in media res

“The body” has been termed and used in many different contexts throughout media and cultural studies. It is the gendered, the racial body; it is the vulnerable, the emotional body, the surface, the container, the discursive.Lately, it has been discussed that the body cannot be seen as either male or female. There is no pure masculinity to which male applies, neither is there pure femininity connected with femaleness. Discourse has been easing its way through and around the body, making it to be something almost virtual. As if it wasn’t there, as if discourse was everything that needs to be considered when talking about identity, whether that be sexual, gendered, or even class identity.There has been so much discourse on the floating body, being and becoming as it may because of culture, social circumstances and whatever else that sometimes I would like to pinch myself to see whether my body is still there. And I ask myself: who am I? I am skin, bones, muscles, joints, blood, veins, organs, electricity, nerves – saying that I try to grasp some of the physical embodiment of my body. Nevertheless, naming these I’m supposedly already leaving the innocence of my endeavour. There is no pure, no authentic sense of the body. It is named and therefore no longer just is.

So I struggle onwards; something that has always fascinated and, at the same time, abhorred me is the sight of a needle breaking through the skin, something alien actually entering the body without any resistance from itself. It is so easy to penetrate the skin, like cutting butter with a hot knife. There it is, the pure moment of physical embodiment. Everything is concentrated on that very moment when the sharp front bit of the needle disappears under the skin, and bit by bit the metallic slides into the body, milimeter by milimeter. I don’t think about gender any more, or about race, class, sex. I am aware of the utmost vulnerability of me.

.meandomedar+DANTE