Body Politics

As I read the pieces from last week in juxtaposition with the articles for this week, the theme of physicality and its instrumental nature in forging communities, keeping those communities safe and healthy, and allowing transcendental expression becomes increasingly apparent. Natalie Havlin’s article really solidified these themes that had echoed throughout other pieces in her work on the revolutionary possibilities of love in third world feminism. The feeling of physical touch and the gauging of emotions to determine revolutionary change are both to this day undervalued in their importance to the movements that fight against the newer iterations of these challenges. With the rise in popularity of self-care, it is important, I think, to recall that though this work is often exhausting and does require special attention to mental and physical wellbeing, that acts of communal love and care within chosen radical communities, real radical, unrestrained, and intersectional love can be just as healing. Just as Shange moves towards the ends of her rainbow with communal healing from the laying on of hands, these moments of collective healing can be found in the every day as Havlin suggests, and supplements self-care in a crucial way. Through these healing actions, also, we strengthen the community and renew energy for the cause in recognizing and embracing differences that define us as well as the similarities that allow transcendental understanding of struggle. The success of this physical re-imagining of love is twofold, in that the stereotypes that are inscribed on these bodies, and specifically the black female body in the works of Shange, can be re-written. Havlin notes, “Martinez’s differentiation of Cuban and African American corporeal and emotional expressions compliments her emphasis on the local historical specificity of antiblack racism.” This sentiment brought to mind Sullivan’s essay on the way that Shange’s work aids us in this mission as well, as she notes, “choreopoetic thinking offers pathways for speaking oneself out of social structures that constrain the voice through willful misreadings of the body.” Sullivan goes on to note “Shange’s innovation of the choreopoem offers such a form, a poetic form and mode of expression designed explicitly to represent the complexities of intersectional identity.” Just in the ways that physical love and expression demonstrates “the physical and emotional expression of the potential of collectivity”, Shange’s works, specifically her choreopoem, uses this exact theory of radical collective love, both physical and metaphysical, to carry us to the ends of our very inclusive, every color under the sun, bright, shinin’ rainbow.