what it is? Does an absence, once clearly defined, become a presence? If I  understand something—but maybe I  am totally wrong—the absence clearly has presence—an acting entity, whether clearly defined or not. But it seems that we, the people affected (both in the sense of effect and affect) by absences, can get agency back by working around the imperceptible edges of absences. I cannot remember exactly, but I saw a documentary on astrophysics and how some ‘objects’ in space can be deduced to be there because there is an absence of a particular radiation. We are kind of in the shadow of these objects. Maybe they are the absence of a presence. I felt that in Davina’s it works similarly—or maybe in the opposite direction. Pieces of cloth remnants of a person no longer there: trace this usually imperceptible edge of the absence? It makes me think of the body not only being able to perceive and express things that are there but might elude words but also things that are not there (absences) and things that are very much harder to trace (trauma). It is a field of intensities and tendencies, the moment you would try to capture and trace it has eluded you and changed. So how can we work with the presence of the absence and how can we work with other ‘objects’ or ‘entities’ that elude the words and are more diffuse around the edges? Davina gives some ideas, and Davina and Claudia give others here. And there are many more in this book. It seems one of the things this book does is open a space for things traditionally outside of academia and outside symbolic description.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-11

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Figure 5.5 Absence/presence (pencil on paper). Source: ©Mark Huhnen.

Claudia: A topic from Davina’s work has resonated in my heart for quite a long time now, ‘the presence of absence’. Although Davina discusses it specifically in the context of grief (Kirkpatrick, 2017), I believe the topic is transferable to many spheres of our daily lives. That is why we, The Bodies Collective, ran an online workshop at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in 2022 about the ‘presence of absence’. There, among others, I offered an exercise about where the presence of absence is felt in the body and about expressing this experience by means of art (see below). Exercise: Where Do You Feel the Presence of Absence in Your Body? (Inspired by the WISE-Processes of Dr. Rajan Sankaran (Sankaran, 2021).)

• You need around 20–30 minutes for this activity. It comprises two parts: Imagination and creation. • Follow the written instructions. • Close your eyes and let your experience unfold like a movie. It doesn’t have to make sense in a rational way. It does not even have to relate to reality.

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 101 Imagination 1) Imagine an absence that you are experiencing right now in your life (choose something you know you can handle in this context). It can be anything, for example, a person, an animal, something in nature, an emotion, an energy, or even an object . . . Bring that in front of your inner eye. What do you see? Let this scene unfold like a movie. 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

Where do you feel this absence in your body? How does it feel there? Describe, don’t explain. How does it feel in the rest of your body? In the head, the chest, your back, your belly, arms and hands, legs, and feet. Take your time and fully experience your scene. Try to stay with it, even if it might be a little uncomfortable. Then, take a step back and observe the same scene as a witness. What does this person experience? How does she/he/them react? Again, let this scene unfold. When you are done, orient yourself again to the current space and time. How do you feel now? What do you feel in your body?

Creation • As a next step. I invite you to express your experience in the form of art. • Try to shape your experience and transform it into a creation. • It can be anything—a doodle, a painting, a poem, a picture, a song— anything you like. • You will find an example of Claudia and Davina’s below.

Davina’s Response to the Same Invitation The Twelfthtide Nights of 2021/2022 Claudia: I created the picture and the poem of the ‘presence of absence’ exercise during the second Twelfthtide night on the 26th of December in 2021 as part of an art project between Davina and I. Between the 25th of December 2021 and the 6th of January 2022, we created something by means of art for every Twelfthtide night and shared it with each other in a Messenger chat.

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Figure 5.6 In front of the white canvas, eavesdropping to the murmur of a lost connection, I  step out. Twelfthtide night picture 26 December  2021/ January 2022. Coloured Acryl on paper, 10.5 × 14.8 cm, shown as a black and white image. Source: © Claudia Canella.

Figure 5.7 I dreamt I had articulated wings that unfurled. I was standing on a bridge— a gap between and showing them to someone. Twelfthtide night picture for 26 December 2021/January 22. Coloured collage on paper 20 × 13 cm, shown as black and white image. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

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The Twelfthtide nights are part of different cultures and traditions and are usually related to the winter solstice and the time between the years (see e.g. Ruland, 2019). One of the concepts is that every night between the 25th of December and the 6th of January stands for a month of the upcoming year. The single days, respectively the single months, are related to different topics, often of a seasonal nature, for example ‘winter’ and ‘introspection’. During our Twelfthtide nights project, we went with a prompt for every night and created a piece of art the following day about what emerged during the night from sunset till dawn of the next day. The prompt for the 26th of December 2021 relating to January 2022 was: ‘When you dive into your silence, who meets you there?’. What emerged that night for me was Davina’s ‘the presence of absence’, and I created the painting and the poem above. I believe this to be a real-life example of implemented Bodyography. Davina and I extended our project and created every month of 2022 a response— by means of art—to our own Twelfthtide pictures by taking up a colour, a shape, or the topic of the respective picture. Below you will find my January response. Davina: This project enabled Claudia and I  to stay connected through a calendrically determined ritual process and to get to know each other in another way not determined by words but by images, colours, themes.

Figure 5.8 The magic reveals itself beyond the light. Response to the Twelfthtide night picture 26 December  2021/January  2022. Colour Acryl on canvas, 30 × 24 cm, shown as a black and white image. Source: © Claudia Canella.

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Figure 5.9 Response to the Twelfthtide picture 26 December 2021/January 2022. Coloured photo on archival paper 21 × 14.5 cm, shown as black and white image. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 105 We have repeated this project in 2022–23 with other members of The Bodies Collective becoming involved. There is a powerful bodily response to the written prompts and the huge variety of images, approaches, and materials used. We are brought into direct contact with serious play, and I am always amazed that when one gives people the same prompt, the interpretation is always different as it filters through the veil of ourselves. Alys: Joining the Twelfthtides in 2022/2023 allowed me another space for my artistic practice to connect to other bodies in The Bodies Collective. Inspired by the prowess and knowledge of Claudia and Davina and the photography of Sarah, all helped me explore my own creative identity in response to the prompts (Klaas et al., 2014). Sometimes nervous to share my work first on the WhatsApp group or feeling guilty that it was nearly midnight, I began to realise that making space to reflect, dream, think, and then craft my inner journey was rewarding, but particularly so as my friends were also holding the space together. Davina’s work on the presence of absence has continued to deeply resonate with me since I first read her PhD thesis (Kirkpatrick, 2017), learning to see grief and transitions as not something to ‘get over’ but something to live ‘with’. This image I am sharing here is from Day 4 of the Twelfthtides, where I added colour pencil to a sepia collagraph print of the tropical garden in which I had been living in Yeppoon, Darumbal Country, Queensland, Australia. In December 2022, when I did this piece, I was only one month back in the United Kingdom after living in Australia for over 4 years, so I was very much with my body in the transient space between countries and identities. Adding colour allowed me to see that tropical garden through a new lens. Sarah: The other day on the radio, someone was talking about how, as we grow older, more sh*t happens to us, around us, and within us. It made me suspect that reading your chapter can’t not take people (back) into their own grief experiences or grief expectancies, and so I sat for a while with where it took me. It made me feel the grief that I still carry with me each day over the death of my uncle R. An unexpected, untimely, unexplained death that happened in a faraway country decades ago, but that feels like it happened last week. Your words and this memory took me towards the notion of continuing bonds—the idea that the work of grief is not to let go but to engage in a different way, often in a very bodied way. Grief carries within it such body memories as sight, sound, touch, smell, and movement memories mediated through perceptual apparatus at each time and place where the memory is evoked. I imagine wheeling R’s bike to lean against the fence, where there must still be some small strands of your partner’s shirt, and watching as the wind wraps

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Figure 5.10 Living in the bush, Yeppoon Garden, Sepia collagraph print (June 2022), Added colour pencil highlights (December  2022), shown as black and white image. Source: Artwork and photograph © Alys Mendus.

the shirt-strands around the wheel spokes, tangling up the dead and the grief. It made me think that I’d like to sit awhile with you there, hearing about your partner and telling you about R—and that we might drink some coffee and imagine them, just for a short time, joining us, hugging us, and loving us. Notes 1 Professor of Social Engagement and Humanities. 2 Contemporary arts practice tends to be concerned with art of the present day, currently being produced. It is often about ideas and concerns rather than solely the aesthetic (look of the work). 3 Rasaboxes trains participants to physically express eight key emotions first identified in the Natyasastra, a Sanskrit text dealing with theatre, dance, and music. 4 A transect line is a tape or string laid along the ground in a straight line between two poles as a guide for sampling, often used within geographic practices. 5 This river is the longest river in Britain and separates England from Wales. It has the second-largest tidal range in the world and has a tidal bore, a wave that happens because of the incoming tide. 6 Berlant gave one of the keynotes at the 5th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies at The University of Edinburgh in 2015. 7 Annabel initiated Throes of Grief (TOG), an artist-led collective research, which I  am part of an initiative exploring both the presence and themes of grief in contemporary art practice.

Equivalencies—Creative Rituals, the Ageing Body, and Grief 107 8 This seemed particularly relevant as the fragility of the earth had been brought into sharp focus by the failings of the Cop 26 meetings in Glasgow in November 2021. 9 Csikszentmihalyi said this in his February 2004 TED talk. 10 A clootie tree is found beside a holy well and has strips of fabric tied to it as part of a healing ritual and pilgrimage. 11 Professor of Qualitative Inquiry.

References Kirkpatrick, D. (2017). Grief and loss; living with the presence of absence. A practice based study of personal grief narratives and participatory projects [PhD thesis]. University of the West of England. http://eprints.uwe.ac.uk/29973. Klass, D., Silverman, P. R.,  & Nickman, S. (2014). Continuing bonds: New understandings of grief. Taylor & Francis. Ruland, J. (2019). Das Geheimnis der Rauhnächte: ein Wegweiser durch die zwölf heiligen Nächte (23., neu gestaltete Auflage). Schirner Verlag. Sankaran, R. (2021). From shadow to light. The WISE processes in homeopathic casetaking (1. Aufl). Homeopathic Medical Publishers.

6 Snacks from Cooking After the Bodyography Recipe The Body as an Epistemological Entity Claudia Canella Working with The Bodies Collective as a Game Changer in My Academic Thinking Engaging with The Bodies Collective was a game changer in my academic thinking. I was trained that an academic is a lone warrior aiming for citations, high impact factors, and reputation connected to a professorship, preferably. Although I started early to question these values and followed another path, I became aware that these values were still a sediment in my performance as an academic when I first participated in a workshop of The Bodies Collective at the European Conference of Qualitative Inquiry in Leuven, Belgium, in 2018. I was irritated—how good it felt to engage in physical activities during a scientific conference and how the workshop providers dared to embody autonomy as pedagogy. As they left space for participant-led activities, I felt deeply respected as a professional for bringing my own experiences into play. On the other side, to just hold the space and leave everything else open was a strong contradiction to my values of didactic leadership. I felt troubled and excited at the same time. I wanted to be part of this. Journal Prompts

Imagine giving up your authorship as an individual academic in favour of a collective publication with like-minded researchers. • • • •

Where does your focus shift to? Which advantages and disadvantages do you see in doing this? Where do you feel this in your body? Which emotions emerge from this imagination?

Bodyography Recipe Doing Bodyography is not a simple dish, neither does it turn out always the same although you follow the recipe. But this is exactly the charm of this dish. It is messy, colourful, and exciting. Try it now (The Bodies Collective, 2023): DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-12

Snacks from Cooking After the Bodyography Recipe 109 Create Safety and Activate Ventral Vagus Prepare a ground broth by creating a safe and non-judgmental environment where you and the people with you can express themselves and move comfortably. Creativity is supported when we feel safe and are unthreatened by any kind of situation. Then, the ventral vagus gets activated, which allows us to be open and curious and to connect with others. Become Pro-Motion Let your broth simmer constantly by prioritising movement. Embrace your body as it presents itself now, with its resources and limitations. Move accordingly and with self-compassion. Employ Arts-Based Approaches Enrich your broth by employing arts-based approaches and serious play to mobilise bodily stored knowledge, experiences, and feelings. Use it to enter into dialogue with each other. Collaborate Cook together, and you will create something greater than the dish on the table. Allowing ourselves to be social, intimate, and vulnerable are the secret ingredients that will make the dish extraordinary. Embrace Flourishing Be patient and let your dish unfold with time. Embrace what your body is offering you right here and now in all its facets. Be mindful and self-compassionate while you finish cooking. Enjoy the meal. Once you have tried it, you will want to taste it again and again. You might find that cooking itself is the magic ingredient. Snacks from My Cooking After the Bodyographys’ Recipe Create Safety and Activate Ventral Vagus

Recently, while doing an e-learning course on scientific writing at Stanford University, I  asked myself again what it means to be a scientist. It comes with a broad skill set, such as content knowledge of the scientific field and its epistemological history, the ability to execute research according to methodology, and engaging in science communication. It is a lifelong learning process. Working with The Bodies Collective made me aware of the importance of a layer that lies below these skills and that is basic not only to life in general

110  Claudia Canella but to science too: creating a safe environment that provides the floor for one’s own creativity to unfold. Science is made by humans and therefore depends on their ability to put all their knowledge into practice. This works best in an environment that signals safety to our autonomic nervous system. It is worth it to spend some time cultivating safety while doing science. In my academic life, I experience this most clearly while conducting interviews. I literally see people’s bodies instantly relax after I offer them a more comfortable chair and a pillow at the beginning of my interviews with mind-body groups for cancer patients. Arms unfold, and we are ready to enter into dialogue.

Journal Prompts

• What (scientific) environment do you need to feel safe and relaxed? • Where do you feel this in your body? • How do you feel this in your body?

Exercise for Activating the Central Vagus

(The exercise is inspired from the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) (Craig, 2007), which has its roots in acupressure, a traditional Chinese medicine technique.) 1) Stand comfortably with your feet hip-width apart. 2) Start tapping your arms and legs very gently with your open and flat hand from the top to the bottom: outside your upper arm to the lower arm and inside your lower arm to the upper arm. Proceed in the same manner with your legs. Repeat for about three rounds. 3) With both of your open and flat hands, smooth over your face from the middle to the ears, and then go on to the top of your head backwards to your neck and start all over again for about three rounds. 4) You can enforce this exercise by repeating loudly or in silence the sentence: ‘I am safe’ while doing the tapping. Becoming Pro-Motion Bodies in motion tell us a lot about our own selves, others, and how we are together in this world. Isn’t this what qualitative inquiry is about? Trained as a cultural anthropologist, researched in education for a decade, and changed to integrative medicine almost another decade ago, I am at home between the disciplines as a qualitative researcher and therefore not a fan of exclusive concepts. So, why highlight the body in research, then? Because it

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Figure 6.1 In motion I. Acryl on paper, 14.6 × 20.8 cm. Source: ©Claudia Canella, 03 June 2022.

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112  Claudia Canella was strongly neglected as a source of knowledge and needs to be reintegrated into the concept of qualitative inquiry. To make bodies in motion available as a fruitful methodological tool, it is important to start with yourself. I followed a Flamenco group class for about 15  years. I  really enjoyed turning my rational academic thinking off once a week and mimicking what the Flamenco teacher was offering me during class. After the COVID pandemic hit, I found myself alone in a rehearsal room. I became aware that I copied what I believed to be Flamenco all these years but did not embody it. I  restarted from scratch and entered an ongoing process of discovering my own artistic voice as a lay Flamenco dancer. In this process, the most important thing is experiencing my body. How does it express itself? What kind of movements come up? What is my range of motion? What are my feelings while moving? What qualities show up? A very dear friend and dance therapist introduced me to a powerful improvisation exercise to further develop the experience of your own body. Playfully Approaching Your Body in Motion—Dance Improvisation

(The exercise is inspired from Girod-Perrot (Girod-Perrot, 2012)). 1) Make three sets of cards for: a) Body parts which can be moved (e.g. lower leg, shoulders, hands etc.); b) Emotions (e.g. excitement, anger, interest); c) Qualities (e.g. airy, floating, heavy etc.) 2) Choose a song you like 3) Blindly choose a card from every set (it will for example look like this: ‘lower belly’—‘interest’—‘heavy’) 4) Move freely from within you to the song according to your cards (e.g. you only move your lower belly, in a heavy manner, expressing interest) Recommendations

• Approach this exercise playfully and with self-compassion—play with different songs; enjoy the random combination of body parts, emotions, and qualities. • Do not try to make it look like music videos or dancers from the internet, TV, social media, theatre, etc. Concentrate on what shows up from within, however it might look. Try not to judge your movements. • I recommend starting alone to feel safe and to overcome feelings of shame that often show up in such processes. With time, it will expand your experience if you do it with someone else or even in a group. • You might occasionally want to record yourself with your smartphone to gain another perspective on yourself.

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Figure 6.2 Improvisation card set of Claudia: Body parts—‘Upper legs’; Qualities— ‘airy’; Emotions—‘trusting’. Source: Original language: Swiss German, translated by Claudia, ©Claudia Canella.

Going through processes of experiencing your own body will help you perceive more sensitively how others express themselves through their bodies. As a qualitative researcher, it will provide you with additional options to capture everyday life experiences. You can also use your body in motion to communicate with others about your research. Exercise for Using Bodies in Motion for Science Communication

1) Gather in groups of two to four participants. 2) Each participant individually and silently chooses a question, experience, or insight from their own research and expresses it

114  Claudia Canella without words in a single gesture or movement. It is important to stick to your first impulses. It helps limit the time to choose the topic and the movement to five minutes. 3) The participants show each other their gestures/movements without talking about it. 4) The participants share their observations of the gestures/movements shown. Prioritise description over interpretation. 5) Enter in dialogue within the group.

This exercise pushes you automatically towards the essence of your question, experience, or insight because you must stick to one gesture or movement. By expressing it through the body, hidden or subconscious concepts will also show up. Mirrored by the group participants, they add to your knowledge of the research topic. You will be surprised at how much the others understand just by observing this one gesture/movement.

Journal Prompts

• Start a video diary (eventually without words) to document your process of experiencing your body in motion.

Employ Arts-Based Approaches

I practise intuitive painting (Lüchinger, 2005), where you approach the canvas without intention and let your intuition take shape. It is a way to access bodily stored concepts before they are in your conscious mind. Exercise for Starting with Intuitive Painting

• Take a piece of paper and any colouring within your reach, for example, coloured pencils, watercolours etc. • Try approaching the paper without a specific intention. Close your eyes for a little while. Wait until a picture, a form or a colour takes shape in front of your inner eye. Start drawing with this. Continue with what evolves from there. You are done when you feel like you have nothing to add anymore.

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Recommendations

• Approach this exercise playfully and with self-compassion. • Do not try to make it look like paintings you know from the museum, art gallery, internet, TV, social media, etc. Concentrate on what shows up from within, however it might look. • Try not to judge your drawing. Concentrate on what manifests itself instead. How do you feel about that? Where do you feel this in your body?

Figure 6.3 Academic Skinship. Oil on paper, 18 × 24 cm. 08 July 2022. Source: ©Claudia Canella.

116  Claudia Canella I am a K-Drama and K-Pop lover. Around the K-Artists, the concept of ‘skinship’ is rather prominent, showing physical affection among friends and relatives without sexual intent. It deeply resonates with me and keeps me reflecting. One day in June, I started coating the paper with a palette knife and black and white oil colours. For three consecutive weeks, I added layer by layer. One night, in the state between being awake and falling asleep, the painting appeared before my inner eye with the words: ‘academic skinship’. I thought, that is what The Bodies Collective is about. Arts-based approaches help me pursue a body-centred approach to qualitative inquiry. I  feel arts-based approaches translate my bodily stored knowledge for others so that we can enter into dialogue without slipping into traditional ways of academic discourse. Journal Prompts and Hints for Art Practice

• What is an art form you’ve always wanted to try? Until now, what kept you from trying it once? What do you need to overcome this? Choose one art form and schedule your try—You don’t know what to do. Here is a suggestion: Try the exercise for ‘using bodies in motion for science communication’. As a second step, try to transform your experience into an art piece. It can be anything, a doodle, a painting, a poem, a picture, a song—anything you like.

Collaborate Within The Bodies Collective, we practice a non-hierarchical, collectivecentred form of collaboration and share responsibilities. I appreciate that we follow what I would describe as an ethics of care (Sander-Staudt, 2022) and highlight the value of vulnerability (Brown, 2012). Within The Bodies Collective, research topics receive a new twist after we start to collaborate. While this is not that surprising when people join their forces, I  experience the collaboration to get enriched when we practice an ethics of care and show ourselves vulnerable while doing it. Instead of performance orientation, we ask: ‘what is going on in your life right now; how can we support you’, when we work together in the collective, even when deadlines are pressing. The portrait is an example of this dynamic. It is part of an art project of Davina and I (see the resonances in Davina’s chapter). Caring for each other paves the way for innovative ideas to unfold. We experienced this repeatedly in the conference workshops we offered (The Bodies Collective, 2020).

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Figure 6.4 To face my subconscious frightens me. Pencil on paper, 14.8 × 21 cm. 01 October 2022. Source: © Claudia Canella.

As one of many examples, I  recently witnessed a powerful act of showing vulnerability during a symposium on patient and public involvement in cancer research. During a keynote lecture, the speaker—a husband of a cancer patient who passed away—embodied his grief about the loss of his wife in front of the about 200 present participants, talking and crying over the topic of post-traumatic growth. It was heartbreaking and empowering.

118  Claudia Canella Practicing Care and Showing Vulnerability

• Open a business meeting with an open round of: how do you feel right now? Adapt the meeting’s setting to the answers. For example, if some people are saying that they feel stiff after long working hours at the desk, invest a minute of the meeting in a limbering-up exercise. Or if people give feedback that they feel stressed out, try the tapping exercise above for activating the central vagus. • Next time, when someone asks you how you are doing, take a short time to really feel what is going on in your body and mind at this very moment and answer accordingly. For example, I feel exhausted and have a headache right now while I am writing this because it is the most intense day of my menstruation.

Journal Prompts

• Reflect on the last situation when someone showed vulnerability towards you? How did the person show it? What was it about? How did you react? What did you feel in your body? • Reflect on the last situation when you showed vulnerability towards someone? How did you show it? What was it about? How did the person react? What did you feel in your body?

Embrace Flourishing I am in a constant state of negotiation with my body; sometimes I praise what my body can do, and sometimes I am frustrated about what my body cannot do. I push my body forward and allow my body to rest. Flourishing happens when I embrace my body in the present moment with self-compassion (Neff, 2022). It is a similar mechanism as signalling safety to the autonomic nervous system. I have been interviewing mind-body therapy groups for cancer patients for eight years in a row now. When I ask about important changes they are going through, one of the hot topics is ‘self-compassion’ (Neff, 2022). For most of the participants, it is the first time in their lives that they turn towards their bodies in a self-compassionate way instead of a performance-oriented way.

Snacks from Cooking After the Bodyography Recipe 119 Exercise in Self-Compassion

(This exercise is inspired by Kristin Neff (Neff, 2022). Find guidance and more exercises on her webpage: self-compassion.org.)

• Gently caress your arms while embracing yourself, OR put your hand on your heart. • Install a compassionate, gentle voice in your head as if a beloved person is speaking to you. • Speak in an acknowledging, comforting, and encouraging way to yourself. For example: “I acknowledge that I am struggling right now. It is OK to feel all the feelings. It is OK to feel shame. I am not alone. May I trust myself.” Recommendations

• You might find it weird to talk to yourself in that manner. It might feel fake. Try to stay with it nevertheless and allow yourself to believe what you are saying. It takes time and practice.

Journal Prompts

• Notice the different kind of voices in your head; for example, critical, anxious, discouraging, careful, gentle, compassionate, etc. • Reflect on how much space you allow each of these qualities in your self-talk. How do you feel in your body when the ‘different voices’ are speaking to you?

An Invitation to Dialogue I tasted all these Bodyography snacks—they are nurturing. The cherry on top is being able to do this within The Bodies Collective. It has transformed my focus to an arts-based collaborative approach to the body and to prioritising human connection and dialogue in addressing relevant research questions in qualitative inquiry, such as struggling, healing, hierarchies, and privilege. I’d like to keep cultivating this approach and these qualities—do you want to join in?

120  Claudia Canella Invitation to Dialogue

• I invite you to share your thoughts and experiences with me in whatever form they might be, for example, text, audio, video, art pieces, etc. • I am looking forward to our exchange—write me at: [email protected]

References Brown, B. (2012). Daring greatly. How the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way we live, love, parent, and lead. Gotham Books. Craig, G. (2007). The EFT manual (Emotional Freedom Techniques). Self-published. Girod-Perrot, R. (2012). Bewegungsimprovisation: Wahrnehmung und Körperausdruck, musikalisch-rhythmische Bewegungsgestaltung, tänzerische Kommunikation und Interaktion in Gruppen. Academia-Verl. Lüchinger, T. (2005). Intuitiv Malen. Wege zur Kreativität. Zytglogge-Verlag (Zytglogge-Werkbuch). Neff, K. (2022). Self-compassion. https://self-compassion.org/, last access 16.11.2022. Sander-Staudt, M. (2022). Care ethics (The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161–0002). https://iep.utm.edu/care-ethics/, last access 16.11.2022. The Bodies Collective. (2020). Bodyography as activism in qualitative inquiry: The Bodies Collective at ECQI19. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(1), 104–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720970140. The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)Centering the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy, and human flourishing. In T. Chemi, E. Brattico, L. Fjorback, & L. O. Harmat (Eds.), Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing. Routledge (Routledge research in arts education). www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003158790.

Resonances to Chapter 6: Between Academic Skinship and Authorship—Cultivating Different Tastes and Appetites The Bodies Collective Musings about Authorship and Academic Skinship

Jess: I feel so happy to be eating supper while reading an ingredient list for a meal such as Bodyography—otherwise I may have found myself thinking, beyond my control, of my fridge. To think of the food that sustains us, the way that the body becomes part of our attention as we read, to even make reading a treat by allowing dinner to be a part of the process—this is the body ever present in the work we do. Let me think about your prompts: • Imagine giving up your authorship as an individual academic in favour of a collective publication with like-minded researchers. • Where does your focus shift to? • Which advantages and disadvantages do you see in doing this? • Where do you feel this in your body? • Which emotions emerge over this imagination? It is hard to give myself up in this space—I find myself struggling against the confines of egotistical desire for recognition alongside a need for ethical ‘dis-embodiment’ of a collective. Is the collective disembodied? Or is it multi-bodied? And does the multi-body then take away the individual body? Perhaps this is my struggle. Where do I fit? As I edited one of our pieces for a publication a year ago, I knew that my name would not be more attached to the piece than anyone else’s—even if I felt that I had spent considerably more time on it. This is hard as an academic. To give ourselves up. To become Multi. It is hard for me anyway. But that is the point. It is not easy to be a collective. To allow for ‘more time’ on a piece for the whole to shine. In this understanding of academia, we all sweep the steps leading up the Ivory Tower. And it feels so special and important.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-13

122  Claudia Canella Your piece reminds me of deep friendship—the play and gentleness that I  admire in you are so strong in this piece. The idea of friendship and skinship—to be close with one another, not only in our shared projects and academic interests but also in life. To be able to be with one another as we experience childbirth, death, separation of partners, or a pandemic. Life is what happens in between the margins of academia, and your piece brings that messiness and complexity together. Claudia Responding to Jess—To Become Multi Dinner and Bodyography—a perfect match! Thank you very much, Jess, for your personal example of the struggle to navigate between individual and collective authorship. It might be easy to sweep over a general statement of how difficult it is to give up individual authorship in favour of the collective, but reading an example gives the readers a taste of how consuming and rewarding it is to go through this process in every project we do, again and again. I love your notion of becoming Multi. Me too—I feel all the feelings when it comes to the issue of authorship. I  feel frustrated when we fail to find a common meeting date; when somebody remains silent, when deadlines are pressing; and when contributions are significantly unbalanced between the single members. This includes frustration about myself too. But then—every time until today—the frustration transforms into delight of collaborative working. While I  do allow space for my frustration, I  remind myself about the magic of our collective. Every project always ends with multiple people taking on responsibility so far. This allows me to focus on my strengths and paves the way for my creativity to unfold. I am forced but also privileged to decide in every project what is important to me to say and to contribute. If we contribute and work together in that way, I feel our reflections and creativity will be amplified beyond our individualities. This is a powerful source of inspiration for me—it feels magical. And so does our academic skinship. There might be partly shared values in the current academic system, for example, about authorship, but—as Alys always remembers us—’life is happening’ beyond. That means that we have to juggle, but also the possibility to drive from our physical and mental health, hobbies, friends, partners, family, volunteer, and paid jobs. I  enjoy that we prioritise an ethics of care around that. It feels radical in a positive way to me, that I try to fully acknowledge the individual circumstances and unconditionally trust in our collective process without slipping too deep into ‘organ mode’—as Mark puts it in the discussion chapter. Alys joining into the academic skinship: I came here to attempt to write what you have beautifully written, Jess, about how Claudia’s chapter gives ‘thick description’ of the realities (the messiness) of friendship and academicskinship. The feelings of comradery over the miles and differing time zones as many of us have moved multi times crossing continents since the beginning of The Bodies Collective adventures in 2017!

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I read this chapter with hope and aspiration for others to realise that using the pedagogy and epistemological positions of The Bodies Collective can be accessible for everyone. My field of innovative educational approaches is often challenging to pre-service and working teachers as it does not follow the ‘normative’ approaches in traditional mainstream education, and The Bodies Collective has come across similar challenges in that our thinking and approaches are for ‘certain’ people. What I argue for both in education and with these approaches is giving space to the body so that it is possible for everyone to listen, learn, move, and make changes, however small. Claudia Transitioning to Cultivating Different Tastes and Appetites You are making an important point, Alys. I think we still have to move away more and more from the belief that something like ‘science for everyone’ exists and for which we can define universal characteristics. It is more about opening and holding the space. To me, ‘serious play’ is a can opener to this (see Davina’s response below). To be mindful of inclusiveness and differences is another—as Sarah reminds us below.

Figure 6.5 A visual creative response—black watercolour on seed paper. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

124  Claudia Canella Sarah Emphasises the Different Tastes and Appetites Claudia, I want to interject in a slightly different direction. I will use the phrase ‘recollections may differ’. Perhaps this connects with your irritation after the 2018 workshop, so beautifully described. I was there in many of the spaces you describe, and while I  love your descriptions, my memory differs and my feelings about the activities and outcomes differ. Even the notes I took at the time differ from your descriptions! I write this because I want to emphasise that we all have different tastes and appetites. Of course, you know this! But I also think when we try to do Bodyography, to be inclusive, to encourage autonomy as pedagogy, and to flourish, it can take such different shapes for each of us. We’ve started to write elsewhere about how what might be space-opening for one person might be triggering for another. Difference is OK; difference is what we aim for. I know that it’s safe enough for me to say that I feel different because of the frame we have been trying to build. Caring for each other is dialogical—it means that robust challenge and questioning in a relational context of deep empathy and radical presence can happen. Perhaps this is what critical consciousness and liberatory practices feel like. I like this a lot. Mark—Something Is Cooking Here—The Proof of the Pudding Is in the Eating Yummy! What a delicious selection of snacks! Do they work? The proof of the pudding is in the eating of it, as they say . . . this is about trying it. In my chapter, I might have had some ideas why it might work. Or why we do not pay much attention. But this chapter is for you, the reader, to try it out, and you might find that you adjust the recipes slightly or that you are inspired by completely new recipes. You might find new and different ingredients. You might sometimes have a similar herb or vegetable, but it has a different name. And yes, it is still messy—like most kitchens are. But something is cooking here. Do I overstretch the metaphor? Maybe. But I think this metaphor of cooking, preparing something to nourish, is so helpful. Bodyography, like preparing food, is inevitable. You cannot not move. How often do you do it without thinking? How often do you do it consciously? How often by ourselves and how often with others? But, however, it is always a doing. Movement! Change! Transformation! Ryan—Tasty, Not Easy I love this reminder of when we were so lucky to meet in Leuven in 2018! I  was feeling the elation at the start of the conference that being invited a few months prior to join as a presenter and collaborate with the collective brought me. I felt special, like I was adding a special ingredient that mattered. When I reflect on some of the moments you shared in your chapter, Claudia,

Snacks from Cooking After the Bodyography Recipe 125 I recall some of my difficulties during our workshop. Being new to collective work, I felt at first threatened by having to cancel the workshop activity I had planned in order to make space for new collective members and participants of the workshop to offer something else. I don’t know if others noticed right away with all the flurry of activities, but I was a bit pouty and chose to be a photographer of the activities, still feeling shy about moving my body with others and feeling a tinge of rejection. I learned an important lesson in that conference: to write and discuss the magic of non-hierarchy and to relinquish control in practice are very different things. I have had to consistently challenge my need for control as an author, workshoper, and contributor. This very much reminds me of my resistance when I am cooking a dish in my kitchen and others come in and out, offering feedback, questions, and suggestions that I  wasn’t seeking. That same selfconscious defensiveness comes up then. And yet, I find that when I let things flow, something above and beyond me, or even me and the others, is able to emerge—a delicious and unique dish that no one of us could recreate. So much of the power of our collective, and indeed collective work in general, lies in letting go of expectations, letting go of the desire for control, and allowing myself to be seen in my vulnerability. So, though I  may cringe at first, please come into the kitchen unannounced, and we will partake of this chaotic process. Let’s Cook Together in Our Messy Kitchens I (Claudia) couldn’t agree more, Mark, that the proof of the pudding is in the eating . . . and combined with an invitation to cook together in our messy kitchens (Ryan). Sarah adds that you, reader, may want to grow your own food to bake into a Bodyography.

7 Talking/Walking to Myself Questioning the Primacy of the Word Mark Huhnen

So, I am walking here down a grey, rain-soaked street. I know I have to write this chapter, but somehow I do not feel it. I have a first draft. But I have to admit it was somewhat half-hearted, mostly cobbled together parts from my doctoral thesis (Huhnen, 2023) that do not quite fit together that well when shortened. Other bits, newer bits, were better—more satisfying. I think I can save some of them. The Body Between Trauma and Language ‘The body keeps the score’ writes Bessel van der Kolk (2014). It is a remarkable book. It has been credited as putting trauma firmly into focus of the psychological professions. I can anecdotally confirm this. In my practice as a systemic psychotherapist, hardly a day passes by in which a colleague would not mention trauma as a contributing factor for a problem they are trying to ‘treat’. Before this, most of my colleagues were more concerned with language and meaning. It is from this perspective that the title is remarkable in another way. It is the body that keeps the score, not some language/meaning system. Since the ‘linguistic turn’ (Rorty, 1967) language has become the central metaphor or metaphor we live by (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) in my discipline, systemic psychotherapy (Huhnen 2023; Rober, 2002). Now it might well become trauma. . . . Maybe this step towards trauma has not been made in other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, maybe it has or is about to be made. Collective trauma, historical trauma, cultural trauma etc are search words that yield results beyond the field of psychology and psychotherapy. It is worth noting that the notion of bodies keeping the score is not at all a new one with regards to racial trauma and the experience of racism (Fanon, 1967—original 1952). In many more ways the history of systemic psychotherapy is remarkably closely linked to developments in the humanities and social sciences and qualitative research. Wittgenstein’s (1953) later works, speech act theory (Austin, 1962), post-structuralism (Derrida, 1982, 2016), discursiveness DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-14

Talking/Walking to Myself 127 (Foucault, 1980) and dialogism (Bakhtin, 1981), all had considerable influence in shifting the focus from a central metaphor of systems and feedback loops to one of language (Huhnen, 2023). Whether trauma or language is the dominant metaphor, the body exists either as a construct secondary to social interaction and language or as a recording place for trauma, or reacting to trauma. Maybe there are ways of affording the body a more active position? More recent developments like ‘new’ materialism (Barad, 2007; Braidotti, 2013) seem to not have made their way into systemic practice yet in the same way as they maybe have into the wider realm of humanities and social sciences. Despite doubts about the newness of this new materialism (Lettow, 2017; Pillow, 2019) it does put material reality back into the focus of our considerations, marrying epistemology and ontology, knowing and being. A focus on language foregrounds the mind, while materiality brings our own immediate materiality of our body into view. That matter matters, could be seen as a response to the social constructionist and linguistic view that reality is created in social interaction or discourse. If the material reality or material manifestation of a person is the body, we have now also seen for a while a theorising of the body as separate from mind/soul/psyche. Maybe Foucault (1977) is a good example of how mind/soul/psyche stayed separated from body. In ‘Discipline and Punish’ he describes how the locus of penal technologies shifted from the body to mind/soul/psyche. Yet disciplinary power still affects the body directly (to create docile bodies). I am not aiming to critique Foucault here, but to give an example of how the body/mind duality that is much older (Descartes, 2017—original 1644; and in many belief systems it is the body that can die but the soul that lives on) is being maintained. Foucault is also an example of how the body might well be theorised in humanities and social sciences, quite often as a more passive object, rather than agent or at least part-subject. But here I  am in the rain-soaked street, the abstract I  had once written sitting heavily on my shoulder. I do not want to move, not another step in the street, nor another word in this chapter. Why did I go out when I did not feel like it? Why do I want to write something I do not feel any more? How can I reconnect with the purpose of going out? Ah, there it is. A deep in-breath. I wanted to get fresh air. I/my body wanted fresh air. Not just the docile body that was told it needed fresh air in order to function, but the wild body in itself. Expressed in just one breath. The purpose of writing? To reconnect to the body with the mind/soul/psyche. Was that Bodyography? What were all the things that I have done that excited me? The wild side of me? The one that stretches academia a little—at least in my own mind. Puppets . . . ah here they come back. Those spirited (literally ‘animated’) pieces of matter. Oli and I had too many drunken conversations out of which

128  Mark Huhnen nothing came. So, one, discussing (not so) ‘new materialism’ (Barad, 2007) with a puppeteer can be a challenge, had to be ‘made into something’. The resulting film, ‘Interviews with puppets’ (Smart  & Huhnen, 2018), got published in an academic/practitioner journal. Is that knowledge creation? Is that Bodyography? These puppets seem so alive. Looking at the film again and remembering, I  felt I  was directly communicating with them—not Oli, the puppeteer ‘behind’ them. How can some supposedly non-living matter seem so lifelike and communicate? And turning it around: can something as ‘immaterial’ as mind/soul/ psyche do anything without a body to intra-act (Barad, 2007) in the world of material things? Bodies are material and can occupy space— both the physical as well as figurative—between: A mediator between worlds, an active participant in the configurations that make reality. The body knows and the body does. It expresses. Can a body, a material something, act, or be active without something internal or part of it like a mind/soul/psyche that makes a decision to do so (like Oli)? The last question plays into the realm of ‘new’ materialism and the post-human. And one possible answer is that everything, everybody (like a body of water etc) has its own agency and inter- and intra-connectedness to everything else: a becoming together, Sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016). Humans are not special. But we seem to insist on our special place. And language is often used as the difference that sets us apart from other beings. Is it our ‘human’ language that makes us feel special? Is that why we insist on language and linguistic activity as the main domain of our being? It would go some way towards a possible explanation. There might be further explanations. One possibility, a fairly obvious one, is that language is the currency of science. It is the carrier in which knowledge is assumed to be transferred. This of course excludes knowledges that are difficult or impossible to express in language, and it excludes those who cannot use language in a way that is sanctioned by science. In this way language itself has become a marker in the hierarchy of those expressing knowledge. Those who can use language the best are afforded the highest places in the hierarchy and have probably an interest to maintain the importance of knowledge. Of course, for knowledges that are open to the expression in language or, more generally, symbolic action (Huhnen, 2023) there are advantages. A  certain amount of precision is possible. There are advantages to language—for some and in some scenarios. But what do we miss when focussing on language? Yes, the body is (also) conceptualised—in language. The word ‘body’ is part of language. We use the word body to make sense of, and talk about, the body. About! It is an aboutness (Shotter, 2010) of the body. What might an approach to the body through the body, and with the body—withness

Talking/Walking to Myself 129 (Shotter, 2010)—be like? These will be the main questions that frame this chapter, summarising points I made elsewhere (Huhnen, 2023). Fascinating! As I walk the rain-soaked streets, having just re-read the first draft of my chapter that I did not really like, I realise why: I got more into the aboutness, summarising (possibly) interesting points from my largely cerebral exercise of writing a doctoral thesis. Feel free to find it and read it. Maybe I  will even try to make it into a book at some point. But I  had not really summarised before; I had extracted some parts that were now in the wrong environment—like myself with the wrong shoes on a rain-soaked street. Ideas have an environment too. Still, I had promised to speak about the problem(s) with language. Now I will summarise. One problem with language is that a lot of it is binary in nature. Something is small only in comparison with something else that is big. There are many such binary pairs rich/poor, strong/weak, on/ off and dare I  say epistemology/ontology? Of course, reality is more complicated. You might question ‘what about being somewhere in the middle, being neither rich nor poor?’ Language has the possibility to describe this. I just used it to do this. Yet this is only extending the binary into a spectrum that still has binary poles. It also loses precision. Symbolic actions have more or less stable meanings and a relatively stable binary opposite. (In her Chapter 1 Jess reflects more on binaries.) A noun, a thing is something as opposed to not-the-thing or something else. (In their Chapter  4 Ryan questions this ‘thisness’, haecceity or essential qualities of a thing.) An action is specific compared to other actions. And whether words are referring to other words or to reality or both, they do also try to stand in for material things and properties, are symbolic. And as such they are struggling. Not only, as shown above, do they struggle with the spaces between yes and no, 1 and 0. They also struggle with the movement between those imaginary points while the body only ever exists as moving in the space between. It is in dynamic action. Always moving . . . or is it? This links back to a very old dispute: Does motion exist? In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Zeno created a series of paradoxes that are meant to demonstrate that motion or movement (dynamic) is impossible (Aristotle, 1930). In the main, they are variations around division of space: the dichotomy paradox says that if someone wants to move a certain distance, they need to first move half the distance. To do that they need to move through a quarter of the distance, an eighth and so on. So, they end up having to complete an infinite number of tasks which are impossible to complete. Another paradox, states that when an arrow is shot but looked at in any instant of time, it is not in motion in that instant. The arrow therefore cannot pass through this position because then it would be for

130  Mark Huhnen an instant not in motion. Zeno argues that all these paradoxes show the impossibility of movement. There is also an assumption that everything’s normal state is stillness out of which it has to be moved, triggered by something (or someone) else, ultimately by a prime mover, that or who does not need to be moved. I cannot help feeling reminded of Vico (1725/1948), and thinking that we might have ‘created’ a deity to make sense of our experience. An alternative starting point could be that everything moves and changes. It is hard now to imagine anything that does not undergo change. Yes, things might seem temporarily stable, but is this the norm or the exception? Over time the idea of the impossibility of movement or motion has been refuted many times: a great tradition that includes Bergson (1911), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Massumi (2002). More recently even the motion in the conditions of a philosophy of motion has been theorised (Nail, 2019). Everything moves. Tout bouge. Everything moves. It comes back. The great Lecoq used to say this. I know what is important to me. I notice it, not only in my mind. In his writing about the ecology of mind, Bateson (1972) uses the example of a blind person with a cane to conceptualise ‘mind’. In this example mind is a feedback loop in which information/difference gets circulated around and around, in different transforms. When the person takes a step, the road surface changes, the cane vibrates in a different way, a different neural (electrochemical) signal gets sent to the brain and contributes to the decision to take another step or not in this, that or the other direction. Mind for Bateson (1972) is the whole system involved in this feedback loop. Beyond this example, mind has to include everything connected to everything (Bateson, 1979). What was I saying, I fall into the old dualism. But anyway, I noticed it with and in my body. My steps become lighter. I know what to write. Everything moves. Beyond words. A lot of my doctoral thesis (Huhnen, 2023) shows that words can never describe movements from the biggest to the tiniest and will always ‘arrest’ (Bergson, 1911) them! Lecoq knew that all those movements would still communicate. It comes back to me. Jacques Lecoq (2020) used a tool called the Neutral Mask. Now of course it is not entirely neutral. It might well be subject to the same cultural lenses that we identified before. It might be more or less reminiscent of a particular ‘race’ or gender. But it tries to be neutral at least with regards to emotional expression. And crucially, there is in Lecoq’s teaching the rule that the Neutral Mask cannot talk (or use any symbolic action).

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Figure 7.1 The neutral mask. Source: © Mark Huhnen.

One task with the Neutral Mask that I encountered in theatre school and I tried out at the European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (2019 in Edinburgh). Imagine a small island, a beach, and a pleasantly warm ocean over which the sun rises. Everything is calm and comfortable. There is no need to ‘add’ anything to the scenario, just being with the island, sea and sun rise is enough. Participants put on a neutral mask and imagine that they are awakening for the very first time. It is worth spending a little more time on exploring what waking up for the very first time would mean. There is no need to be afraid, dismissive, bored or anxious. Only curiosity makes sense. Is this also Bodyography? If it is, then Bodyography might not be something new. It does not need to be. I think it has always been. And I am doing it now, walking down the grey, rain-soaked street. My feet are getting wet—very different from the pleasantly warm ocean at sunrise. I  imagine my gait changing in response even before I notice it. And even after I notice it would take a moment before I could put this into words—either for myself or for someone else.

132  Mark Huhnen Another problem with language is that the body is always in motion and changing while language’s descriptions of the body fix it in time like any description fixes movement (Bergson, 1911) into a position. But movement comes possibly chronologically and certainly ontogenetically before position—the arrow moves before its movement gets arrested in thought and speech (Massumi, 2002). Movement and its perception in the form of affect happen before the coding in words and scientific theories. It is intensity yet unfiltered by cultural and linguistic patterns with which it will be made to fit. There is a form of knowledge and a potential for change that might be less affected by the hierarchies described. We encounter each other and ourselves in different ways, with our bodies, through our bodies. A body in space is a body in space. It only becomes more or less capable, more or less beautiful or more or less gendered or racialised through culture that, yes, might well have happened chronologically before but ontogenetically after. Maybe there is an approach to inequalities and changing them from a perspective (less a position) of the moving, changing and not yet classified body that affects and is affected by other bodies. Ha, the body is not classified! Here I  am judging mine—partly for its environment (it is wet and a little achy) and for not being this or that (tall, strong, beautiful, etc.) enough in the binaries that language describes. And my body is even a privileged one. Who Gets to Take Part? As indicated, the use of symbolic action includes and excludes to different degrees depending on the knowledge and skills in a particular system of symbolic actions, in a language. The validity of the knowledge produced is related to these skills. Knowledges expressed and transmitted in other symbolic action systems and in dynamic action get dismissed. And if language is seen as the quality exclusive to humans, all non-humans get excluded—at least in thought. Interestingly we are relying more and more on non-humans (like algorithms) to produce knowledge. But generally, we are still stuck in a hierarchical thinking critiqued by Braidotti (2013), Haraway (2016) and others. This hierarchy, dominant to Western thought, is the extension of a hierarchy between humans with white, middle-aged, able-bodied and cis-gendered males—Vitruvian Men, as depicted by Leonardo DaVinci, Man 2 as Sylvia Wynter calls him (McKittrick, 2015) seen as the pinnacle. We find a Euro-centrism, racism and sexism inside of anthropo-centrism. Applying this to knowledge and language or language games (Wittgenstein, 1953) the hierarchy is Western ‘scientific’ language or

Talking/Walking to Myself 133 symbolic action on top, then ‘other’ languages and then embodied knowledge and dynamic action. This raises the question then not only who gets excluded but also what: knowledge that eludes symbolic action, for example knowledge of which the body has kept a score. Now my body/me knows why this is important to me. I want to not be in a rain-soaked street, although I am grateful for it now because it helped me write this chapter. I do not want to be in this space of mind(s) judging bodies, mine and others. I remember a very important space for me. It is a cold February day in Leuven, Belgium—2018. I  had been to a game changer with the people with whom it turns out I will later form what is called The Bodies Collective. Apart from that, the conference had been very ‘talky’. Yes, there was passion in a lot of the talk, but it felt like a loftier, intellectual passion, a passion that arrives out of egos. I offer a workshop. I  put a poster on the door that says that upon coming in people are allowed to do anything except from talking (as long as they keep themselves and others safe). People come in a great variety of bodies. They take their warm winter clothes off. On the floor are some objects like juggling balls. Very quickly, I cannot say exactly how long it took, we are playing with each other, using balls, building castles out of chairs and coats. We related. People smile. Afterwards, people feedback that it felt like a relief from the head. Is this also Bodyography? It seems that Bodyography can take many forms. In this book, you find some examples of The Bodies Collective working with and through the body. Yes, we are aware that this book, in its written form, has become about the body. But it came about through bodies being together in space—working with and through the body first. It is not an easy, if at all possible, thing to do. We all come laden with what happened chronologically before, how we have been cultured, gendered, racialised, and classified in all sorts of ways since before we were born. And our bodies kept score of that. Of course! And yet we try. References Aristotle. (1930). Physica (R. P. Hardie & R. K. Gaye, Trans.). In W. David Ross (Ed.), The works of Aristotle (Vol. II). Oxford University Press. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago University Press.

134  Mark Huhnen Bateson, G. (1979). Mind and nature—A necessary unity. Dutton. Bergson, H. (1911). Matter and memory (N. M. Paul & W. Scott Palmer, Trans.). George Allen and Unwin. (Original work published 1896) Braidotti, R. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Derrida, J. (1982). Sending: On representation. Social Research, 49(2), 294–326. Derrida, J. (2016). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). John Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1967) Descartes, R. (2017). The principles of philosophy (J. Veitch, Trans.). Anodos Books. (Original work published 1644) Fanon, F. (1967). Black skin, white masks (L. Markmann, Trans.). Pluto Press. (Original work published 1952) Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/knowledge, selected interviews and other writings, 1972– 1077 (C. Gordon, L. Marshall, J. Mepham, & K. Soper, Trans.). Pantheon. Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble. Duke University Press. Huhnen, M. (2023). How to do things without words [Unpublished doctoral thesis] University of Bedfordshire. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago University Press. Lecoq, J. (2020). The moving body (D. Bradby, Trans.). Methuen. (Original work published 1997) Lettow, S. (2017). Turning the turn: New materialism, historical materialism and critical theory. Thesis Eleven, 140(1), 106–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513616683853 Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual. Duke University Press. McKittrick, K. (Ed.). (2015). Sylvia Wynter—On being human as praxis. Duke University Press. Nail, T. (2019). Being and motion. Oxford University Press. Pillow, W. S. (2019). What matter matters? Reflexivity and one-slit theorizing. [unpublished manuscript]. Gender Studies, School for Cultural and Social Transformation, University of Utah. Rober, P. (2002). Some hypotheses about hesitations and their nonverbal expression in family therapy practice. Journal of Family Therapy, 24(2), 187–204. Rorty, R. (1967). Introduction. In R. Rorty (Ed.), The linguistic turn (pp. 1–39). Chicago University Press. Shotter, J. (2010). Social construction on the edge: ‘Withness’-thinking and embodiment. Taos Institute. Smart, O.,  & Huhnen, M. (2018). Interviews with puppets. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice. [online] https://murmurations.cloud/ojs/index. php/murmurations van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score. Penguin. Vico, G. (1948). The new science (T. G. Bergin  & M. H. Fisch, Trans.). Cornell University Press. (Original work published 1725) Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations (G. Anscombe, Trans.). MacMillan.

Resonances to Chapter 7: Matter as Mattering The Bodies Collective

Claudia remembers: Me, the hatfrog, and the neutral mask—what happens at the edges of science, art, and everyday life. Hatfrog for President I was there when Mark showed his interview with the hatfrog—It was love at first sight. I like the question that Mark raises in his chapter about whether material objects can embody things before they come into language and mind. As Mark also puts it in his chapter, we are all so easily trapped in the duality mind—body, especially in science and academia; so am I. Using material things, such as the hatfrog, at least offers me new perspectives and paves the way to step out of the traditional ways of academic discourse. Qualities that I consider important in today’s science show up more easily in such settings, such as playfulness and vulnerability. It just starts with a warm feeling of humour and excitement if you meet the hatfrog as a speaker in a conference and not another middle-aged white male professor ‘mansplaining’ in monologue; or myself as middle aged white female academic ‘womansplaining’ my scientific findings in a quick and dirty 15-minute presentation. The Emotional Neutral Mask A strange thing happened when I  attended Mark’s workshop with the neutral mask. My expectation was that it would be more difficult to express ourselves behind the neutral mask when we are deprived of language and facial expression. I  could imagine that ‘trained’ actors, dancers, or performers would show off their talents in non-verbal communication with the masks, but not as the academics we were at this conference. The opposite happened. The neutral mask allowed us to communicate with our bodies first, through movements and emotions. It was such an intense experience because it

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-15

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Figure 7.2 Mark interviewing the hatfrog. ECQI19, Edinburgh, UK. Pencil on paper. Source: ©Claudia Canella.

enabled me to focus entirely on the bodies, the non-verbal communication, and the atmosphere that came with that. I especially intensely felt the emotions transmitted through our bodies. I left the workshop with an unexpected feeling of being connected to the other participants. What Happens at the Edges of Science, Art, and Everyday Life I discussed with Mark that we might better understand the body as an epistemological entity if we act at the edges of science, art and everyday life—that is, wearing neutral masks and discussing with hatfrogs about identity. These edges are getting more and more blurred nowadays, and they are challenged too. And as they blur, are they becoming arbitrary? And if so, where do we see our research questions and methods as scientists? Mark Responds to Claudia’s Response I am very grateful for the reminder of the practical side of Bodyography, Claudia, as is your chapter in this book. The interview with the ‘hat frog’—his name is Timrik—can be accessed here: http://murmurations.cloud/ojs/index. php/murmurations/puppets.

Talking/Walking to Myself 137 Maybe my chapter here is more ‘theoretical’—wordy even? And that is the trouble, right? Putting things into words that might not be so easy to put into words. Except for in poetry. . . ? Alys Responds to Mark (2 February 2023) On the rain-soaked streets The body keeps the score Can we ‘treat’ the linguistic turn Language, trauma, treat. . . But The body keeps the score Not a new concept Think . . . . . . . . . . . . racial trauma New materialism and systemic practice ‘Matter matters’ But does it trouble the linguistic turn? If the body is a person is matter This body/matter is separate from the mind/soul/psyche. Back to those rain-soaked streets Is writing a way to connect the body back with the mind/soul/psyche? Bodyography connecting the body/the matter back. Puppets that came alive, Oli and I Published puppets as knowledge creation Direct communication with the puppet themselves not the puppeteer Not-living-matter yet alive. . . Everything has agency . . . a becoming together  . . . sympoiesis Language as humans special place The difference that sets ‘us’ apart Is language the main domain of our being? Language—a marker of hierarchy of those expressing knowledge What do we miss when we focus on language? THE BODY! Not about, but with, the body. I was wearing the wrong shoes on those rain-soaked streets. Mark Responds to Alys’ Response I do not know who said it, but I once heard someone say something like, ‘there are two precise languages: mathematics and poetry’. I think with regards to language, that is because poetry is more than language. And I suppose the whole book is trying to provide more than language, also searching for words around things that are—I seem to keep coming back to that—difficult to put

138  Mark Huhnen into words for different reasons (including not talking about the abject?). Maybe there is another precise language, non-verbal cues, even if they are not seen as language? Sarah Reflects Mark’s chapter and in particular the workshop using neutral masks seems such a generative counterpoint to my work on online interaction, when all we have is the face, unless we really push the boundaries of what we have been conditioned to show in the online box. The question I’m left with, given my work, is how much of our bodies can be read from our faces? And what if that’s not enough, whatever that means to different people. I’m reminded of a recent online meeting where one participant had as their picture an image of them sitting at their desk, headphones on, as though they were actively engaged in the call. This disconcerts me because I  know—I’m pretty sure I know—that they are actually out doing their daily loop of the block. They give the pretence of neutrality while engaging in important bodily activity. Who has the power to say—I’m fully with you but my body needs some attention? I can multitask effectively. I’m also reminded of an exercise I often do with online groups: I ask them to look around the room they are in and select an object that captures something of their current experience. I then ask participants to show that object on the screen, and then, depending on the frame I am working in, I ask the participant to talk about it, or I ask the other participants to free-associate to it. Any object can help us tell our stories. Any object can become a puppet. Any object can become a helpful non-human actor and can create that difference that makes the difference, that gap between I and Thou, to show news of a difference. Mark Responds to Sarah’s Response Fascinating, right? Both of us are from the same field of systemic psychotherapy, also sometimes called family therapy, and we are used to thinking of entities (mostly people) in relation to each other. Both of us have been influenced by this focus on language and are now looking at how we also relate beyond language—whatever the setting. Davina Thinks/Feels I worked for a while in a participatory workshop company called The Moveable Feast, and I remember Tony Gee, the maestro puppeteer, saying the first puppet you make is you; mine guards my studio. She is part ice queen, part fairy, part bride, part drag queen, and part me—she is uncompromising in her stance, yet is made of fabrics that light passes through as well as over. I felt she needed to be present in these Resonances and this is my response.

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Figure 7.3 Davina’s first puppet, seen guarding her studio. Source: © Davina Kirkpatrick.

Mark Responds to Davina’s Response She seems fantastic, particularly as she expresses something that words could not have. Bodies do that; human bodies and more-than human bodies. . . . Jess Comments Davina, I  see so much of you in this puppet. She is fierce and strong. I see her as an ice queen, dressed in wedding garb and drag. I find myself

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Figure 7.4 Mark shows us his puppets via Zoom. Source: © Jess Erb.

looking at her image again and again. The puppet as matter mattering (Barad, 2003)! I see this in the way Mark brought forth his puppets for us to watch (Figure 7.4). They seem so grumpy, and I felt that the lady puppet was a bit cruel. Am I anthropomorphising the puppet? Isn’t that the point? But more than that, perhaps it is not simply making a puppet adjunct to the human but allowing it to be matter, the physical being, and through that lens, wondering just what a puppet can do—and that it matters. It is the deemed ‘otherness’ of material that constricts and yet allows for a different form of engagement. This seems important. Reference Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter signs. Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 28(3), 801–831.

8 Doing Online Embodied Research Researching Together, Apart Dr. Sarah Helps

Introduction I spent the first part of 2020 arguing loudly that researchers and academics could continue to do almost everything we needed to using digital technologies (Helps et al., 2020; Helps & Le Coyte Grinney, 2021). Looking back, I could not bear to accept how the pandemic had made us stop our usual ways of working or our connections with each other. Now, with the benefit of three years’ hindsight, my position is more nuanced. While I remain in favour of using digital technologies in all aspects of work and personal life, I am more aware of the differences between online and in-person research interactions. Doing online research is the focus of this chapter. Embodied research or inquiry (I will use the term research for the sake of brevity) is research where the body and lived experiences are the main foci of investigation, where the activity of a body or bodies is central to the inquiry, and where there is a constant interaction between the body, experience, and positionality of the researcher and the body, experience, and positionality of the researched. The prime question posed by embodied research is ‘What can and do bodies do?’ (Spatz, 2017). So, in this chapter, the question I explore is ‘What can and do bodies do together online?’ Practice Reflection I: Being a Participant I’m sitting in the Zoom waiting room. Or rather, I’m standing in the Zoom waiting room looking out into the garden, watching my cat defend her territory from next door’s younger cat, who’s confidently exploring the political geography of the back gardens of South London. I’m not sure how this research interview will go, as I  don’t quite know what’s expected of me. I know what the title of the research is and why I will likely make a good research participant, but I don’t know what that means to my interlocutor. I’ve signed up to have this conversation because the topic of the research appeals to me. It’s something I feel passionate about and have spent a lot of time thinking about. DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-16

142  Sarah Helps Having often been on the ‘other side’ of the research interviewing screen, I’m curious about how, as the conversation unfolds, we might coordinate our intentions, about the questions I  might be asked, and about how the power dynamic between us might play out. I know this researcher is young, bright, and ambitious, but I  also feel anxious that their clinical skills will not translate effectively into doing research interviews, particularly research interviews online when we can’t read each other in the ways that we usually would and where there are likely felt power dynamics at play in the broader weave of our relationship (me teacher, him student; me experienced clinician, him novice). Zoom transports me into the meeting room. I fiddle with the mute button and fiddle with the sound, settling my headphones more comfortably into my ears. We say hello and exchange some pleasantries. He takes a breath, shuffles what I  assumed to be papers below the screen, looks back up at me, and says right ‘um I think perhaps we should start is that OK with you?’ I say, ‘of course’. He checks that I have read the participant information form and asks me if I am prepared to continue with the research interview. I say yes. The cats hold a small standoff and I glance over to the drawer of cat treats, wondering if I should resource myself in case my cat barrels in mid-interview. But back to the screen. He asks if I  have any further questions about the scope of the research, what will happen with the data, and how anonymity is going to be managed. He reminds me—in what seems to me a rather robotic way—that I  can withdraw my consent to participate in this research at any time until he starts analysing the material. I say fine, but I’m suddenly struck by how late he’s leaving it to start to make sense of his research material, what we might call ‘data’. I feel an anxiety in the pit of my stomach, and my shoulders get twitchy, and I want to step out of the interviewee role and remind him just how much it takes to take others’ words, thoughts, and bodily expressions and gather them together with other similar but different conversations and produce something we might call findings. I douse these words with some water, but I feel them sitting at the top of my chest, where they stay throughout the interview. As I  keep an eye on my self-view, I’m not sure that these words are outwardly visible, but to me, I feel them as a torsion in my voice. We talk, and his interview questions are great, lots of open questions leaving lots of space for me to ramble or free associate, give anecdotes, share my experiences—after all, that’s what he’s interested in. Despite us being hundreds of miles apart, he’s really good at reading the information he can see on screen; he pauses, he hesitates, he does not interrupt my narrative but prompts and then comes back to unpick some of my muddier talk.

Doing Online Embodied Research 143 I notice that I’m both looking at the screen and looking out the window. I’m pacing around the mini-space in front of my desk and occasionally tilting on my balance board, which I guess to him might look rather odd, but which grounds me, helping me settle in gathering and then expressing my thoughts (although as ever, I don’t really know what I’m going to say until I’m in the act of saying it). Self-view draws my attention to how my gestures have become bigger; my smiles feel Joker-like, and my frowns really show my age. It’s as though my face wants to convey important messages that I  worry my words won’t do justice to. I feel like my performance in this interview is different from how I imagine it would be in-person, as though my usual more subtle, nuanced movements, expressions, and gestures simply would not reach him. And yet I’m also aware, because I  can see myself through this whole conversation, that I seem to look pretty ordinarily animated and that our faces and top bodies seem well coordinated. We get to the end, and he asks me if there is anything else I’d like to say. I take a couple of moments and say, ‘No, I don’t think so; I think we’ve covered everything’. He draws the conversational lens back and asks me how this conversation was for me, and I  say good, it was helpful; your questions made me think about the topic in a different way, and I feel like my ideas have opened up a bit, thank you. He tells me that due to the brilliance of Zoom, the transcription of this interview will not take as long as it would have in the past, and we both laugh at what the foibles of Zoom might be when it wrestles with some of my technical language. We move into a few minutes of more general chat, the kind that we might otherwise do when walking out of the interview room, down the corridor, and towards the building’s exit. We talk about jobs, family, holidays, and the importance of a work-life balance. At the time, boundary I felt such a pull in my arms that I wanted to shake his hand or touch the top of his arm and say thank you for this conversational opportunity. I notice my reluctance to press the leave button because I don’t yet have access to the more familiar ways of doing a decent ending. I wait for him to leave the space and stare at myself for a few seconds—who am I here? Doing Interactive Research and Communicating About That Research in the Online Space Synchronous online research is but one of many forms of online research, and there is a wealth of literature that describes asynchronous, text-based ways of gathering data that I will not address here. This chapter focuses on conversational and interactive forms of inquiry, where two or more people come together to generate research data or communicate findings. In using the term conversational, I refer to all the aspects of conversation, not just the

144  Sarah Helps words spoken to each other, but to the way in which words are spoken and all the more-than-verbal markers that go along with those words, that is, the embodied performance of all those words. Gathering research data online was happening way before the pandemic, and the benefits of doing so were clearly identified, such as lower research costs and access to a broader, even global, field of more diverse participants, with concomitant greater potential to be inclusive and to address power imbalances (Biggs et al., 2017; Cavusoglu et al., 2023; Etzion et al., 2022). However, there was also concern that online interviews were viewed as less good than in-person interviews, for example, with online interactions leading to more negative first impressions and less agreement between conversational partners (Okdie et  al., 2011) and producing less rich information (Johnson et al., 2021). In their comparative study of in-person, telephone, and online interviews, Johnson et al. (2021) reported that the flow of in-person interviews was very different from that of online interviews, with in-person interviews producing more rounds of turn-taking compared to remote interviews, so concluding that these online interviews were less conversational and more led in a question-and-answer way by the interviewer. Likewise, Davies et  al. (2020) concluded that while online methods of research might increase the likelihood of obtaining the desired sample size, respondent answers were shorter, less contextual information was obtained, and overall relational satisfaction was lower. These researches were conducted prior to March  2020, when online working was innovative and there was choice about how to gather data, and it seems highly likely that this broader context was significant in making sense of participants’ and researchers’ views about the quality of the data gathered. More recent studies, particularly those drawing on conversation analysis, have shown that online communication is very different from in-person communication. For example, in a comprehensive review of the field, Meredith (2019) found that online interaction greatly differs from the way in which the interactions begin, often managed by the technology rather than by a person; in terms of the way that conversational turns are taken, for example, showing how simultaneous or overlapping turns are not possible, the to-and from turning taking of conversation is altered as people might take a few turns before there is ‘space’ for the conversational partner to add their turn, and that there are longer ‘gaps’ between different turns; and that repair—what you do after making a mistake—happens differently. The way in which ‘trouble’ is addressed in online interactions seems important to explore when the focus is on trying to develop an attuned and safe-enough researcher-participant relationship. Of huge relevance to our bodyographical work, Meredith argues that in the absence of in-person contact, interlocutors quickly developed ways of representing embodied states during conversations through creative uses of punctuation, gifs, or emojis. While these alternatives were helpful, it seems to me that they do not adequately fill the intersubjective gap.

Doing Online Embodied Research 145 Polyvagal Theory and Making Meaningful Connections Online So, in considering how to address the intersubjective gap, that shared space of meaning making and connection, I  share some thinking with polyvagal theory to explore how our bodies do interaction when we are apart. Only when we feel safe enough can we achieve the social engagement and mutual flourishing that Bodyography aims for. Polyvagal Theory describes how the social engagement system of the autonomic nervous system continuously monitors cues of risk and safety and thus influences our physiological and behavioural states (Porges, 2001; Van der Kolk, 2015). The theory suggests that when we are faced with a threatening situation, the social engagement system is initially activated to find safety. The sympathetic system, effectively the first line of social defence, gets mobilised when we try to work out what we can do and what others can do to help us feel safe. The dorsal vagus, the second line of defence, gets activated when we are unsafe; it can lead to collapse and shut-down. We have previously noted (The Bodies Collective, 2023), that activating the ventral vagus is the starting point for doing Bodyography. The ventral vagus is activated when we are flourishing, open, curious, ready, and able to make links with others. A physiological state characterised by a vagal withdrawal would support the mobilisation behaviours of fight and flight (e.g. leaving the research field by turning the camera off or ending the call). At this felt moment, the task is to activate the ventral vagus to try and trigger some calmness and social engagement. In contrast, a physiological state characterised by increased vagal influence would support spontaneous social engagement behaviours (approaching an interesting-looking person at an academic conference, taking that postpresentation question as a curious one to be gently explored). The notion of neuroception, the process of scanning the environment (both the inside embodied environment and that external to the body) is given by Porges as an explanatory mechanism to trigger or inhibit defence strategies. Thinking about the practice-reflection above, my sympathetic system was very much active as I stood in the Zoom waiting room, wondering if I had got the right Zoom link at the right time, wondering if my internet connection was going to hold steady so as to be a good research participant. It took my noticing the immediate smile of the researcher to activate my ventral vagus and start to settle. Porges (2021) might explain this by emphasising the connection between the head and the heart. He describes how the face-heart connection enables a person to ‘read’ another person’s state of physiological arousal to signal safety or danger. Learning how to slow down and read this communication, whether between a couple, between a therapist and client, or between a researcher and participants, enables greater connection to form.

146  Sarah Helps Psychological safety refers to the sense of being and feeling safe enough to take risks. It refers to the notion of feeling able to speak out without fear of detriment and to being able to bring one’s whole self to the encounter. It refers to the ability to speak up without self-censoring. Psychological safety is the external performance of a complex process of inner dialogue. Inner dialogue (Rober, 2005) is that talk that we all do all the time; it’s those multiple voices that we hear and feel coming from both tacit and more planned fast and slower thinking to help us make decisions in every moment. Our inner dialogue contributes to this neuroception, to our sense of safety or threat. Neuroception thus involves reading inwards and reading outwards. Online interaction, however, seems different. With the supposed benefit of multitasking as we join an online session while checking our emails and our social media feeds and even baking a loaf of bread (Is that just me?) it seems easier to get stuck in dorsal shut-down. As our other senses are caught up in the living moment of our own environments, online attention diminishes and tunes out. Perhaps dorsal collapse and conservation of resources are more common because we can’t so easily ask for help from or notice the enscreened invitations of others to help nudge us back into sympathetic functioning. In order to more fully engage online, we have to use ourselves differently. As a clinician and psychotherapist, I am used to preparing myself for therapeutic relationships, and preparing ourselves for a research encounter is no different. While the elements of preparation for an in-person encounter may be different from those for online encounters, preparation is still required. There are the practical basics of ensuring stable internet, a decent camera and microphone, access to Wi-Fi or data, and a confidential space. These practical aspects are notably laden with privilege and power. Fredman (2016) writes of the importance of preparing our bodies for the therapeutic relationship by exploring how age, gender, accent, tone of voice, ethnicity, race, culture, class, sexuality, profession, education, and physical appearance might show themselves for clinician and patient. These aspects of identity are as tangible online as they are in-person, so they require the same care and consideration. Tuning in to our emotional postures and what we bring to the encounter in any moment is the first task. Specific to the online space—what is it that I  anticipate/worry about/carry with me as I  launch into this research conversation? What do I imagine my participant/co-producer is thinking and feeling as they wait for me to open the link. Because it might be harder online compared to in the room to feel what the other is feeling, we have to work to be more present and to use our bodies and our words differently. We have to expand our feeling vocabulary and get better at describing what we feel in our bodies. We have to mention the twitchy feet and the achy neck, because these things won’t show up like they do when sitting close to each other. Thus, questions about bodies and affects need to be asked differently. As

Doing Online Embodied Research 147 we only have our eyes and our ears, as we lack the smell, touch, and taste, we have to look harder and listen deeper, catching the catch in the throat when someone speaks about a challenge, dilemma, or trauma, noticing the changing light in the background, or the pause before the next sentence. Collaboration and Feeling Felt If psychotherapy, such a collaborative, relational, and embodied activity, can effectively happen online (Barker & Barker, 2022; Geller, 2020; Helps & Le Coyte Grinney, 2021), then surely the same can be true of Bodyography? Collaborative online research shows itself in the flow of the conversation, the way in which the dialogue unfolds, the way in which we talk over each other, share and develop language, and do so with radical listening and dialogical presence. Perhaps, collaborative, collective research is more straightforward when conducted online. There is less faff and stress about people’s different relationships to time (although the time it sometimes took to agree when we might meet while sitting in all the time zones, in our seeking-to-be-democratic way, was at moments highly painful), about the painful inequalities of who can afford the conference fee or the plane/train/car costs to get to the next farflung conference venue. While we greatly miss our bodies being together and reading each other in anticipatory, immediate, intimate, and less languaged ways (Shotter, 2005), we have also swiftly learned to use what we have. We find that power can be more easily flattened when engaged online, everyone can be made a co-host, everyone can share their screens, and everyone can use the chat functions. However, it’s also true that there are inequities in terms of access to stable broadband, devices with good screens and microphones, and a safe enough place from which to engage. Perhaps collective inquiry is also less straightforward when conducted online. Each person’s physical context comes into view; this has both equalising and unbalancing effects. Unless we choose to blur our backgrounds or select one of the many backgrounds provided by the online platform, the materiality of our lives is highlighted, or at least the materiality of our curated backgrounds. However, these ‘fake rooms’ and blurred backgrounds can be disturbing to people with certain visual or mental health conditions and can feel misleading. Do you check behind you to see what might be showing up before you jump on a call? Do you move the plant pot or bring into focus a book you are proud of having read? Do you sit at an uncomfortable angle so the stuff of life around you is not in shot? What do you hide on screen to present yourself as you choose to? There does seem to be a greater possibility for mis-attunement online and feeling unfelt, triggered both by the lapses and lags caused by the technology and by the reduction in the body data transmitted, which creates the potential to miss the point. Cultivating an online presence, whether the task is therapy (Geller, 2020) or research, thus takes different kinds of interactional work.

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Figure 8.1 Sarah on a Zoom call on her ironing board in June 2020. Source: © Sarah Helps.

Therefore, while providing space for online Bodyography, it is the responsibility of the space facilitators (we might otherwise refer to these people as lead researchers) to offer presence and safety by more expansively languaging their own bodied experiences and inviting social engagement, which others are then welcomed to respond to. This all only works if the facilitator is genuine in their comfort to decentre themselves, to stand aside and give up space, to make space. In this way, felt safety can be established and then have the potential to ripple through the group. So how, in practice, do we collaborate in the online space? In part, this relates to creating sufficient space to go slowly enough that our research participants really do feel able to offer their thoughts. There’s a sense of the need to slow down to speed up so as to be able to fully read all the detailed information that comes to us through seeing the details of people’s faces.

Doing Online Embodied Research 149 Employing Arts-Based Approaches By 2021, The Bodies Collective had become bored of just seeing each other’s faces. We were fed up with the fact that we couldn’t be bodies together. We don’t have huge experiences of being together, but our shared narrative, as you will have read in the Introduction and Conclusion of this book, is that when we were together in that basement room below a pub in Edinburgh, or in a bright and airy conference room, or in an Irish bar in Champaign, Illinois, that it was good, that it felt good, and that it led to creativity and innovation. Practice Reflection II: Making Online Embodied Data Together Noone told us how to frame ourselves online; no one said we could only show our heads on screen. Noone told us we had to sit still and look straight at the camera. I can’t remember who came up with the idea or how it evolved, but The Bodies Collective reached a place where we wanted to show up differently to each other, to be with each other in a different way than the now-humdrum view of talking heads. In preparation for an online workshop at an academic conference in 2021, instead of showing our faces in the enscreened boxes, we experimented with sharing different parts of ourselves. This required a certain amount of logistical rearrangement, including moving computers and phones around and propping them up in wobbly places. In itself, this was joyous: experimenting with holding the camera in a different way and reframing what had become familiar into something new. I find myself lying on my sofa, my feet in the air, my laptop balanced on the edge of the table, wiggling my slippered feet. My goodness, how much I  am enjoying this. How much I  am enjoying seeing bare feet, slipper feet, shoed feet, feet in unmatching socks, feet dancing, and feet with the tiniest of movements in the toes. Feet with carpets and dogs behind them. When Alys’ feet found the sun, I felt the rays drying the grass. Who knew that I could learn so much about these bodies by seeing a different part of them? Then we got bolder. We experimented with moving our whole bodies on screen, in pairs as well as all together. We twirled, jumped, laughed, and copied each other. We were so busy doing this that, so far as we can recall, no recording was made. One might imagine that it is our mirror neurons that afford us the possibility of feeling very much here that we would otherwise do there. If you stub your toe and I see you doing it, chances are that I will ‘feel’ it. My mirror neurons are thought to be activated when I see you (a human or non-human actor) do something (Napolitano, 2021). They are activated when you do a thing so effectively that they have been described as the brain-source of empathy. We don’t have to be in the same space for mirror neurons to get going—you might be in Canada, and yet I feel the stub of your toe as you swirl around, I feel the swish of your hair as you spin.

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Figure 8.2 The feet and the screen. Source: © Sarah Helps.

The Affordances and Constraints of This New Environment: A Note About Self-View, of Seeing Oneself in Action We could show our feet and twirl about in real life; indeed, we have, but doing so online is novel and shows a difference. It’s also performed differently when online, in, I think, a slower way, slowing down so as to make sure that we can keep up with each other. So, the online environment could be seen as a poor proxy for the real world. Or it could be seen as a novel and exciting new space for interacting with oneself and others. Self-view is one of the novel aspects of the online world, that affords a window into how we see ourselves. As Berger notes, we never just look at one thing; our looking is in continual motion (Berger, 1972). While his male-female binary view seems increasingly outdated, Berger’s notion that some people look at the ‘other’

Doing Online Embodied Research 151 while the ‘others’ watch themselves being looked at holds resonance and relevance within the zoom world today. A recent eye-gaze tracking study showed that in online interactions, people spent about 15% of their time looking at themselves, particularly when they were speaking; that when the self-view was hidden, people spent over half of their time when speaking looking away from the screen; and that when others were speaking, people looked elsewhere more than when in-person (Balogová, 2021). In exploring dance movement practices online in relation to the self-view, Loussouarn (2021) suggests that it creates a situation where our preoccupation with how we are moving within the frame (and therefore are being perceived by others) makes us oblivious to the environment where our own body is grounded. We might be aware of our body’s reflection as an image within a frame but not actually feel our body and its physical connection to the environment it is located in . . . This is because the self-view, like a mirror, reminds me that I am always the object of someone else’s gaze. (p. 83) So, my task is to be watching-them-watching-me-watching-them-watchingme and also tuning inward with my body to understand more fully the enscreened messages. This poly-observational task seems more like the notion of evenly suspended attention, involving a kind of temporally balanced anticipation towards internal and external experience. Self-reflexivity is the process of listening to one’s inner dialogue and thinking why am I  doing this at this moment in time? Why am I  reacting this way in this situation? What is it about me and my story, my intersectionality, and my identity that makes me jump that way not this? Self-reflexivity is something far more than a straightforward mirroring of ourselves. The notion of diffraction is a much more accurate way of describing what we do. In physics, diffraction is the process by which light is changed when it goes through a small hole. Diffraction is the process by which a beam of light spreads out in passing through a narrow aperture. When passing through the gap, the light spreads out, separates, and changes direction. It bends and alters. As a methodology, it is the practice of ‘reading texts intra-actively through one another, enacting new patterns of engagement, attending on how exclusions matter’ (Barad, 2010, p.  243), which embraces partial perspectives, multiplicity, and the complex entanglements of living and is an alternative way of creating something new and expansive (Haraway, 1997). So, when I  look at myself, I  don’t see a straightforward reflection; instead, I  see or read myself through the aperture of my positionality and my views, beliefs, and perspectives. My gaze changes as a result of my changing experiences. Thus, the initially disturbing constant exposure to my self-view via the apparatus of the online platform heightened my anxiety, hunched my shoulders, tightened my chest, made me stand up

152  Sarah Helps straighter, and made me far more self-conscious. Now, after some years of being online, I am more comfortable with and indeed value seeing myself and using this feedback data to understand self and others more richly. But what do we lose when we focus on seeing ourselves in interaction? Does our self-view obscure our sense of the other? If I am so aware of my own movements and expressions and am busy threading what I can see through what I am feeling, does the field fade when my eyes, hair, lips, and mouth occupy half the screen? Knowing that I  can see myself, how can I  vanish without worrying about what others can see that I cannot? The new view of oneself, available on multiple online video link platforms, has changed the possibilities for reflexivity and self-positioning in the ways that the researcher can consider their moment-to-moment contributions to the creation of data. Practice Reflection III: The Lonely Presenter I’m giving a paper at a small online conference. Perhaps because of the reduced cost of attending, no prohibitive transport and hotel costs, and no contribution to climate change, the audience is diverse, from literally all seven continents. I’ve never met anyone in the audience before, which makes me anxious. Apart from a moment ‘hanging about’ in the virtual foyer, where I didn’t know (technically) how to get into a conversation, and once I’d figured that out, small talk felt excruciating, I have so far found this to be a lonely experience. There are 13 equal-sized boxes on the screen, including mine. After my presentation, there is lots of time for discussion and the yellow frame moves around the screen as people talk. Despite my invitation not to do so, everyone has turned their microphones off as if they are worried about the contagion of their living experiences. This could be explained in terms of not wanting to pollute others’ experiences with background noise, but it feels sanitised and flat. At least cameras are on, and I can see 12 heads staring at me, looking towards me, and looking down and around their environments. The emojis, the yellow, pink, brown, and black hands, intermittently get raised and then in watching and tracking these, I  become aware of how I am missing that engaged overlapping ordinary talk, that nonlinear chaotic cacophonic interaction where people hum and hmm and give vocal nods to show that they are present and engaged and thinking and responding. The thumbs-up icon simply doesn’t do the job. So, please leave your cameras on so I can see the warmth in your eyes and the laughter lines around your mouths. Please switch your mics on; I’m keen to hear your dog, your washing machine, or your creaking back as you shift positions. These things connect me to you; they tell me about you without words, they enable me to be more compassionate, more present, and more generative. These things help me know if what I’ve said has landed well with you, moved you, irritated you, or puzzled you. Please use the chat to add your nods and queries, and play around with the punctuation to convey something of the tone of your question or comment. Your smiles, hearts, and

Doing Online Embodied Research 153 claps. Without your feedback, in all its multitudinous polyvocal forms, it’s hard to know how to go on. To restate this borrowing from Shotter (2019), without ‘you’ as a context ‘into’ which I  can address my remarks and into which I try to fit what I want to say, I will find it very difficult to go on. It is the continuous coordination of what I do in relation to you that makes us go on together in a meaningful way. This is as fundamental online as it is in-person. Closing Thoughts: Tentative Suggestions Towards Embodied Online Research The global COVID pandemic has produced as yet incalculable amounts of loss, trauma, and ongoing disability. But, in relation to academic work, it also produced some unexpected silver linings such as new ways of conducting research and balancing academic life and home life (Yip & Maestre, 2023). We’ve learnt over the past three years that we can maintain existing and form new relationships online, and as this chapter has shown, in the practice of embodied research, so much has become possible. Ellingson (2006) suggests that researchers bodies can function as a bridge between mind and body. In this chapter, I  have explored the question of what bodies can do together online and shown how online embodied research interviews provide the possibility of collaborative engagement. I have described how we might draw on polyvagal theory and the notions of neuroception and psychological safety as we think about what happens in the online space, suggesting that these bodily processes are just as active when interacting online as they are in the offline space. In being together-apart online, there is more potential for many kinds of diversity; for voices and bodies from around the globe, bringing neurodiverse profiles into shared spaces. Researchers can use the principles of Bodyography to create and facilitate safe-enough spaces. In thinking about the tasks of Bodyography as described elsewhere in this book, I have described how these might look and feel when working online, when bodies are separated and yet connected by screens. Bodyographers are interested in close observation and in looking in different ways to create news of a difference (The Bodies Collective, 2023). The online environment gives a partial but super-detailed opportunity to observe faces, those holders of such detail and depth of character. Your face, the spotlighted image on a screen that covers the whole wall: I can see your laughter lines, but I can also see the minute frown, pursing of the lips, leg jerk, that I might miss if we were across from each other in my room. We also never know who has spotlighted whom, who is staring at us intently, or who has muted our video. This gives us real power to navigate and choose our focus. Self-view has desensitised me to my changing body, and it is through self-view that I  have come to know my greying hair, changing body, and mouth-twitches at the point of trying hard to express my thoughts in a more intimate way than ever before. As a result, I  am much more aware of the impact and influence this body has in both the online and the in-person space.

154  Sarah Helps The Bodies Collective has shown how we have challenged the partial face-in-box discourse and have moved from being disembodied heads to bodies that take up the space in different ways and that show up and flourish on the screen. We can move together in our own spaces in a way that feels safer given our complex relationships with our individual bodies but that does not cause concern about how bodies might uncomfortably slide or collide step on each other’s toes in all the meanings of the phrase. Ellingson (2017) also suggests that we should focus on all our senses as embodied researchers. When online, we cannot touch or smell each other, but we can use our neuroception to tune in to our own isolated bodies, and through reading ourselves in relation, we can read, relate, respond to, and flourish together with others. Communication is such an anticipatory-responsive process, and our bodies are programmed to spontaneously respond without waiting for the end of the communication from another (Shotter, 2008). While the digital time lag might change the shape of this conversational interchange, the basic processes, biologically driven by neuroception and our mirror neurons, remain intact. In doing embodied research online, the kind that The Bodies Collective is doing, some principles are emerging: we need to slow down to speed up—to have body-based time together to explore our non-verbal interactions together, we need to put the body into words, reaching for words to describe the felt sensations that guide us to know the other, to use our neuroception, and to evenly hold our attention, focusing both inwards and outwards to make meaningful connections. This way, online bodyographical research can flourish. References Balogová, K. (2021). Looking at yourself on zoom [doctoral dissertation and master’s thesis]. University College London. https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk/content/2-study/ 4-current-taught-course/1-distinction-projects/15–21/balogova_karolina_2021.pdf. Barad, K. (2010). Quantum entanglements and hauntological relations of inheritance: Dis/continuities, spacetime enfoldings, and justice-to-come. Derrida Today, 3(2), 240–268. Barker, G. G.,  & Barker, E. E. (2022). Online therapy: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 health crisis. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 50(1), 66–81. Berger, J. (1972). Ways of seeing. British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books. Biggs, J., Hawley, P. H., & Biernat, M. (2017). The academic conference as a chilly climate for women: Effects of gender representation on experiences of sexism, coping responses, and career intentions. Sex Roles. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11199-017-0800-9. Cavusoglu, M., Dogan, S., Kirant Yozcu, O., Hsu, M.-J.,  & Cobanoglu, C. (2023). A conjoint analysis of attributes influencing attendance of academic conferences. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management. https://doi. org/10.1108/IJCHM-10-2020-1184

Doing Online Embodied Research 155 Davies, L., Le Clair, K. L., Bagley, P., Blunt, H., Hinton, L., Ryan, S., & Ziebland, S. (2020). Face-to-face compared with online collected accounts of health and illness experiences: A scoping review. Qualitative Health Research, 30(13), 2092–2102. Ellingson, L. L. (2006). Embodied knowledge: Writing researchers’ bodies into qualitative health research. Qualitative Health Research, 16(2), 298–310. Ellingson, L. L. (2017). Embodiment in qualitative research. Routledge. Etzion, D., Gehman, J.,  & Davis, G. F. (2022). Reimagining academic conferences: Toward a federated model of conferencing. Management Learning, 53(2), 350–362. Fredman, G. (2016). Using supervision to prepare our bodies for the therapeutic relationship. In J. Bownas  & G. Fredman (Eds.), Working with embodiment in supervision (pp. 80–95). Routledge. Geller, S. (2020). Being present and together while apart: Therapeutic presence in telepsychotherapy. In Advances in online therapy (pp. 21–34). Routledge. Haraway, D. (1997). Modest witness—Second millennium. Routledge. Helps, S. L. (2020). Doing remote systemic psychotherapy during a pandemic: Learning from a speedy quality improvement project. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 3(1), 95–112. https://doi.org/10.28963/3.1.16 Helps, S. L, Kerman, C., & Halliday, C. (2020). Ways of working during the COVID-19 crisis. Context, 170, 2–5. Helps, S. L., & Le Coyte Grinney, M. (2021). Synchronous digital couple and family psychotherapy: A meta‐narrative review. Journal of Family Therapy, 43(2), 185–214. Johnson, D. R., Scheitle, C. P., & Ecklund, E. H. (2021). Beyond the in-person interview? How interview quality varies across in-person, telephone, and Skype interviews. Social Science Computer Review, 39(6), 1142–1158. Loussouarn, C. (2021). Moving with the screen on Zoom: Reconnecting with bodily and environmental awareness. The International Journal of Screendance, 12. Meredith, J. (2019). Conversation analysis and online interaction. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 52(3), 241–256. Napolitano, A. (2021). Study casts new light on mirror neurons. www.nature.com/ articles/d43978-021-00101-x. Okdie, B. M., Guadagno, R. E., Bernieri, F. J., Geers, A. L., & Mclarney-Vesotski, A. R. (2011). Getting to know you: Face-to-face versus online interactions. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(1), 153–159. Porges, S. W. (2001). The polyvagal theory: Phylogenetic substrates of a social nervous system. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 42(2), 123–146. Porges, S. W. (2021). Polyvagal safety: Attachment, communication, self-regulation (IPNB) (p. 75). W. W. Norton & Company. Rober, P. (2005). The therapist’s self in dialogical family therapy: Some ideas about not‐knowing and the therapist’s inner conversation. Family process, 44(4), 477–495. Shotter, J. (2005). Inside processes: Transitory understandings, action guiding anticipations, and withness thinking. International Journal of Action Research, 1(2), 157–189. Shotter, J. (2008). Conversational realities revisited: Life, language, body and world. Taos Institute Publications. Shotter, J. (2019). Social accountability and the social construction of ’you’. Thirty years on. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 2(1), 67–96. https://doi.org/10.28963/2.1.8 Spatz, B. (2017). Embodied research: A methodology. Liminalities, 13(2).

156  Sarah Helps The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)Centering the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy, and human flourishing. In T. Chemi, E. Brattico, L. O. Fjorback, & L. Harmat (Eds.), Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing. Routledge (Routledge research in arts education). www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003158790. Van der Kolk, B. A. (2015). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Penguin Books. Yip, S. Y., & Maestre, J. L. (2023). Academic motherhood in times of pandemic: Finding silver linings. In B. Cahusac de Caux, L. Pretorius, & L. Macaulay (Eds.), Research and teaching in a pandemic world: The challenges of establishing academic identities during times of crisis (pp. 213–228). Springer Nature.

Resonances to Chapter 8: I am Always in Relation to You, Whatever Form We Take Together The Bodies Collective

Alys

‘Next time I see you, I want to see your feet’ my almost 4-year-old told our old neighbours at the end of our WhatsApp chat, keen to see their whole body or perhaps just be there in person, not online. Sarah’s chapter troubles the ‘partial face in a box discourse’ that zoom-life communication entails. However, my child, as someone who has grown up with family and friends (and The Bodies Collective, as they have attended most of our online meetings) as people who exist in a box on a screen, it is interesting for the need now to see the feet! Perhaps that need is permeating through us all. Although we have continued to hold spaces at conferences in 2020, 2021, and 2022, it wasn’t until ECQI 2023 that The Bodies Collective was able to hold its first in-person workshop (and then there were only two of us!). We are now hoping that some of us will be together in-body in Edinburgh in 2023. We coped/thrived/survived online, but we miss the corporeal being together—the touch, the smells, the energy, the downtime chats, and hugs that Zoom just cannot give us. In my excitement for the body-connection of The Bodies Collective, I  also realise that online embodied teaching/meeting have allowed me, as a new PhD in 2018 and a new parent in a new country in 2019, to work, albeit as a casual at three different universities in Australia since March 2020. The pandemic driving the need for online teachers, markers, researchers, and tutors created work for me that fit around my itinerant family life. I’m now quite adept at online teaching (see McCaw et al., in review). One minute I’m breastfeeding, reading a book, or singing a song, and the next I’m smart (from the waist up, hair quickly pulled back), sitting at a desk with a ‘suitable’ professional backdrop, with my face in a box, ready as Dr. Alys. The embodied stories of digital Bodyography. Mark’s Memory Gets Triggered by Sarah’s Chapter We are both working in the same field, systemic and family therapy. We were taking part in the same doctorate programme. And we find ourselves having very similar interests, how the body can be used in our field and research regarding

DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-17

158  Sarah Helps it. The difference might have been that I felt very bereft of being able to use the body when it came to COVID-related lockdowns, and maybe you embraced it—or at least embraced it earlier. I remember one of our meetings in preparation for doing Bodyography online. I  was sceptical. I  had just had to cancel some research workshops where people would have been in the room together, able to touch each other. I was surprised at how much I not only enjoyed our preparation and workshop online, how well it would work. Of course, something gets lost or is not possible, but a lot still is. We can still breathe together, even if it is not the same air. We can still see and read some parts of the body and be affected by others bodily expressions. Mirror neurons still fire. Maybe some things get lost, yes, but some things get highlighted. And there is something interesting in the possibility of managing the other person’s view by being in charge of which part of the body or which part of the environment to show. Like Alys (at least if I read her right), I am also interested in the threshold and transition from before to during the meeting. It seems so different than when it is done in person. I am now sitting on a train to get to where I am teaching. Preparations and packing my bag had to happen last night as I had to get up early and have a shower, being careful not to wake up others in the house. Most importantly—must not miss  the train. Teaching online during COVID could mean getting up with little time to spare, putting on a decent jumper, and trying to get hair into some kind of shape (at the best of times and in person that is not my priority). All the while only hoping the technology works. . . . In what way am I different for that? Jess’ Body Comes into the Space While reading your piece, I could help thinking about my love for MerleauPonty (1962) and his provocation that we can never know ourselves without the view of another. Why? Well, because the other has something that we do not: Our face. Is this still true now in 2023 as it is in 1962? Your writing makes me think of how much of myself I have of myself as I perform myself through the self-view of a screen. (Embarrassing admission: I always make my wee square bigger when I am on Zoom and talking with a friend. I simply put it closer to their face so that it doesn’t look like I am looking at myself!) While Merleau Ponty may argue that we never quite see ourselves, even in a mirror, due to our performance and the ‘reversal’ we see in the mirror, I am wondering now if he might have to grapple with this assertion now that our observer—who Merleau Ponty often refers to as ‘the other’—is also getting as much of a performance as if we were alone, because they do not get us freely talking in front of them, but rather they are witnessing us in front of our own mirror of the self-view. As you beautifully write, ‘I am always the object of someone else’s gaze’—but what happens when they are also not the object of our own view? This folding back on itself is doing my head in.

Doing Online Embodied Research 159 Also, I absolutely adore your picture of you working on an ironing board! It reminds me of something I completely forgot about: That in the early days of the pandemic, I did not have a desk, so I fashioned one out of boxes and a couple books! While we may be the object of someone else’s gaze, we also hold such secrets beyond the scope of their eyes—or more accurately, our webcam. Ryan Reflects Reading your piece, I found myself reflecting on the ways I am Virtually Queer. I  manage my image as a therapist, as a queer person, and as an academic. I  grapple with the desire/fear of appearing queer in a zoom of appearing queer as a therapist. In the flesh, I embrace and depend on small cues to convey myself as non-normative—things like flashy earrings, painted nails, and my stance. Things that help me to reify my gender and feel authentic to myself, and that I do find myself wanting others to notice. The screen presents some challenges to this. Can I  get my nails and my earrings on the screen? I catch myself holding my hand to my cheek, so I see my nails on the screen. I turn my head so my earring (only on one ear) can be clearly seen. I want others to notice my queerness, but I also do this for myself, so that in my own video square, I see myself reflected in a way that feels authentic. There are other types of meetings where I notice I mask my queerness—I try to keep my nails off the screen. I turned my head the other way. I catch myself doing this when I feel I cannot express myself fully or there may be some negative judgement made. Perhaps by funders in my non-profit work, or perhaps with certain psychotherapy clients that have expressed discomfort with non-normative people. I practise this in terms of my bodily appearance as well—I always have to have the camera level or higher than my face because this helps me to look thinner and to not have too much of my body in the shot—just the bust. This then sometimes limits my ability to express, since I cannot gesture visibly or have my body language help to otherwise convey my meaning. For these reasons, I sometimes, as a therapist, try to get more of my body in the shot because this helps to convey warmth and attention, embracing the fact that human communication relies heavily on non-verbal means. Of course, I engage in many image conscious practices in my day to day in-person life as well. This new opportunity for live editing and curating others experiences fascinates me. Claudia—The Virtual Providing Space for Basic Needs and Cultivating Resources While reading your chapter, Sarah, I remembered how the virtual realm is providing me space for my basic needs and for cultivating my resources. I feel better, if I do not have to jump on the bus and rush to the next meeting,

160  Sarah Helps which is per se a stressor to my sensitive senses. I appreciate that I can go to the toilet when I  need to without startling the two hundred conference participants at that keynote lecture. It helps me during my menstruation if I can have these 10-minute breaks on my comfy couch during a demanding workday. And nobody who steals my coffee! On home office days, I save 90 minutes by not having to travel to the office and back. Precious time I can use for cultivating my resources, such as dance practice in my rehearsal room or watching K-Drama on Netflix. This is lived Bodyography to me, creating safety and activating the ventral vagus. Sarah—Responding to Resonances If, taking a social constructionist approach, ‘people are essentially beings produced by other such beings’ (Shotter, 2019, p. 76), how do we give and take permission to do what we need to do with and for our bodies? The more I give myself permission to become aware of and connected to my body, the richer and more present my engagement is. Perhaps, maybe, the online space affords greater space to play (and I take play to be a serious enterprise), to experiment with showing up differently, to see how my difference might land with you, and what we might make together of that. These resonances remind me that I am always in relation to you, whatever form we take together. References Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Shotter, J. (2019). Social accountability and the social construction of ‘you’. Thirty years on. Murmurations: Journal of Transformative Systemic Practice, 2(1), 67–96. https://doi.org/10.28963/2.1.8

An Ending to the Book and a Beginning of Sorts Of Bodies, Organs, Time, and Space The Bodies Collective Throughout the book, we have shown a broad range of ways of researching with and about the body. We have drawn on autoethnographic, reflexive, and embodied sensibilities and have always started with ourselves. We started by developing a model of practice and have drawn on this in more or less subtle ways in our work. As we read and respond to the chapters of the members, we become more aware of common qualities, which we consider not only as characteristic for Bodyography but probably also as important for qualitative inquiry in our times. ‘Conclusion’ seems to suggest some finality that does not seem to fit. But a temporal noticing fits this ‘body of research’ better. For millennia, people have been talking about bodies. It is hard to imagine a discipline like medicine without the possibility of using language onto bodies. But there is an effect of doing this. Medicine can pathologise the body. If something is wrong with a body, does this mean that there is something wrong with this body, rather than with the social, material, and discursive practices around it? Coming to Terms with Hierarchies, the Body, and the Social Order of the Body Throughout this book, we have troubled hierarchies of mind/body dualism and how we have navigated bodily appearance. We have also troubled the idea of who, of what bodies are granted voice in this realm. Many of us are independent researchers, and this means that this book was created as a co-creation of passion rather than an academic requirement or prerequisite to tenure. What draws us to this research space together is therefore not the benefits to our careers. We are all noticing how our bodies come to life when we allow ourselves to move differently. As we come together, we also create the space to reflect and notice how our bodies have been treated, and have been treated differently, by the academic machine and the social order. Everything in this book is a political question: We ask ourselves and our readers what bodies get to talk, and this question is not neutral, not academic, not a vague gesture. This question is about who has rights, how we are treated DOI: 10.4324/9781003320210-18

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The authors gather on Zoom to complete the book, March 2023. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

by our doctors (of both academia and medicine), and who has funding and basic stability. This is a question of ethics. As The Bodies Collective, we work through the body, rather than about the body, to forge a new understanding of how we approach ways of knowing. Through this, we subvert, rather than acquiesce to, former ways of knowing and treating bodies. One of the primary avenues for this subversion is through speaking to that which is often viewed as explicit or experienced as unspeakable. Each chapter acts as an organ, driving the complete organism that becomes this book, and interacting in ways both unexpected and delightful. Chapter One brings to us the conflict above—what bodies are allowed a voice, and who listens? This chapter draws our attention to how the social order’s perception of our bodies, our beauty, and our gender determine how others interact with and treat us. Chapter Two challenges us to face complex questions about bodies, sex, and friendships. This chapter acknowledges the taboo within, highlighting the limitations of the social order and institutions on what cis women are allowed to say about their own bodies. This links directly with Chapter Three’s exploration of bodily realities. Which realities are welcome topics for discussion, and which might be seen as too ‘triggering’ to talk about? Can we be intimate with our intimates, or is that too intimate for the academy? Chapter Four pushes at the social limitations and expectations of binarised gender. This chapter offers an experience-near account of coming to terms with a body that doesn’t fit the social order, encouraging the reader to challenge what bodies are told when they don’t fit within gender expectations, and displaying the traps laid for our bodies by capitalism and normative

Doing Online Embodied Research 163 assumptions. Chapter  Five dives into the intra-relationship between grief, loss, pain, and the messiness of an ageing body. This chapter invites the reader to consider how they are impacted by absences and where absences show their presence in their bodies and lives. Here, we begin to understand why we crave intensity and the ripples of absence in everything we do. Chapter Six insists that we stay with the power of collective work and art practice, the power to do rather than power over. This chapter moves the reader to be thoughtful of themselves, to experience from within the body and what their body can do, and then pushes us to recognise that so much more is possible in collaboration and through art practice. In Chapter Seven, we are asked to let go of what we think we know about communication and learning. This chapter asks us to listen to the way we move our bodies, to consider how we communicate even with a blank face, and to keep in mind the many ways we philosophically struggle to come to an understanding of our mind/body/ psyche. Chapter Eight draws our attention to the recent changes in the way we use our bodies and share our bodies with others—through virtual means. Due to technological advances and rapid cultural shifts, we come together online more and more. This chapter wonders what this means for our bodies and how we can collaborate in an embodied way in a virtual world. Learning how to do this might just save/have saved our lives. While we hope that reading the body’s import is a joyful endeavour, it is possibly not always easy. We felt troubled that writing a book like this was doing the very thing that we were critiquing. We wanted to trouble hierarchies and were clear that we did not want to replicate hierarchies within our The Bodies Collective and within our collective body. We wanted to be a body without organs (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), full of potential, full of intensity, and not limited by function or outcome. But when writing a book and having a deadline all of a sudden come upon us, the temptation was high to have organs that fulfil functions: someone to organise the next Zoom meeting, someone to keep us on track, someone to write the introduction. It is difficult to resist the temptation of assigning functions and creating top-down processes when writing a book to be published in a world that values these arborescent structures. It could be argued that there is no place outside of this world. There are only ideas pointing towards a different world; there are only lines of flight. In this book, we have invited you into the body, the collective body, and The Bodies Collective: To question, to trouble, and to be troubled. We have invited you along the way to do Bodyography. We strive to always be in dialogue about the body in order to build, not towards an end result but towards a better than before. This book breathes life into the conflicts surrounding the body and penetrating bodies themselves. This book was written to lovingly but insistently force the reader to be aware of the way bodies are (mis)treated and ignored and the way assumptions and avoidance ultimately impact our societies and our lives—but more than that, to lovingly and insistently ensure that we build fortresses of hope in our rib cages and continue to collaborate towards flourishing.

164  Sarah Helps What It Means to Collaborate in a Collective I look into your zoom faces and feel the friendship and connection as we have lived through a pandemic, across multiple oceans and shared the intense focus of collaboratively embodying a book together (Bodyography in action!). I smile to myself as I look at my new glasses on my face, inspired by Jess! Jess does not know that when I went to the opticians it was her stylish glasses, seen on her through the zoom screen, that influenced my choice! As we write together, into each other’s work, we inspire each other and direct our lives . . . including our fashion choices it seems! (Alys)

Alys’ example beautifully shows how we have been influenced by each other and how these influences have involved the words we use, and the theories we have drawn on, the ways in which we have coordinated our look at our bodies on screen. What is mine is yours; what is yours becomes mine; our knowledge becomes felted together. Together, our collective has taken shape by feeling with each other, and our collective feelings, to borrow Ahmed’s term (2004), have become the sustaining glue through this project. The Challenge of Authorship

When filling in online forms, such as those for academic conferences, scientific journals, or reference management software, you are usually forced to name single authors and affiliations. There is just no (technical) option to appear as a collective, or as an author with no localisable affiliation. Within academia, there is a consensus regarding the principles of academic authorship that is followed by universities, research institutions, and scientific journals: authors have to be identifiable, locatable, responsible individuals whose individual contribution to a publication is traceable (see e.g. the international committee of medical journal editors: www.icmje. org/ and the WMA Declaration of Helsinki—Ethical Principles for Medical Research Involving Human Subjects: www.wma.net). But how can we meet these standards as members who intentionally gave up their individual authorship in favour of the collective and who practise collaborative writing that sometimes involves creating, changing, and evolving texts together on the word and sentence level? We Won’t Lie—It Is a Constant Struggle

In the beginnings of the collective, we aimed to appear under the authorship ‘The Bodies Collective’ only. With this, we wanted to trouble the standard

Doing Online Embodied Research 165 notion of academic authorship but also highlight our collaborative approach. While practising this kind of collective authorship, we faced the above technical issues as well as personal challenges, as we are all researchers that are and want to be part of the actual academic system (see Resonances in Claudia’s chapter). We found a compromise between these two different worlds by appearing as authors as follows in our publications: The Bodies Collective. Edited by [insert names of the individual members who contributed to the publication]. Go and have a look at the beginning of the book to see what solution we decided on for this book. However, it is still a complex situation, as we also must guide our readers on how to cite our work, which was not even edited by First Name et al. but by The Bodies Collective. I always laugh that there are two choices in academia, you rename yourself Aardvark so you will always be the first author cited or you find another way, like we are trying to! (Alys)

So Close Together, Yet Screens/Time Zones Apart

It is such a fascinating process, this writing together and apart. As we read each other’s words, we take different relationships into our own. As we read our emerging resonances, we rewrite our own thoughts. We all know that there are no original thoughts, and we also know that putting things together in different ways creates new ways of seeing and being. We have given each other permission to delete/rewrite/reshape any writing. What are the conditions that we created as a group for this to feel safe enough/helpful enough? There is no ‘one size fits all’ answer. With every new project, we renegotiate the terms of our collaborative writing and notions of inclusion. We try to provide each other the space for inspiration and irritation as best as we can. Sometimes we fail. *Mark: I wrote this paragraph and was pleased to express this thought— do ‘I’ also need to claim that it is mine? * There are logistical challenges to keeping connected as a collective (The Bodies Collective, 2020). The members of the group are located not just in different countries, but in different continents and time zones. So, planning to meet online to discuss ways forward with projects can involve early mornings with small children in tow, middle of the afternoon squeezing-ins between seeing clients, or late nights for the members. The quantum leap in online meeting platforms due to the COVID-pandemic at least makes it technically easier than before, but it can feel impossible to find a time that works for all members.

166  Sarah Helps We have been a fluid group; people have dipped their toes in and vanished, hugely contributed, and then moved onto other lines of work while maintaining the gentle kinds of staying-in-contact that social media enables. Inclusiveness: Troubling Our Own Voice in Speaking to the Body

The diversity of perspectives and voices that our different cultures and first languages add to our writing is one of our great strengths, but it can create communication glitches as we have to readjust our aural faculties to cope with multiple accents and voices (The Bodies Collective, 2020). Claudia: My first language (Swiss German) is far away from English, and our online meetings usually happen between 9 and 11 pm in the later evenings for me. I love seeing the members and what we do in the collective, but I  am also always naturally tired when we meet after a full day of work. I have to overcome the obstacles of turning on the computer again and scrape together the last breadcrumbs of my concentration and creativity. As I need a little longer to process what is said by the members with English as their first language, I often miss the English jokes and innuendos—what a pity! Imagine the rhizomatic fibre-optic-enabled conversation that pulses as we continue to think together, these digital gestures surfacing as we slow dance in and amidst all our other activities and family demands on our time (The Bodies Collective, 2020). Besides finding a time that works for all members, online meeting calls involving up to seven participants can be tricky in terms of allowing all the voices and perspectives to be heard (The Bodies Collective, 2020). Challenges range from technical restrictions, that is, that you lose people’s voices speaking simultaneously during an online call, internet and Wi-Fi connection issues, different first languages, to different perspectives and personalities. Furthermore, while we claim to prioritise movement and the body, we have also struggled against the question of: Wouldn’t this mean to aim for collective members that represent different types of bodies? All of the current members are white, western, and more or less able-bodied. This is a recurrent and highly political issue for our collective. While we discuss the importance of diversity and all sign up to the belief that diversity opens space for newness, how come we are all so similar? Did we fail to make sufficient effort? Or are we representing a very limited pool of conference-going, qualitatively learning, academics, who have the privilege of high-level educational qualifications, mentors who have initially guided us into these spaces and have now made them our own? What did we do to exclude other bodies? Who would tell us?

Doing Online Embodied Research 167 Sarah— I wonder what local discourses we have fallen into that make it hard for the reader to join with us—what seems impenetrable? We talk together using ‘fancy’ academic language collected from our favourite theorists—does this create a barrier? Who does it exclude? Are we good-enough at opening space for the reader to interject, and what form might this take in a printed book—perhaps an actual space for ‘notes’ from the reader between each resonance? Jess— I remember all too well that comment we got from our conference presentation a few years’ ago that ‘we were all beautiful’ (see Chapter 1). And how everyone was frustrated that that was the key message conveyed to a participant after our presentation. Ryan especially was angry that someone could push such a position upon them when they did not feel that way. But it was also a moment where we should show that even as we speak to bodily knowledge, our bodies also speak for us—and they sometimes convey very different messages than we would want them to. I think that this, in itself, is another form of Bodyography; being able to use these moments of how others may view the body to provide movement and complication/complexity to our work.

Bodyography as Grappling: With Discourses and the Discourse of Our Bodies Rather than get overwhelmed, discouraged, and embarrassed by our above questions and awareness of our privileges, we sought to use them as the very point of deterritorialization to question ourselves, our bodies, and how they are viewed/used/assessed. This is the point of Bodyography. No one has the agency to speak on behalf of all bodies, which would miss the whole point of Bodyography. Rather, it is to grapple within these constraints, to write from within the body, even as we struggle to find words for all the felt senses of how the body speaks to us. Researching with and through Bodyography means remembering that we work within diffractions, which help us appreciate how ‘different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how these exclusions matter’ (Barad, 2007, p. 30). This recognition is our key to moving past being ashamed of who we are as we do this work and working within it even as we trouble, and are troubled, by it. We have troubled/problematised and brought awareness to the silencing of the body through voicing it, celebrating it, and showing its vital nuances (Chapters 1 and 4). Even as we stumble over language, our own privileges, and how to convey that which words often fail at—especially when at least

168  Sarah Helps one of our number is more comfortable using visual imagery to convey a felt sense (Chapter 5)—we move forward in bringing forth the body’s place as a knowledge source. Furthermore, as traced in this book, the effect/affect of methodologically performing Bodyography brings forth its relegated lower position within the hierarchy of mind over the body (Chapter 1). As academics, we exist within practices that give currency to the word—a tradition that can be traced back at least to Descartes (2017/1644) and in which the mind (alongside language) is seen as higher. What this fails at is that the mind is the body, and could never be conceivable without a body; our bodies are not floating adjuncts of thoughts! The body holds our experience (Van der Kolk, 2014), and is the very physical dimension that can and does move within space. It ages and cannot go backwards. It is impossible to conceptualise anything, including cause and effect, with not being subject to that same body being moved in time. Anything else, any other conception, is not possible without this basic experience. This is the work of Bodyography—the troubling of the body being subjugated to a dominant mind. It is the work of being with the body in time, with its affects and its bodily processing. Characteristics of Bodyography (The Bodies Collective, 2023; Chapters 4, 6, 8): • Create Safety • Activate ventral vagus • Become Pro-Motion • Employ Arts-Based Approaches • Collaborate • Embrace Flourishing Examples of qualities that we sensed: • Vulnerability • Ethics of care • Human connection and dialogue • Self-compassion • Other-compassion • Creativity • Playfulness/serious play • Emotionality • Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality • Academic skinship

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Moving towards Bodyography as Human Flourishing

In this book, as we moved from tackling the assumption of a dominant mind over a subjugated body, as well as voicing other domination/ subjugation structures that seem so unquestionable (Chapters 1 and 2), we have brought the body back to the foreground through showing its contours and its affects even when the body is lost to us, and have worked to provide some suggestions on how to practically start Bodyography through six Prompts for Bodyography as a form of Flourishing (Chapters  4, 6, 8; The Bodies Collective, 2023). We have shown that Bodyography is not just the tackling of top-down structures, as important as this work is, but also showing what the body can do and, in this, how it can flourish! Above is a bulleted list of our six Prompts to Flourishing as well as qualities that come with these practices: Shouldn’t these be additional quality criteria of qualitative inquiry—what do you think, readers, when looking back to the single chapters in this book? We all come laden with what happened chronologically before and how we have been cultured, gendered, racialised, and classified in all sorts of ways since before we were born (Chapter  7). We started out by acknowledging our position, ‘that we know because we are of the world’ (Barad, 2007, p. 185), and recognising that our bodies kept score of that. Of course! And yet we try. Please continue the conversation via https://www.thebodiescollective.com/

Bodyography in a Zoom session. Source: © The Bodies Collective.

170  Sarah Helps References Ahmed, S. (2004). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21(2), 25–42. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1980) Descartes, R. (2017). The principles of philosophy (J. Veitch, Trans.). Anodos Books. (Original work published 1644) The Bodies Collective. (2020). Bodyography as activism in qualitative inquiry: The Bodies Collective at ECQI19. International Review of Qualitative Research, 14(1), 104–121. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940844720970140. The Bodies Collective. (2023). (Re)Centering the body: Bodyography, autonomy as pedagogy, and human flourishing. In T. Chemi, E. Brattico, L. O. Fjorback, & L. Harmat (Eds.), Arts and mindfulness education for human flourishing. Routledge (Routledge research in arts education). www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003158790. Van der Kolk, B. (2014). The body keeps the score: Mind, brain, and body in the transformation of trauma. Penguin Random House.

Index

Note: Page numbers in italics indicate figures on the corresponding pages. Abadie, K. 89 abject, the 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, 17, 51 – 52 abject autoethnography 42, 46, 47, 51 – 55 academic skinship 115, 116, 121 – 125 activating the ventral vagus through Polyvagal theory 14, 76, 109 – 110 affect 1, 4 Artful Collaborative Inquiry 41 audio found poetry 56, 58, 60, 61 – 64 autoethnography: abject 42, 46, 47, 51 – 55; explicit 40, 42 – 44, 46 – 48, 49; performative 64, 69 autonomy as pedagogy 44, 88 Barad, K. 15, 94 Bartleet, B. 42 Bateson, G. 130 becoming 6, 15 becoming girl 20, 28 – 29 becoming pro-motion 14, 76, 109, 110 – 114, 113 Bennett, J. 58 Bergson 130 Berlant, L. 92 Bio-power 27, 29 Bittinger, R. 86 Bodies Collective, The 1 – 3, 2, 34 – 39, 82 – 86, 108, 121 – 125; expressing and exposing the body back to relevance 30; history of 8, 8 – 14, 11, 14; improvised workshops 90; merging the academy with the physical 7 – 8; multiple bodies of 6 – 7; as not a neutral entity 24; role of underwear in 56 – 57

body, the 20 – 22; defining and voicing 3 – 6; as geography 6; as matter 1, 3; as silenced in academia 23 – 24; in space 132; transference and 21; between trauma and language 126 – 132, 131; see also non-binary body body dysmorphia 73, 76 – 77 body image 21, 24 – 25, 30 – 32 Bodyography 1, 20 – 21, 127 – 128, 131, 133; challenge of 22; defined 4; defining and voicing the body in 3 – 6, 30; in everyday objects 56; non-binary body and 76 – 78; recipe 108 – 109; six prompts to 14 – 15; viewing underwear through lens of 58; of voice 60 body politics 30 – 32 Braidotti, R. 4, 20, 132 Brewis, J. 57, 62, 63 Butler, J. 55, 88, 89 Cain, P. 94 collaboration 6, 7, 14, 76, 109, 116 – 118, 117 collaborative inquiry 6, 10 collaborative narrative inquiry 41, 42 collective authorship 108, 121 – 125, 165 Collinson, J. 42 conferences 7 contemporary arts practice 88 COVID-19 72, 93, 112 creating safety 14, 76, 109 – 110 creativity 88, 89, 90, 93, 95, 109, 110 corporeal body 3 – 4, 20, 24, 27

172 Index dance improvisation 112 – 113, 113 Davies, B. 59 Deleuze, G. 15, 17, 74 – 75, 130 Descartes, R. 25, 26 digital spaces 41 Disciplinary Power 29 disembodied 3, 7, 26, 121, 154, ecology of mind 130 Ellis, C. 43, 60 embodied friendship 40, 42 – 45, 49 embodiment 2, 10 embracing flourishing 14, 76, 109, 118 – 119 employing arts-based approaches 14, 76, 109, 114 – 116, 115 enigmatic articulation 88 Entwistle, J. 58, 63 equivalent intensities 89 Erb, J. 4, 22, 45 – 46, 78, 80 erotic, the 75 ethic of care 43, 60, 116 European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI) 9, 12, 131 explicit autoethnography 40, 42 – 44, 46 – 48, 49 family therapy 138 feminism 4; journey of being ‘woman’ and 28 fieldnotes 3 Fields, J. 57 Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girls Confabulous Memoir 75 flow state 94 Foucault, M. 27, 127 Freuh, J. 44, 46 friendship: bodies and 17; and Bodyography 10; close/deep 76, 122; embodied 40, 42 – 45, 46, 47, 48, 49; female 51; realities of 122; relational embodied friendship identity 57 Gannon, S. 20, 23, 28 – 29 gender 72 – 80 gender euphoria 79 Girod-Perrot, R. 112 Gonick, M. 20, 23, 28 – 29 Greer, G. 47 grief 87 – 90, 92 – 95

Grosz, E. 8, 24 – 26, 29, 51 Guattari, F. 15, 17, 74 – 75, 130 Gumbrecht, H. U. 89 Hallam, E. 94 Haraway, D. J. 43 – 44, 49, 132 Hastrup, K. 3 Helps, S.L. 68, 148 Hockey, J. 94 Höglund, H. 59 – 60 International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) 57 intra-action 4, 10, 15, 128 intra-relationship 92 – 93 intensity 90, 97, 132; balance of 93; as a craving 163; form of 87; of grief 88, 89; liminal 41 intuitive painting 114 – 116, 115 invitation to dialogue 119 – 120 Irigaray, L. 26 Kesselring, R. 3 Kim, H. 74 Kirkpatrick, D. 51, 88, 91 Klement, V. 88 knickers 56, 57 – 59, 62, 64, 68 – 71; see also underwear Kristeva, J. 51 Lacan, J. 26 Lecoq, J. 130 Lorde, A. 75 loss 87, 88 – 90, 92, 94 Mackay, S. M. 47 – 48 Mackinlay, E. 42 making kin 43 – 44 Massumi, B. 130 matter, body as 1, 3 Meager, M. 90 Mendus, A. 51, 64 Meyer, C. 58 mind-body dualism 1 – 3, 25 – 27, 29, 32, 161 – 163 mind-body hierarchy 161 – 163 multidisciplinarity 4 Neutral Mask 130 – 131, 131 new materialism 54, 59 – 60, 127 – 128 Noddings, N. 43 non-binary body 72; bodyography and 76 – 80; buying the 74 – 75

Index  173 online conference/meeting/workshop 69, 83, 100, 138, 149, 152, 165, 166 online embodied research 141, 143 – 144, 153 – 154; collaboration 147 – 148; environment/world/space 150 – 152, 160; interviews 142; making connections 145 – 146; teaching 157 – 158 Orbach, S. 24 Owens, C. N. 89 – 90 Owton, H. 42 participatory performativity 88, 89 Pelias, R. 43 Pels, P. 94 performance 40 – 46, 48 performative act 88, 89 performative autoethnography 64, 69 Peter, N. 65 Pettigrew-Macpherson, A. 93 playfulness 90, 135 Pockets method 41 Polyvagal theory 14, 145, 153 post-humanism 2, 128 post-modernism 2 power 69, 86, 89, 97, 146, 147; of being in control of one’s body 44; ‘Bio-power’ 27, 29, 31, 35; of collective 125, 163; of desire and being desired 92; ‘Disciplinary Power’ (Foucault) 29, 30, 77, 127; dynamics 142; feminine 43; from body differences 5; imbalances 144; of metaphor and story 88; modern (Foucault) 27; navigating 23, 31, 153; and personality dynamics 7; position of 36; of relationship with underwear (‘thing-power’) 17, 58; structures 22, 26, 29 presence of absence 87, 88, 95, 99 – 106 privilege 4 – 5, 6, 7, 10, 13, 30 pro-motion, becoming 14 psychotherapy 20, 147, 159; conference/clinic 22, 31; psychodynamic 35; systemic 126, 138 puppets 127 – 128 qualitative inquiry 9, 12 queer 72, 76 – 77, 79 – 80

Raymond, J. 42 Raza Boxes workshop 90 resonance 1, 5 – 7, 17 – 18 re-territorialization 75 ritual 88 – 89, 90, 93, 96 – 97 Roberts, D. 61 Sankaran, R. 100 Schechner, R. 90 Schut, H. 89 screen: behind xix; connected by 153; glare of computer 21, 52; on/ through 6, 10, 12, 17, 138, 142 – 143, 147, 149, 150, 151 – 152, 154, 157, 159, 164; prints 94, 96; self-view of 158; sharing 147 science communication 109, 113 – 114 self-compassion 109 serious play 89 – 90 sex positivity 47 sexual encounters 87, 92 Sheldrick, M. 47, 48 Somerville, P. 90 Stone, B. 88 storying 58 – 59, 61, 63, 65 Strobe, M. 89 sudden and unexpected death 87, 88, 93, 97 Symbolic Order 26 – 27, 29 sympoiesis 44 systemic psychotherapy 126 – 127, 138, 157 Tanner, L. 92 Thom, K. C. 75 transference and countertransference 21 trauma, body between language and 126 – 132, 131 Tsaousi, C. et al. 57, 61, 62, 63 Turner, V. 89 Twelfthtide Nights 101 – 106 Tying the Threads 90 – 92, 91 underwear 56, 68 – 71; audio found poetry on 61 – 64; conclusions on 64 – 65; research methodology on 60 – 61; role in the Bodies Collective 56 – 57; theoretical positioning and literature on 57 – 60, 59 unspeakable body/unspoken body 23 – 24, 45 – 46

174 Index van der Kolk, B. 126 Vico, G. 130 virtual interactions 10, 14 voicing the body 3 – 6, 7, 30, 31 Volatile Bodies 24 vulnerability 116 – 118 Ward, A. 58 Watts, M. 56, 64

Weiss, G. 8, 51, 53, 55 Werner, K. 61 Wittgenstein, L. 126 Workman, J. R. 27 Wyatt, J. 97 Wynter, S. 132 Zeno 129