Embodiment & Feminist Theory

Embodiment and feminist frameworks do not exist separately from Blackness; they are continuous expressions of the exact same physical reality. American Society relies fundamentally on forcing a divide between the mind and the body, demanding that human beings dominate, control, and tame their physical feelings, instincts, and desires in order to maintain a hierarchy of authority. Feminist frameworks reject that humans must censor themselves to be seen as legitimate in the social sphere. Audre Lorde laid bare this false divide, contrasting the white fathers who insisted on I think, therefore I am with the black mother in each of us who whispers I feel, therefore I can be free. A foundational insight established in Anti-Racist Theory is when a system demands that you dominate your own emotions, it is training you to disembody yourself, to ignore your nervous system, and to surrender your own internal agency to external control. Feminist theory is about embodiment. Audre Lorde describes embodiment is what it looks like when you operate from your internal agency and the internal satisfaction you get is what she labels the erotic. The erotic is not inherently sexual. 

This disembodiment extends directly into how lesbian existence is sanitized by dominant culture, producing the phenomenon of "lesbians without bodies". Institutional acceptance and heterosexual comfort demand that lesbian identities be stripped of their raw physical, sexual, and material bodily reality, reducing them to bloodless political categories or palatable asexual aesthetic choices. But lesbian existence in its true, unmediated form is not a neatened-up political slogan; it is the expression of pure feminine craving, uninhibited sexuality, and visceral erotica. It is the overwhelming, somatic pleasure of intimate devotion, where physical desire, boundary-dissolving passion, and the raw truth of the body are fully reclaimed without apology. Reclaiming situated embodiedness means asserting that lesbianism is a deeply physical, erotic, and somatic truth that refuses to swallow its desire or be desexualized for institutional approval, directly echoing the radical deconstruction in Queer Theory.   

This disembodiment is further maintained through specific relational tactics, most notably white woman crocodile tears. In the white worldview, anger in marginalized bodies is treated as a dangerous threat to be policed, while white female distress is weaponized as an immediate demand for compliance. When a person expresses rational anger about harm, white women frequently respond with performative tears and grief, instantly shifting the dynamic so that the victim of oppression is reframed as an aggressor. These tears function to offload accountability, derail conversations about systemic harm, and summon institutional power to punish the person who dared to speak. It is a socialized defense mechanism that demands everyone in the room stop addressing injustice in order to soothe white discomfort.

Reclaiming situated embodiedness requires returning to what Audre Lorde defined as the erotic. The erotic is not a cheapened commodity designed for public consumption or (male) gratification; it is a deeply physical, internal sense of joy, satisfaction, and somatic wisdom rooted in our capacity for feeling. Patriarchy teaches marginalized people to fear the erotic because a person who is in touch with their own physical capacity for joy and truth cannot be easily satisfied in a society not based in care. Audre would say when you know what genuine, deep connection and bodily satisfaction feel like, you can no longer be lied to by an unjust society. 

This framework aligns directly with the relational critique in Human Development, which rejects Lawrence Kohlberg’s masculine standard of detached logic and honors Carol Gilligan’s ethic of care, situational context, and mutual connection. Furthermore, by centering the physical reality of the body-mind over external demands for productivity and compliance, feminist embodiment links directly to Crip Theory and the Social Model of Disability. Feminist and embodiment frameworks refuse to let institutional standards define what is rational, acceptable, or healthy; anger in the face of injustice is not a disorder, a loss of control, or a character flaw, as demonstrated in Narrative Therapy and Schizoanalysis, but an appropriate, information-rich response loaded with energy, grief, and survival. Healing cannot happen by intellectualizing pain, swallowing anger, or soothing the feelings of those who benefit from your silence. It happens when we ground ourselves in the raw, undeniable truth of the physical body, trusting our own erotic power and gut perception over the rules forced upon us by authority.

Lorde, Audre. The Uses of Anger Responding to Racism 

Lorde, Audre. Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. Kore Press, 2000.