Embodiment

All living things have a body, a container that consists of muscles, sinew, blood, water, skin, microbes, and more. Awareness of this body and history of this awareness alert to all its meanings and changes is what becomes one’s sense of embodiment: to become a self through knowledge of a bodily being encountering other embodied beings. This sedimented bodily sense for humans is an ordinary, banal, mundane accompaniment as much as an accomplishment. However, the gritty, layered meaning of morphology and built-up proprioception can become pushed forward into agreement or conflict with other “social facts” like gender, race, (dis)abilities, and age that hook into or zip up one’s embodiment. This entry considers how Trans Studies scholarship, some anchored in the embodied knowledge of trans persons, has developed important theories of time, space, difference, subjectivity, and more according to lived experiences. It does so while examining how this scholarship builds on diverse traditions in critical race theory, media studies, queer sexuality, and feminist theory that center the body.