A Conversation
with Elise Peeples, author of
The Emperor has a Body —
Body-Politics in the Between
Q: Tell me about The Emperor Has a Body: Body-Politics in the Between. I find the title intriguing.
A: I was hoping readers would feel the same way. The origin of the first part of the title comes from the re-write of the Emperor 's New Clothes fairy tale that I use to enchant but also to plant seeds. In my version of the tale, the emperor is not only vain as he is in the original tale, but he believes he is or can become a god. One of the ways he goes about that is through denial of his body. He goes to the extreme to separate himself from his body. In the book I go on to talk about why splitting ourselves from our bodies and living in our heads is a problem, and that this problem has repercussions in all areas of our lives.
We have seen over the centuries how those in power have attempted to accomplish the very thing that the emperor sought. I look briefly at the fields of philosophy and religion, science and medicine, economics and education to name a few fields where the mind/body split is evident. I argue that these splits of which the mind/body is a primary example, along with other dichotomies such as the male/female, reason/emotion, white/non-white, human/non-human, are based on a faulty worldview. That view says it is possible not only to split ourselves up but to then to elevate one part to a dominant, power-over position. It becomes clear in the emperor 's story that this worldview is false and inherently dangerous.
In this book I introduce a different worldview, which brings me to the subtitle of the book-- "Body-Politics in the Between." The Between is a model of reality that I advocate instead of the dichotomy model. It is in the Between of these dichotomies where the most interesting and creative work can be done. By Body-Politics I mean that once we have gotten rid of the notion that mind and body can be separated, we realize that to be whole, we need every Body in the community to hold part of the power.
Q: I understand that you worked for a number of years as a paralegal. What inspired you to quit that line of work and write this book?
A: I spent a number of years as a paralegal in law firms and felt that I was working more with corporations than with people. When I got fed up with law firms, I went into the public sector where I worked for the Superior Court as a Court Investigator. My job was to protect the rights of old and disabled people who were faced with having someone else put in charge of their affairs. At about the same time I switched into public service, I went through training to become a community mediator. In my job I came into contact with many people warehoused in nursing homes, etc. and issues of quality of life or death came up frequently with no way to resolve them. I decided to try to combine my interests and create a new field, that of medical mediator, to bring together family and medical teams, etc. to mediate medical ethics issues.
To do that, I needed to know more about ethics so I went back to school in philosophy with a particular interest in ethics. But the traditional ethicists did not have anything palatable to offer me. Luckily there were feminist critiques of traditional theorists which I soon devoured. I read a lot of critiques of dichotomies but I was always unsatisfied with them. Critique is fine but I find that when I want to change something I am doing, it doesn 't help me to be told, "Don't do that." I need to have some alternative way of looking at the world.
Since I didn 't find what I was looking for in ethics, I wrote this book which deals with ethics though not in a traditional way. The last chapter is called "From Ethics to Body Politics"--that 's what I call my new system of ethics--body-politics. Many traditional ethicists often use the lifeboat scenario as a test of a system of ethics—that is that someone has to be thrown overboard or the boat will sink, so whom do you pick to go over. They believe that there is a formula that can be used in any circumstance to make the right choice.
I believe that in a sense there is no way to "float" above the lifeboat and decide based on a formula; the decision-maker is always embodied and so are the people in the boat. We are all in it together and we need to figure out a way to make it together. Let 's not delude ourselves into thinking that we have transcended ourselves and dwell in some universal place. Those in the lifeboat have a lot of skills. Somebody is a swimmer and somebody is a zoologist and somebody is a marine biologist. We have many alternatives to choose from; we are not limited to sending one overboard lest we all drown. It 's not about determining who is better or more worthy of living—it 's about using all of our skills.
Q:What do you think distinguishes this book from others of its ilk?
A: This book is unusual in its approach, partly because it covers so many topics. For instance, it covers some of the same topics as Naomi Wolf 's The Beauty Myth or Kim Chernin 's Reinventing Eve but it also talks about men, about racism, about the environment, and about common assumptions that underlie all of our thinking. It establishes links between issues that are so often missing in books that focus heavily on one piece of the picture.
Additionally, this book is heavily weighted toward solution rather than just critique. Many authors incisively critique worldviews but finally fall short at the conclusion, where we find only a few pages devoted to changing the status quo. It is easy enough for an author to wield the wrecking ball against current thought structures; it is quite another to go on from there to begin to build a way out. This kind of writing leaves the reader feeling impotent about how to improve a convincingly rotten situation.
The critique I offer is not an end in itself; rather, it is an identification of the areas of Western civilization most heavily infiltrated by the dichotomies I spoke of previously--those areas most in need of repair. The main thrust of this book is focused on ways to effect that repair. The book proposes and then applies a model of change to specific movements and issues and suggests ways to make these changes happen.
Another way this book is different is that it 's not about giving you the eight steps to happiness--a kind of top-down directive. Rather, I try to give people a way to reframe their worldviews in such a way that they can figure out in their lives with their particular set of experiences, what will work for them. Instead of going to the store and making do with clothes off the rack--clothes that often cannot fit the particularities of our bodies--I am attempting to help us become our own tailors--to pick the cloth, the style, the color, and the size that fits us uniquely. It 's a way to tailor our own life to fit our needs.
Q: How did you come up with the idea of the Between model?
A: I needed something that had flexibility built into it; something that would allow for the overflow that we see in our daily lives--that does not fit into the dichotomous categories. By dichotomous, I mean the sets of opposites that since before the Greeks we in the Western world have used to divide up our world. Those divisions became more than just a system for categorizing what 's in the world; they turned into mutually exclusive categories with one of the set preferred over the other. But the world we experience does not fit into these characterizations.
The Between is the place where two meet--whatever those two are: night and day, you and me, men and women. The model says yes, there is a thing called you and a thing called me. But we can never be completely separated; we have this Between which is constantly connecting us and that's constantly shifting and changing. Language plays a major role in this--it freezes things and makes them appear static. The Between model offers a way to acknowledge that we are always in the midst of change; there is no way to pin down our boundaries. You can try to describe it but you can 't catch the river in your hand.
It's a fluid model more than a solid model. You can 't predict the Between. This element drives traditional scientists and ethicists crazy so they try to freeze it--or worse yet, cut it out-- because it can 't be dealt with in the dichotomous model. What I am saying is that our tendency to disregard or amputate the unpredictable makes us lose the best part of ourselves, the most creative. And this has messed with our ideas of what is truth and what is knowledge and how the world works.
Q: When you talk of dichotomies would you say that in making dichotomies you are actually slicing off a part of yourself? Using the night and day dichotomy, what would you say we are losing?
A: I think of twilight as such a rich time, of the mingling and mixing of day and night. And to have to say whether that is day or night, is really a dilemma. Most people would have a difficult time deciding whether to call it day or night. I think in our modern world we resolve our problem by abstracting ourselves from the natural cycles of life. When we 're in our houses and it gets too dark, we turn the lights on. But when you are living closer to the elements, like when I was working on this book and I was up in Northern California in a cabin in the woods and I didn 't have any electricity, my life very much depended on what the light was doing. And when twilight would come, I resisted putting on the kerosene light which brought everything inside and I could no longer see outside. I didn 't like doing that and resisted the transition but yet I couldn 't read anymore or work on the computer so I spent that hour really watching the outdoors and the changes in the light. One thing I did was to bring out my flute and play improvisations because I didn 't need to see anything for that. I wasn 't dependent on the light but I could still pay attention to it and to the transition time of twilight.
Q: When you speak of the Between, are you talking about something that is not natural? Is there anywhere in the rest of the animal world where this happens?
A: The framework in most of the disciplines that study living beings--such as zoology, natural history, anthropology, etc.--see through the lens of a dichotomous worldview. Scientists look at other worlds and project hierarchy, dominance and dichotomy onto them. When we observe animals, we assume that they, too, dichotomize. Studies are more likely to document behavior that seems to fit that mold. In my field of philosophy this is certainly true. I invite people in other fields to look at the biases in their own disciplines.
What we perceive see as "natural" is oftentimes that which fits our preconceptions. What if we went into the field with a Between model in mind?
Q: You spoke of hierarchy and dominance, but don't you need a certain amount of power for survival?
Immanent power is the power that resides within. It is not an exercise of power over things outside yourself or parts of yourself but the power of wholeness; it is the ability to connect with the world as a whole being, recognizing that you are formed and defined by everything in your life. You can call it yours but it is always in relationship. Power-with, not power-over. You must hold up your end--a safety net will be no good if you do not hold up your end, not just you but all of us. You can 't express yourself and be who you really are unless others can also, because who you really are is interdependent with others. There is no you apart and separable from others.
You may feel a sense of losing control when you see yourself as inextricably bound to others . But it 's not about losing power but about gaining a different kind of power.
Q: Sometimes it seems like we need to make sure that we are separate and different from others, actually better than others and a kind of xenophobia sets in. How can we get past that to allow ourselves to be in a place like the Between?
A: It's like what we talked about earlier, about not doing something. It does not help to say, "Now children, don't be xenophobic." We are so inculcated by the dichotomous worldview that we feel we have to use it no matter what and we fall back on it for our answers. But if another model were put in its place--not at the moment of hate, but long before the hate develops--and if that model made sense and were attractive enough to draw us into it, the idea of xenophobia itself would be weird. If we saw ourselves in the Between model, we would see that in harming another culture or person, we harm ourselves. Part of me is in this Between and is shared with this other person, animal or culture. It goes back to the "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"--the only difference is that "you" are not separate from the "others"--we are all connected in the Between.
Q: Once you are in the Between that is clear, but what is the inducement for you to break out of your cocoon and get into the Between?
A: The inducements are everywhere you look. People are living now more than ever in a place that is totally untenable. People are searching for a reason to wake up each day. There are a lot of means but there are very few ends. It 's not enough. You can see it in the ways that we keep trying to escape. I don 't blame us for trying. Living in this dichotomous world we are split from everything--from our own bodies, from each other, from the earth, we are split up in pieces, we might as well be split-ends--though split-means would be more like it!
Consumerism is such an empty kind of game--it 's creating more and more holes that can 't be filled.
Q: What steps would we take to get into the Between? In other words, how do we get there?
A: The how is not an overnight thing where we find we must quit our jobs and join the revolution. It's more like a gradual process of becoming aware at this moment and doing the small and large things, whatever they are, that are possible for us to strengthen the Betweens in our lives right now. We could start with any of the dichotomies, for instance, humans and our habitat. We can acknowledge the effects our actions on our environment -- how much trash do we generate; how much packaging is in the products we buy; do we use public transportation where possible; what methods are used in the growing or raising of our food? The major shift here is the awareness that our habitat is part of us and that what we do has an impact--constructively or destructively--on our relationship. We become aware of the consequences of our actions on others and on ourselves.
This is not a book about stasis, rationalizing what we already do. It's a challenge to become conscious of how we are living and its effect on ourselves and others. We have lived with a dichotomous worldview for so long we feel comfortable in this worldview. When we try to change that view, we have to examine how our action affects all other entities -- be they animal, tree, or countryside. It's a more difficult road to hoe but there is also much more potential in it. This is not about altruism. It 's in our own self-interest to live up to our potential but that in itself is not enough; we also have to make sure that others have the resources they need to express their potential, as well. That is the only way to have a strong Between. We can 't be whole on our own. The incentive for us is that we get to be who we are--we don't have to conform to the stereotypes of men or women or blacks or whites, that there is room for alterity.
Alterity is an incentive. The word "alterity" comes out of French philosophy. With that word I try to get around the issue of "otherness" without the implication of the One as standard and the Other as deficient. Alterity is a word meant for each of the entities that we might dichotomize. Each has alterity. It is different from "individuality" because it also recognizes the connections. "Individuality" has a history that would have to be purged from it to get at the meaning I intend.
Q: You seem to be making up words here. Do you do a lot of that in the book?
A: Sometimes because of the baggage that certain words have or because there is no word that I know of to say what I need to say, I do make up words. It's tempting to make up a whole new lexicon but you risk alienating and excluding people as well, in a self-referential vicious circle. I have limited it, but sometimes the use of a new word seems unavoidable.
'Between' is a word we use all the time but I am redefining it. 'Bewhole' I made up because there was no comparable way in the language to talk about the coming together, though we have lots of words that mean splitting apart. "Bewhole" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "Be": to make something active (to transform it from noun to verb), paired with "whole". I use the term body-mind which is a play on the mind/body split. The dash shows connection rather than slashing. Then there is the word "alject" I use to get around the terms subject/object. A lot of feminist work concentrates on women becoming subjects in their own right as opposed to being objects. But what do we call something that is neither the subject nor the object but is both active and passive. A combination of alterity and -ject. Not dualistic and extreme--it combines the qualities of both extremes.
Q: So you invite people to play with language, to break out of the pre-existing molds that box us in?
A: Yes, it's about having fun with language. In the latter chapters there is permission to reframe things and humor pops up. It's the kind of humor that does what Luce Irigaray calls "jamming the machinery." You befuddle or overflow the categories--so where you have "man" and "woman," you overflow them such that they become meaningless and cannot be relied upon. This kind of sabotage is not metal spikes in trees; but every chance you get you bring up that these things do not sit where they are supposed to sit.
When you see a newspaper article referring to the neighbor and his wife, make a point of saying "I hope the neighbor and her husband felt similarly." Say the dinosaur, she... Or the scientist, she... Or play with the idea that any unmarked person in a newspaper story is assumed to be a white male--all others are identified. Play with that. Disrobe those pronouns and assumptions of white-maleness.
At a certain time in my development, I felt like these things were all just semantics and I thought, I 'm not going to contort myself to do the "he/she", "chairperson" dance. I have changed my feeling about that now. People will still use "chairman" for a man and "chairperson" for a woman. That eliminates the possibility. When the chair is a man, we should keep using the term "chair" to allow for the possibility that it may at some other time be a woman. When I was in college and decided that I was going to call myself a woman instead of a girl, I could hardly get my lips around it. When I started using that term, my way of thinking about myself changed. That 's when I realized it went beyond semantics.
Q: Often authors have personal motivations for writing particular works. Did you have a personal reason for writing on the subject of the mind/body split?
A: Oh, most definitely. I inherited a genetic disability affecting my extremities which was something my family did not acknowledge. So, though I was not "normal" in my physical development, I pretended I was. It was mind over body in a major way. If I could have completely disembodied myself, I would have; instead, I ended up falling a lot and being teased for walking funny and not being able to run or play sports. The more I ignored my body, the tighter and more off-balance I became. For years I went down the disembodied road, I mean, after all, I ended up getting my Masters in Philosophy, the most disembodied thing a person can do (except, of course, get a Ph.D. in philosophy). At some point, maybe during graduate school, I saw what I had been doing, and in fact, what so many of us do when our bodies do not fit the "norm" in some sense or other--i.e. we are non-white, female, disabled, gay or do not speak English, etc.--I tried to pass, to live as if it made no difference what my body was doing or that it was different. Some kind of transcendence notion.
Q: What audience did you write this book for?
A: I'd like to tell you a story that might make it clear. A few years ago I helped organize a women 's diversity camp called Mujeres Unidas. One of the premises was that there be an equal number of white women and women of color. Over 100 women came. I gave a talk and it was called "The Emperor is a White Man and We Know Cuz He 's Naked." I had been worried that I would get a lukewarm response because most of the events happening at the camp were very experiential and mine was one of the few actual talks. But just the opposite happened. Women were rolling in the aisles and cheering. I was interrupted many times by applause and cheers.
Afterwards, a black woman of 55 or so came up and said to me, "As a philosopher, I know you could have chosen to go down many roads. I 'm glad you chose the one that included me." I still get goose bumps when I think of it. I was trying to include her, just her--not being so overly intellectual so that no one can understand, not being so disembodied so that there are so many excluded. And it 's her.
I want my audience to be her and many like her who are in a sense like me in that I thought for so long that I was included in, for instance, the term "Man." I tried to leave my body behind to get ahead in my jobs, to simply excel. I could ignore the sexist jokes and keep plugging on because I was doing something larger. What I didn 't realize was that I was disembodying myself at those times. I was losing myself. Now I know that the key thing is not to be something universal but to realize that I am a piece of the truth and so is the person down the street and across the world. I want everybody 's stories to be heard--the universal is a boring story, an illusion; what 's really intriguing and crucial to our survival is our embodied stories that are woven into the fabric of life.
Q: If you had a bookstore, where would this book go? Health, law, philosophy, environmental, diet, women--all these seem like possibilities.
A: I'd like to create a new category in the bookstore. In the Feminist Bookstore Catalog, they 've got me listed under "making change." And that 's where I 'd like to be. It cuts across all these different categories. It is multi-disciplinary. It challenges people in every field in the bookstore, even hobbies.
I 'd like the book to be used very broadly. There is certainly room for it in schools-- in the curriculum of a woman 's studies or philosophy department, but also in the various other departments such as psychology, sociology, political science, anthropology, and other so-called harder sciences.
The book encompasses a large range of issues such as body image, sexism and racism, nutrition, environmental devastation, animal rights, ethics, abortion, religion and science. I try to link issues so that when readers finish the book, they have been exposed to ideas that carry over into all parts of life.
Q: What else would you particularly like people to know?
A: I want people to know that this book is not some kind of decree but is more of a reframing that will require each of us to take it and see how it can best work in our lives. I encourage people to form salons and small groups to get together and discuss how to move forward. I have been doing that in my own life and I hope that others will, too. In the Betweens of all of us will come answers.
As we see reality, so it becomes; humans have been seeing reality in a very split and destructive way for centuries. It is crucial that we realize that this mindset is not something that is preordained; it can be changed. We can begin to make changes right this minute. We don 't have to wait for an education, a revolution, to get rich, or anything. We can begin right now to act from that connected place where we see every one and every thing on this planet, and the planet itself, as connected to us in vital ways that require us to listen to and respect those parts of ourselves that we have previously made "other."
It is in our best interests to do this. Instead of allowing ourselves to be split into tiny fragments, we can get into the Spirit of the Whole. The rituals we devise may seem small but they are sacred acts--like recycling, contributing "garbage" to the compost heap, supporting organic farms, taking public transportation whenever possible, growing our own food and eating body-mindfully, and generally working toward alterity for all individuals. Such acts are harbingers of a shift in consciousness. And that shift in consciousness is a harbinger of a shift in reality.