Forgetting the body

KAT ZUBKO

My awareness of my body primarily comes from the weather. I enjoy the Phoenix summer because it gives me occasion to remember my body. I love the extreme heat that makes me sweat, makes me uncomfortable so that I seek out the cool of an air-conditioned house or business.

The blazing light reminds me to cover my eyes with sunglasses, so that I may be able to see better when I am driving. I noticed, upon reflection, that I think about my body far less once the heat of the summer subsides. When I sit outside in the winter, the weather is pleasant. 

Nothing moves me to go indoors. At times like those, during the winter time, I only become aware of my body when I am sick or my muscles are sore from working.

It strikes me as a little bizarre that the weather or an illness are the main things that remind me of my embodiment. As a genderqueer, female-bodied person, I am often surprised by how little I think about my body. The way that I dress and the way I groom and care for my body does not conform to society’s standard of what a woman should look like, so why do I think about my body and my embodiment so little? 

The answer is complicated. It is personal and it is societal. Thinking back, I can remember a time when I was acutely aware of my body. When I was about 13 or 14 years old, I tried very hard to conform to what I thought a woman ought to look like. I wore makeup; I wore woman’s clothes and jewelry. I was extremely conscious of the way my body looked. I wondered daily whether or not my face and hands were feminine enough, whether or not I was thin enough. I made every effort to perform the gender that I thought my body dictated and I always felt uncomfortable and self-conscious doing it. 

Over a period of years, I slowly moved away from a feminine presentation to a masculine one. I never made a conscious decision to do this. Instead, I arrived at the presentation I wanted gradually. While this happened, my mannerisms slowly changed as well. I began to carry myself differently, take up space differently. I never had particularly feminine mannerisms to begin with, but, over time, I began to behave in a more masculine way. My body, apparently, seamlessly and unconsciously responded to the gender that I wanted to project. 

While I was in college, other people seldom made me aware of my appearance. The college I attended was, in many ways, a very queer environment and certainly supportive of gender variance. Once I returned to Phoenix, however, I noticed that people would often stare at me, especially if they became unsure as to whether or not I was a man or a woman. The looks that people would give me again made me acutely aware of my body. I noticed that I was a gender non-conforming person in a largely heteronormative environment. This was disquieting at first, but eventually I learned to ignore people staring at me. 

Eventually I arrived at the state that I’m in today, a state of seldom thinking about my body. The personal reason for this is that, as a defense mechanism, I began ignoring other people’s evaluation of my body and whether or not it is transgressive. The other thing that enables me to forget about my body, for lack of a better term, is my privilege. As a white person, I am not made aware of my skin color, and consequently my body, on a daily basis in the course of my interactions with other people. Although I am still female-bodied, I haven’t conformed to conventional standards of appearance for women for some time. This has effectively removed my body as an object of evaluation based on these standards, whether men or women direct this judgment at me. These factors afford me the privilege of being able to forget about my body, something that many people do not have. It also leaves me in a strange position: if I do nothing to make myself more aware of my body, by doing yoga, for example, I can go days or weeks without thinking about my body. That is, until the weather heats up again.