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BARBARA KRUGER Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989. Photographic silkscreen on vinyl, 112 x 112 in. (284.5 x 284.5 cm) Courtesy the artist, the Broad Art Foundation, and Sprüth Magers.
The image became a well-known political symbol for women’s rights.
Bodies are not just skin, muscles, and bones, I realized—they are political battle- grounds. How was my disabled body linked to those of women fighting for reproductive freedom? Could disability be an important political identity rather than a fleshy glitch? This marked a turning point in my orienta- tion toward design.
Being embodied is a process of constant becoming. We are always either moving toward or away from embodied presence. When we are closer, we feel connected
to our sentient selves, fully in our bodies, aware of our feelings and emotions, fully alive. When we are distanced, we may feel trapped in our thoughts, alienated, ready to snap. Centering is at the heart of the practice of being and becoming embodied. Coming back to our center opens up space in our bodies, affording more options for our actions and decisions.
The first time I was introduced to center- ing, my teacher, Thomas Loxley Rosenberg, asked me, “What would it take to live life
through your legs?” At first thought, there is nothing particularly significant about legs. Stomach, arms, feet—all the same. What he was suggesting, however, was that I try spending less time in my head. Designers often talk about “knowing
their users.” How could they achieve that without first knowing themselves? Cen- tering helps us come home to embodied presence and, as artist and organizer Kimi Hanauer writes, “embrace groundlessness, multiplicity, fluidity, and change.” In the process, we can become designers who are more comfortable with complexity and ambiguity.
SOURCES April Coughlin, “Teaching on Wheels: Bringing a Disability Experience into the Classroom,” in International Perspectives on Teaching with Disability: Overcoming Obstacles and Enriching Lives, ed. Michael S. Jeffress (New York Routledge, 2018); A. Wagner et al., “Centering Embodied Learning in Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy,” Teaching in Higher Education, 2015, DOI: 10.1080/13562517.2014.993963;
Kimi Hanauer >kimihanauer.com/calling-all-denizens- boston; Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Rebirth Garments >rebirthgarments.com/about.
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