I'm Free!
"...we treat our bodies as subordinates, inferior in moral status. Open association with them shames us. In fact, we treat our bodies with very much the same distances and ambivalence women have traditionally received from men in our culture" (Nancy Mairs, "Carnal Acts," 393)
Until reading this piece, I never realized how disconnected my mind is from my body, nor had I realized that this separation was purposefully constructed by myself. I don't know if it was because I am a woman with superfluous weight and have disregarded my body because of its inadequacies and embraced my mind because of its adaptive faculties, but this division exists. Because Mairs is coming from the perspective of a person with a disability, writing my own case off as circumstantial doesn't seem to make the cut.
Mairs identifies as a person with disability, and in other writings, embraces "cripple" as an apt description for her body. She works out the dissonances between mind and body within her essay, so that her process of rediscovering and embracing her mind/body connection is evidence against the folly of mind/body separatism.
Surprisingly, I find Miars's conclusion liberating because connecting her mind and body does not hinder Mairs, but empowers her. While I'm guessing Mairs would make no claim about being a motivator, so to speak, that she embraces (rather than "overcomes") her disability demonstrates that physical diffrences are not hindrances, but differences, they just are. It's like an existential leg limp, or existential cellulite.
So...it's pretty awesome.
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