The Body (Often) Tells the Truth
When your frustrated gestures and missteps and bodily distress signals are read as a sign of your incompetence, not a problem with the world, you’re often being done an injustice
“It’s open,” he said, just a touch impatiently. I had just tried the handle of the car I was about to get into. The driver, my dear friend, following a few paces behind me, thought he had unlocked it. It had relocked automatically, though, as I found when I tried the handle.
It was only later that it struck me: rather than assume that I was competent, and that the door I had just tried unsuccessfully to open was indeed locked, my friend instead assumed that I was suddenly incapable of opening an ordinary car door—a car I’d ridden in repeatedly, and a door which there is no special trick to opening.
I say this not to call my friend out—we laughed about it afterwards, and he saw my point immediately—but to reflect on a phenomenon that is much more widespread than I think I’d previously appreciated. A woman’s thwarted action or inaction or misstep is taken to reflect her incompetence, rather than a problem with the world. Our frustrated attempts or our gestures suggest that there’s something wrong—a locked door, or any number of more metaphorical barriers to entry. But instead of our bodily signals being taken to be reliable, we’re believed to be flubbing the most basic of tasks or failing to perform actions we can execute reliably.
This phenomenon is closely related to—or perhaps a variant of—testimonial injustice, theorized by the philosopher Miranda Fricker. In her treatment, a woman’s word is not taken as seriously as it deserves to be, due to pernicious stereotypes about her lack of competence or trustworthiness. She is assumed to be ignorant, or a liar, due to the operation of sexism and misogyny. Similar points apply, of course, to any marginalized group subject to intellectual and moral biases: those who are non-white, poor, disabled, queer, trans, and, I would add, fat, are all subject to testimonial injustice on the regular.
Here, I’m pointing to the possibility of a related form of injustice that doesn’t involve testimony—at least, not a spoken or written or signed form of communication. (Is it a sign of the ableism of philosophy that we prioritize and center the spoken form of testimony in particular?) Instead, our bodies communicate something about the world: a locked door, in my example. But the evidence signaled by our bodies—a failed attempt, a frustrated gesture, a misstep—is taken to be a sign of our incompetence, rather than reflective of a true material or structural barrier.
It has to be said that it’s often privileged men who leap to the assumption of female incompetence—my lovely friend included. Again, my aim here, as ever, is not to call out individuals or air largely non-existent grudges, but to point to gendered patterns that are harmful and irrational. The other day, I told another—similarly lovely, similarly privileged—male friend about the idea I’m mulling over here. He reflected, with admirable honesty, that he’d been going on evening walks with his wife, and noticed she often tripped on the sidewalk near their house. He had chalked it up to her being, by her own admission, a little clumsy. It wasn’t until they randomly switched places one night—with his walking on the left, and her on the right—that my friend realized the true explanation for her tripping: there was a large divot in the sidewalk. No wonder she had been stumbling there repeatedly, he thought as he tried to right himself—and, unlike her, fell anyway.
It’s important to be clear here about what I’m claiming and what I’m not. Are bodies invariably reliable guides to the world, and our actions always to be assumed competent until proven otherwise? Of course not. As I would be the first to admit, I am not, as it happens, a particularly mechanically astute person. There are all sorts of quotidian tasks that people who know and love me would be justified in assuming I’m messing up, rather than taking my environment to be the issue. But still: opening a car door is most assuredly not beyond me, and my friend shouldn’t have assumed that I was somehow bungling it. And another friend’s wife tripping in the same place every day should have clued him in to the crack in the pavement.
We might also wonder how much someone being read as incompetent can adversely affect their physical and other forms of confidence. Would I be better at fitting keys in locks—something I am in fact embarrassingly bad at—if I’d not been read as even less competent than I am at it on more than one occasion? Would I be less prone to giving up? Would I have greater self-efficacy? Not to mention simply more practice at the art of the jiggle.
I wonder too: how many women and other people prone to be read as physically incompetent bill themselves as clumsy to preempt the world’s harsh and monolithic judgment about their acumen? And those subject to multiple forms of marginalization are especially prone to being misread as incompetent, in multiple ways, as work by the philosopher Kristie Dotson has brilliantly highlighted.
The point remains that, oftentimes, our bodies are reliable guides to what’s happening. Taking someone to be competent, and their environment or condition to be the problem, is hence often a good default assumption, both epistemically and morally. This, in other words, is a way to avoid routinely doing people—particularly marginalized people—an injustice.
The examples I’ve given so far are pretty trivial, but there is no shortage of examples of the body being (mis)read as incompetent much more serious in nature. The time my nearly fainting during a medical appointment was blithely ignored by my male doctor, rather than taken to be a symptom—in this case, of inadequate nutrition, when I was deep in disordered eating territory. (He congratulated me for my rapid weight loss, as I recount in Unshrinking.) The time my screams of pain were ignored by a male EMT trying to pull off my riding boot after a horse-riding fall, rather than understood to be a sign I had broken my ankle. The several occasions I can recall when my shaking in fear was taken to be a sign of irrationality and hysteria, rather than the fact I had just been in a dangerous situation.
But if you want the ultimate—and most harrowing possible—example of this phenomenon, read the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom: she recounts that, when pregnant, her bleeding and pain were taken to be a sign of something “bad” she had eaten, and spuriously related to her body size. In fact, she was in preterm labor. She endured horrific pain and ended up tragically losing her baby daughter due to medical neglect borne of racism in its intersection with misogyny. “Everything about the structure of trying to get medical care had filtered me through assumptions of my incompetence” as a Black woman in America, writes Cottom, in Thick: And Other Essays.
Sometimes our bodies testify to the reality that something is broken, or that the world isn’t working as it should be, or that our bodies themselves are in trouble. Among other kinds of testimony, this deserves to be taken seriously.
We often hear these days about the importance of listening to your body, in combating diet culture in particular. This is the message of intuitive eating, a tradition I deeply value and draw on in my forthcoming book on fatphobia. Still, I have to ask: how much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people? If the signs of visceral need or frustration or distress—and simply discomfort—were taken seriously, rather than dismissed out of hand for girls and women, especially non-white ones? How much less might we have to struggle with self-trust if we were vested with trust by other people that our bodies at least typically tell the truth? And they often have something important to say, to the effect that the world is broken or painful or lacking.
Tell me, dear reader, have you ever had the kind of experience I’m getting at in this post, where the message of your body was taken to be unreliable, or irrelevant, rather than a clear indication of a problem? And if you, like me, have subsequently struggled with self-trust, is there an element of being told now to listen to your body that feels slightly scolding—even a bit like victim blaming? Maybe that listening needed to start with other people.
"[H]ow much easier might it be to listen to our bodies if they were trusted first by other people?" THIS!!!!
This essay makes me think about the concept of "impostor syndrome" for professional women or the "confidence gap" for girls. Is it really some kind of faulty thinking (blaming the victim?) or just a logical response to the lived experience of being demeaned, mistrusted, and doubted by others?
I love this AND I'm also thinking about the opposite-- the sort of "hips don't lie" rhetoric of a woman's body, where her sexual availability is supposed to come from her movements, dress, etc. and not from her conscious words. I wonder how these are related? Like, under what conditions are women's bodies thought to be telling the truth of the world and under what circumstances are they thought to be unreliable narrators? From the examples given here, it would appear that the unreliable narration stems from moments of pain, injury, frustration-- in short, places where women are asking for accommodation or aid. As you write so well in your books, women are morally required to be givers, not takers, and so when their bodies are asking for something, this signal is read as incompetence, whilst their bodies supposed "invitations" are always read as being universally extended.