NOTES TOWARDS
I was thinking of the criticism some feminists have made about images which show only parts of women's bodies, in art as well as advertising and pornography. As a disabled woman, my appreciation, my understanding of myself make this a somewhat difficult area. The assumptions about 'body' come from the non-disabled world. It comes from the medical world and the world of non-disabled women and men, it doesn't come from me.
It is applied to me by these but it is not FROM me.
There are different things which I apprehend about myself and that I can actually feel something about. For instance, pain is so much a part of me, pain seems to me to be more a reality than the idea that there are these 'legs.' Legs can be seen you might say but in some ways I see what I'm told to see. If I'd only ever been asked to talk about them in terms of the way I experience myself and experiencing pain, I'd have developed my own language to express it. However, we're taught, conditioned to one boring orthodoxy of what things are, rather than discovering and having open-ended, developing attitudes. It's then very difficult to see how we appreciate things ourselves. Constructed meanings but how can these meanings be constructed by a society which doesn't even experience
them?
Non-disabled people seem to have a very limited experience of their bodies. Sometimes, having thought over many of their pronouncements and conversations they seem to have a blank not a body. Their views about, too fat thighs etc., besides being a fragmentary body view, are picked up anxieties, rather than actual experiences of their bodies.