First of all: I fully support absolute bodily self-determination. I believe that humans have the right to do anything and everything we choose to our own bodies – up to and including annihilating them. I believe that making any changes you choose to your body for aesthetic or political reasons is just as valid as making choices about your body for physical or psychological health reasons. All that being said…
I just realized something trippy about the way both trans peoples’ and fat peoples’ bodily autonomy gets negated:
Instead of treating medical gender transition as a valid health practice, hegemonic culture trivializes it as a risky form of extreme body-modification (that supposedly has something to do with sex.)
Meanwhile, instead of treating “weight loss” as a risky form of extreme body-modification (that usually has something to do with sex), hegemonic culture pushes it as a valid health practice.
Something is fucking backwards here.
Hmmm, I had been thinking about this in a slightly different way:
I had been thinking about how on the one hand, medical transition is, yes, trivialized as a risky form of extreme body-modification that is ‘unnecessary’ while, on the other hand, many forms of medical body-modification related to size (of so many bodies and parts) are not only acceptable and promoted but even to some extent expected. Like I said, only slightly differently. There was another aspect to this line of thought though too…but I am a little fried right now and can’t pull it back up.
But, I guess that is one of the parts that I struggle with the most…the demand that some bodies change in order to fit into some “norm” and the demand that other bodies not be changed or be changed in very specific ways so that the “norm” stays the same. It is fascinating to me….okay, off to bed for now…maybe this thought will come back to me on the wind tomorrow.
Comment by orgasmicon — January 27, 2012 @ 11:49 pm |