Writing though the body: a matter of attention, humility, and touch

Abstract

This chapter suggests that the body, as a site of knowing, offers us possibilities to explore the tacit, taken-for-granted or silenced aspects of our research by bringing the affective, embodied, and material into our writing. Building on feminist new materialist and practice-based approaches, we argue that writing through the body requires three modes of engagement – attention, humility, and touch – that develop our response-ability toward the other(s) in our research. We use vignettes from our own fieldwork experiences to illustrate these relational modes of engagement and show how they offer pathways for political engagement. Reflecting on our writing practices in conversation with each other, we further propose that writing through the body is a matter of reclaiming and inhabiting a space in-between self/other and knowing/not (yet) knowing. As a feminist project, (the political potential of) embodied writing demonstrates how bodies matter in and beyond academic practice.