How might we understand the affective body as agentic through the experience of 'dys-embodiment'? This paper, written for the unit 'Gender, Affect and the Body' for the MA Gender, Media and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London, studies the affective body during COVID-19 'social distancing' and isolation.
Introduction
In late 2019, a new virus started spreading from Wuhan, forcing governments around the world to declare lockdowns and 'social distancing'. Being in isolation can be particularly upsetting, but it might help make sense of the ways the body mediates emotions and feelings. This paper analyses how a sense of dys-embodiment — the lost or altered connection with one's own body — can be caused by a sudden change and/or lack of interaction with the world, and demonstrates how the body itself is deeply involved in the mediation of affect, and could therefore be described as agentic.
The first section explores the concept of the 'normal body', particularly the female body, through Butler's theory of performativity, Barad's concept of agential realism, and Ahmed's argument on (dis)comfort — investigating how lockdown changed women's attitudes towards shaving and makeup. The second section examines how technologically mediated interaction alters how we process emotions, through the work of Drew Leder, Sara Ahmed, and Lisa Blackman, and how video calls lead to a distorted way of being embodied. The final section makes sense of the body as agentic through new materialist academics such as Coole, Frost, and Alaimo.
The 'Normal Body'
Because of lockdown, we do not follow the grooming processes we're used to, leading to an experience of dys-embodiment. Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity is crucial here: 'gender is the repeated stylization of the body ... that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being' (2007). If we refuse to perform gender, it ceases to exist — meaning the application of makeup and body hair removal is a performative ritual which defines, but does not necessarily validate, the notion of the 'normal (female) body'.
Instagram user @rubyrare posted illustrations of 49 days without shaving, describing the experience as 'oddly grounding'; Cosmopolitan covered women shaving their heads during lockdown as an act free from the pressure of public opinion. Karen Barad's theory of Agential Realism (2007) describes the universe as constituted by 'phenomena', or the entanglement of intra-acting agencies — useful for understanding how performing our bodies (wearing makeup, shaving) constitutes the body itself. Julia Jansen and Maren Wehrle explain that 'normality' bears an inherent relation to a culturally and historically specific optimum, one that can never be fully achieved, meaning bodies constantly strive to reestablish a 'new normality'.
Sara Ahmed's theory of (dis)comfort explains how bodies are shaped by repeated and forced norms; those who reject heteronormative grooming standards — not shaving, not wearing makeup — may feel comfortable in their own bodies, while their decision to rebel generates discomfort in the spaces around them.
Absence and Dys-embodiment in Video Calls
Drew Leder's The Absent Body (1990) explores how the body tends to disappear from conscious awareness when everything functions correctly, calling attention to itself only through dysfunction. During video calls, we must contend with the lack of engagement of all our senses — unable to 'read the room' or interpret full body language — while a portion of the screen shows us mirrored to ourselves, encouraging self-focus over connection. This constitutes a form of bodily 'dys-appearance'.
Sara Ahmed further discusses absence through the concept of the background — both spatial and cultural — which online meetings limit our perception of, altering the experience of any interaction shifted from physical to online. Lisa Blackman similarly describes a felt, somatic 'tuning in' between bodies in connection, a form of attunement that online meetings, lacking full sensory engagement, struggle to replicate.
Agentic Matter and Dys-embodiment
New materialist academics including Barad, Coole, and Frost trace the conception of matter as inert back to Descartes, and argue instead for matter as 'an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable' (Coole and Frost 2010). Stacy Alaimo's concept of 'trans-corporeality' holds that we cannot separate ourselves from our environment, which becomes 'the very substance of ourselves'.
Lisa Blackman similarly argues against understanding the body as a mere intersection of physicality, biology, and culture, instead proposing 'the permeability of boundaries and the inextricable connection of mind with body, human with non-human and biological with social'. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's theory of the body multiple and Rebecca Coleman's concept of becoming, Blackman suggests we should investigate not what a body is, but what it can do and become.
A possible next step is to consider a 'post-COVID-19 normality': after experiencing dys-embodiment and understanding our bodies as agentic, will we return to old routines, or learn from these events and re-imagine our lives with acceptance of dys-embodiment as part of the life equation?
Conclusion
This paper unfolded the phenomenon of dys-embodiment, understood as the lost or altered feeling of being in one's own body, demonstrating how this is useful, if not necessary, in multiple circumstances. The first section defined dys-embodiment as a temporary state of altered embodied experience while aiming for an ideal that can never be fully achieved. The second section argued that the lack of engagement of all our senses during video calls contributes to an altered way of engagement with our surroundings, and thus a dys-embodied experience. The final section, through new materialist academics, demonstrated that the affective body cannot be anything but agentic — and that dys-embodiment may be a necessary phase in the constant process of becoming, one that concerns not only our bodies but the whole environment.
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