The (research) Body Is Not an Apology: an onto-epistemological refusal of body shame in academia

Abstract

Academia teaches us to hate our bodies, to acknowledge the fleshy organ encased behind bone and swimming in blood, while demonizing the skin that protects. We apologize for its existence: designing studies that minimize the presence of being, generating data but hiding the body that collects, writing research in a way that attempts to atone for using hands to create. Thus, the focus of this article is a consideration of how we might reject body shame in academia, and instead, embrace a stance that demands the acknowledgement and upliftment of bodies. To do so, I consider Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology as an ontoepistemological frame for understanding how embodied research practices generate new forms of academic storytelling that refuse the traditional narrative of disembodied objectivity.