Helen Ngo
Stony Brook, State University of New York, USA
I am (not) in front of my body: racialisation and the lived body in Merleau-Ponty
In the Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty writes, “I am not in front of my body, I am in my body, or rather I am my body.” But how does this cohere with the experience of those whose bodies are racialised or experienced as “racially other”? As many have argued, the racialised body is the visible and overdetermined body, and in an important sense, experienced precisely as being in front of itself. In this paper, I will explore the relation between Merleau-Ponty’s embodied account of first person perspective, and the third person perspective supplied here by one’s social and historical milieu.
As the case of racialised bodies shows us, the experience of the lived body is not always marked by the kind of transparency and fluidity described by Merleau-Ponty. Not only do racialised bodies ‘run up’ against our own returned images, that is to say, find ourselves at the end of a white gaze, but it is also the case that we learn to ‘see’ according to this gaze. This in turn, provokes us to think about how intersubjectivity plays an important role in the constitution of first person embodied perspective.