On Embodiment

Vol. 4.2

letter from the editors

13 april 2020

The editorial board is very proud to share with readers Issue 4.2 of Process, On Embodiment. The body is both foundational to human experience and yet strangely elusive: while Indigeneous cultures have articulated various, integrated understandings of the mind-body, much Western academic philosophy for centuries sought to separate mind from body, even as the purportedly bodiless political subject was established by excluding particular bodies. Today, the areas of contemporary cultural theory that address the body most directly (such as disability studies and queer and feminist theory) take approaches that sometimes diverge, often contentiously. For these reasons, embodiment is one of the most rich and exciting areas of inquiry across the disciplines, and the undergraduate work we present in this issue--our largest issue yet--attests to this.

All of the work in Issue 4.2 considers the relays between subjectivity and embodiment, while suggesting new ways of thinking about the mind and body. Nina Katerina Stular’s “Anglo-Saxon Metaphysics: A Mirror to Modernity?” thinks about the concept of the soul in a crucial period of Anglo-Saxon literature. Stular argues that an analysis of the relationship between soul and matter in Old English poetry from between the 9th and 11th centuries--when a pagan culture was being converted to Christianity--complicates standard readings of a body-soul binary in early Medieval literature. What more ambiguous accounts of body and spirit are offered by these texts? In “Gods of the Machine: Performance and Play in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask,” Riley Kelfer finds similar possibilities for shifting understandings of embodiment--in a very different time and medium. Considering the relationship between player and avatar in two Zelda games, Kelfer thinks about how these games might expand upon theories of play and performativity. Catherine (Ching Wen) Lin’s “Future Perfect: the Female Bildungsroman and Prescribed Futures in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go” considers the way in which heteronormativity is entwined with other forms of violence in Ishiguro’s dystopian novel. Lin considers gender and genre together to show how questions of form are necessarily questions of the body. Summer Cisneros explores the possibilities of period underwear for countering the stigma of menstruation in “Period Underwear as Menstrual Activism: Female Empowerment, Ecofeminism, and Trans-Inclusion.” Cisneros’s paper examines the convergence of various contemporary concerns, including sustainability and justice for people with uteruses, arguing that period underwear may offer the possibility of changing the way we think about periods. Finally, William Fronk’s podcast, “Childhood Cancer Survivors and Healthcare,” attends to the complexities of an often-neglected issue: the unique health concerns of survivors of childhood cancer. Those who survive serious illness or who live with chronic illness know that survival is just the beginning of what is often a permanently changed life. 

As the ongoing COVID-19 crisis has reminded us, we are at the mercy of our bodies, which are embedded in systems of politics, ecology, economy, and care. But we may also find tremendous possibility and joy in these bodies. As always, we hope these pieces inspire further thinking and discussion about embodiment. We also invite readers to take a look at the call for papers for our next issue, On Incarceration, and we look forward to receiving your submissions! 

Sincerely,

Kathleen Reeves and Emily George

Editors-in-Chief

Period Underwear as menstrual activism: Feminine Power, ecofeminism, and trans-inclusion

Summer Cisneros

Cisneros calls for new forms of feminist resistance to long-standing “androcentric, anti-earth, and transphobic” cultural attitudes toward menstruation. Period underwear (PU), she argues, is an empowering, ecofeminist alternative to disposable feminine hygiene products. Tracing the stigmatization of menstruation to colonization, Cisneros looks to many pre-colonial indigenous cultures that model shame-free understandings of feminine embodiment and menstrual bleeding. Furthermore, she celebrates PU companies such as Thinx for designing trans-inclusive boyshorts styles, which can help relieve the shame, fear, and trauma trans men often endure when pressured to use tampons or pads. Cisneros concludes with a call for investment in PU, the education of girls and women about the possibilities of menstrual activism and ecofeminist alternatives to disposable products, and more options that allow trans men to menstruate free from fear or shame.   

Gods of the Machine: Performance and Play in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

riley kelfer

Kelfer explores the liminal participatory role of the player in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Describing the main character, Link, as at once our “performer” and “prosthetic,” Kelfer analyzes the way the Zelda franchise games pivot between dramatic narrative, wherein the ‘player’ becomes a spectator, and play, which involves the player’s performance, growth, adaptation, and awakening. Kelfer’s essay revolves around several philosophical and ludological questions about game play and postmodern selfhood: “Who are we when we play?” he asks, and, “If not ourselves, who do we become?”

future perfect: the female bildungsroman and prescribed futures in kazuo ishiguro’s never let me go

Catherine (Ching wen) Lin

Lin frames Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go as a science fictional reworking of the 19th-century bildungsroman. Aunis Pratt’s feminist reading of the female bildungsroman as a story of “growing down” to patriarchal expectations rather than “growing up” applies to Kathy, the protagonist of Ishiguro’s novel, Lin argues. Like characters such as Jane Austen’s Emma and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, whose procreative bodies become sites of futurity, Ishiguro’s clones provide for disease-free generations to come while being denied access to a sense of an indeterminate future. Lin argues that Kathy’s story is ultimately one of acquiescence rather than self-actualization: to grow into heteronormative adulthood, Kathy learns, she must relinquish aspiration itself.

The Anglo-Saxon Metaphysics and Its Ambiguities

Nina Katarina Štular

Štular identifies ambiguities in Old English poetry that call for a reexamination of Anglo-Saxon metaphysics. Analyzing Soul and Body I and The Seafarer, Homily VI of the Vercelli book, and Alfred’s translation of Boethius, Štular intervenes in a common simplification in Anglo-Saxon studies: the notion that the mind-body divide was a universal Anglo-Saxon belief. Her readings of Old English poetry attend to the complexity, nuance, and contradictions of Anglo-Saxons’ conceptualization of the mind-body relationship, which she traces to Anglo-Saxons’ “contact with Christianity” in 5th century A.D., “after a long and rich history of pagan tradition.”

Childhood cancer survivors

william (James) fronk

Fronk’s podcast addresses the unique challenges of childhood cancer survival. Inspired by his own experiences as a survivor, Fronk researched the physical, psychological, and financial burdens childhood cancer survivors (CCS) face in the wake of their illness, from the malformations and hormonal imbalances caused by chemotherapy to anxiety about future healthcare access. In this podcast, Fronk leads a lively and illuminating conversation about CCS,  a group with such distinct experiences and struggles, it is recognized as a subculture in the medical literature. Fronk is joined by Duncan Kemp, a mathematical economics and political science major at Oregon State, Hashim Nelson, a geography major at the University of Washington, and Jeremy Woltereck-Pham, a biochemistry major at the University of Washington.