MY BODY IS A POLITICAL ACT (NOTAS PARA UNA CLASE)

Ya las gentes murmuran que yo soy tu enemiga porque dicen que en verso doy al mundo tu yo. Mienten, Julia de Burgos. Mienten, Julia de Burgos. La que se alza en mis versos no es tu voz: es mi voz porque tú eres ropaje y la esencia soy yo; y el más profundo abismo se tiende entre las dos. Tú eres fría muñeca de mentira social, y yo, viril destello de la humana verdad.                  (tomado de A julia de Burgos, por Julia de Burgos)

En el momento cuando nuestros cuerpos son usados como metáforas o modelos para formular políticas o para beneficiarse de los mismos (la fag-hag española es evidencia que sirve para explicar este último concepto), el Estado o la Iglesia o el organismo o la persona que sea los convierte en instrumentos politicos, y cómo tal el cuerpo responde, o se censura o señala, acusa como Balzac o Julia de Burgos)

“Being transgender and a woman of colour, my body is political. Throughout my life I have had to navigate myself through society’s gender and racial bias. Being transgender, female and black means I have to battle with sexual and gender taboos. So, my body is political.” (Munroe Bergdorf)

"... ‘You could say this is the reversal of the king's two bodies in the age of the New Man, where being sick and limp is a political asset, rather than something that would drive a nail into your coffin,’ Simon Schama, the Columbia University historian, said last week. He added that there is, after all, some small precedent for physical impairment in a king signalling strength, not weakness. ‘If you think about Louis XIV, there was unbelievable public interest in his bum,’ Schama pointed out. The Sun King conducted a heroic and public struggle against an anal fistula—he underwent a hideous, well-documented operation—which was taken by the people of France as an example of his political fortitude.”  (Rebecca Mead: “The Body Politic”)

“Body politic, in Western political thought, an ancient metaphor by which a state, society, or church and its institutions are conceived of as a biological (usually human) body. As it is usually applied, the metaphor implies hierarchical leadership and a division of labour, and it carries a strong autocratic or monarchial connotation. The first recorded instance of the body politic metaphor appears in the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE), the oldest of the sacred books of Hinduism. There the South Asian caste system is explained by comparing the priesthood to the mouth, soldiers to the arms, shepherds to the thighs, and peasants to the feet of humankind." (Encyclopedia Britanica)

“.... ‘Mommy, my friend at school told me that I have on boy pants,’ my daughter reported to me recently, aghast that her friend would say such a thing. ‘I told her that pants can’t be ‘boys.’ They are just pants,’ she stated matter-of-factly.

This wasn’t the first time we had talked about ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ gendered items like toys, hairstyles and tennis shoes. It wasn’t the last either.

Though I may try my hardest to insulate my children from a world that genders everything and structures society around whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, it sometimes seeps in anyway.’...” (Penn M. Jackson, “Raising children as a queer black woman is an incredibly political act”.

“Nodo donde se anudan exclusiones, rechazos, vidas que no logran alcanzar los 40 años, la violencia letal contra toda persona que no se ajuste al molde cisgénero (varón-mujer definido por la genitalidad) ..... las heridas y padecimientos que tuvo que soportar Diana Sacayán antes de morir atada y amordazada, y como consecuencia de golpes y apuñalamientos”, por ser una travesti, por su forma de vestir su cuerpo, por la forma de mover su cuerpo, por ser un cuerpo distinto. (Adriana Carrasco: “Juicio por el trasvesticido de Diana Sacayán - El odio como alegato") 

"Los niños inmigrantes encarcelados por Trump no sufrirían esa crueldad, si fuesen blancos. La gente ya hubiese tomado la Casa Blanca" (Yeya Pérez, una vecina del barrio)