Embodied Temporalities, Proprioceptive Becoming

DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION Title: Embodied Temporalities, Proprioceptive Becoming Abstract: Transitional processes are often articulated as a process of coming home to the body, or restoring the body to a wholeness it never had. Thinking through transition in terms of restoration sets up a paradox of memory, where transition re-members bodies to a form they always expressed, but never had. I argue that the concept of proprioceptive memory provides a resolution for this paradox, where bodies have embodied memory based not on physical appearance, but on proprioceptive muscle memory. Through proprioceptive sensories, bodies develop a memory of movement that indexes to the muscle’s individual pattern of relaxation and tension as bodies move through space. Because every body has a unique anatomical structure, the resulting patterns of movement produce temporalities specific to each body. As such, proprioception offers a nonlinear continuity of embodiment based on the rhythms of movement produced by the everyday concatenations of trans* embodiments. All sensories are relational embodiments produced in the intra-action of materiality, where the embodied temporalities produced in proprioceptive becomings are part of a becoming of materiality, or the intra-relation and dynamic variation of matter. As such, I show that trans* embodiments and their associated proprioceptive sensories are entangled in matter’s affective processes of becoming. The temporalities produced by these affective materialities create a present that is an always embodied, affectively overfull past-future becoming. © reese simpkins 2016

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DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION The title of my talk today is “Embodied Temporalities, Proprioceptive Becomings,” which is a way of saying that I am interested in developing a framework through which to conceptualize the relationship between embodiment and time. More specifically I am interested in developing a of “trans*time” in particular. It makes sense to start by talking about temporality in general and trans* temporalities in particular...In an article on trans- temporalities, Jenny Sundén argues that gender is a temporal form, where “transitions in gender make the transitional nature of time…particularly clear” (2015: 212). My approach to this topic takes seriously trans* scholarship's expansive conceptualisation of embodiment to include space, time, and social context. Where scholars like Susan Stryker, Eva Hayward, and Lukas Crawford suggest that embodiment, in general, and trans* embodiments, in particular, incorporate spatial, temporal, and affective dimensions. Moreover, the time and space produced through these embodied sensories are not the linear, ‘chrononormative' time that underlines much of human existence—a point which I will develop in greater detail below. My starting point for this work was thinking through accounts of transition that conceptualize it in terms of returning the body to a form it always expressed, but never had. And while, as Nael Bhanji makes clear, we have every reason to be skeptical of the colonial impulses of home, I want to think through the temporality of these accounts of return that so ring so true for so many of us, yet so contrary to normative logics. Another example of temporal discrepancy are those of us who change sex post-childhood and reread our gender identity backward imposing current pronouns on past histories—how can we come to terms with these seeming illogicalities? I would like to suggest that these temporal paradoxes are more than a rewriting of the historical record, but rather evidence of a complex temporality, where future activities rewrite supposedly settled pasts. Trans* temporalities emerge from the tangibility of material embodiment. However, this materiality operates according to a nonlinear framework, where past, present, and future commingle. As such, the experiences highlighted in the questions I ask above are embodied past-present-future becomings that occur within an affective dimension of materiality. In this conceptualisation, trans* temporalities are nonlinear temporalities directly linked with embodied processes of open-ended becoming. I think most of us in this room would agree that hormones drastically impact the body. In fact, hormonal fluctuations impact our sense of smell, taste, touch, sight, and even hearing. I began to wonder with the massive changes brought on by hormonal and morphological shifts experienced by the trans* people engaged in these processes—how it is that these shifts are experienced however dubiously termed as a “homecoming?” How is it that my own body feels more my own post transition than it ever did before the massive changes prior to transition? What continuities of embodiment connect my current body with its previous incarnation? In beginning to work through these questions, I realized that the body’s proprioceptive sensories might be one way of connecting this past-present-future enmeshment; although, I 2

DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION admit that the proprioceptive elements of this paper are very preliminary. I’ve long been interested in this subject, but have only very recently been able to devote time to the initial stages of research. As I was preparing to give the presentation, one of the observations about proprioception that caught my attention and that is particularly apt for my argument today is that “Persons who have severe proprioceptive disorders will often report feeling disembodied, but they still talk of themselves as missing their own body.” (Fridland, 2011) In other words, while the self remains intact despite the disruption of proprioceptive sensories, these disruptions result in a feeling of being disembodied. This reminded me of the social dysphoria and dislocation experienced by trans* people in accounts of trans* peoples’ relationship with their bodies, especially pre-transition. Even as we experience these disjunctures, there is still a sense of self within the body. As such, proprioceptive continuity appears to be related to the connection between trans* people and their bodies. So what exactly is proprioception? Simply speaking, proprioception is the body’s sense of muscle memory as it moves through space and encounters objects. It is linked to our ability to navigate space—for example, your ability to move through a familiar room with your eyes closed and not bump things is enabled by proprioception—the pattern of muscle relaxation and contraction that is indexed uniquely to your physiology. So proprioception very much has to do with memory and your ability to situate your body in space—it is actually the basis of any cartographic or mapping abilities we have. It is also linked to our sense of balance and our ability to remain in positions like standing or sitting. Proprioception is about knowledge of the position and angle of our limbs as well as their movement through space. It also has a complex interaction with the traditional five senses that hasn’t quite been figured out. Certainly, the proprioceptive memory it takes to grasp an object, for example, is linked with your sense of touch—is the object slippery, rough—how hard do you need to grasp as a result? And also your sense of sight—is the object moving—how will this impact your grasp? But we are not really sure how this interaction occurs—they’ve done some fascinating experiments on this, which I am happy to discuss if people are interested (rubber glove example), but suffice it to say that those people who are interested in isolating each particular element in proprioceptive awareness don’t have so-called hard facts as yet. Like many of the body’s sensories, proprioception is both consciousness and nonconscious. Most of us, have a large amount of proprioceptive processing that goes on nonconsciously–if we had to consciously process every part of our movement from grasping an object to the muscles used for standing and sitting, our consciousness would overload. This privilege of nonconscious proprioception is not the case for everyone, and physical therapy with stroke patients, for example, involves bringing certain body parts into conscious awareness to retrain them and then allowing that training to pass into nonconsciousness as the body relearns. For some, however these impairments never allow proprioception to fade into the background.

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DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION Interestingly, there is some evidence to show that babies learn proprioceptively as opposed to visually. If you’ve ever watched an infant learning to grasp or reach out and touch something, you will notice the jerkiness of their actions as their body learns the proprioceptive force necessary to reach for, touch, and manipulate an object. As we master these skills, this concentrated focus recedes into the background as part of our nonconscious everyday bodily activity. Proprioceptive movements are unique to each body as part of its skeletal, muscular relationality. Moreover, the underlying uniqueness of corporeal materiality also means that bodies are producing their own set of temporalities—the time it takes to navigate, to reach, to grasp, to orient in space is all tied to that body’s unique proprioceptive sensory. So the body operates with a very different temporal framework than normative chronological time, or what Elizabeth Freeman calls “chrononormativity.” And Freeman’s work is a useful starting point for me to begin bringing in social sphere. She uses chrononormativity to refer to a biopolitical process through which institutionalised, chronological time becomes somatic fact. Chrononormativity orients “human bodies towards maximum productivity,” (3) where bodies who master the cultural imperative of time are naturalised as normal inhabitants of the socio-political sphere. I would point out that chrononormativity disciplines or standardizes the disparate temporalities of our various embodiments, rendering uniqueness into seconds, minutes, hours. It also standardizes time throughout the life course. As such, in the contemporary context, the chrononormativities of neoliberalism govern patterns of work and leisure as well as our intimate and procreative relations more broadly. Chrononormativity, then, is very much wrapped up in the correct sexual expressions at the appropriate time—certain bodies are permitted to have sex at certain ages, there is an age for marriage, and for procreation. So there is a social dimension to developing appropriate temporalities, which overcode the body’s own proprioceptively influenced temporalities—one only needs to think of the experiences of “night owls” to know that if your body operates outside of business hours, accessing social spaces becomes quite difficult. I mention this example particularly, because there is a link between proprioception and the body’s circadian rhythms. Some bodies simply cannot develop normative temporalities, and certainly there is a strong link here to work in Disability Studies, like that of Alexandre Baril, that, in the context of crip time, highlight the normative construction of disabled bodies as “wasting time.” Moreover, there is a tension between the conscious features of proprioception and the nonconscious ones. This has perplexed some of the philosophically oriented scholars I've been reading. In particular, in his foundational 1995 work on proprioception, Brian O'Shaughnessy writes that “unless we are to embrace the improbable idea that two qualitatively different kinds of perception go on simultaneously all the time, one vastly complex and nearly subliminal, the other selective and accessible to memory centers, there seems to be no alternative but to abandon the doctrine of comprehensive detailed proprioception.” (as cited in Fridland, 2011)

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DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION More recently, Ellen Fridland (2011) has suggested that we must indeed accept these two different versions of proprioception. I would like to suggest that Fridland is correct and there are indeed two disparate versions of proprioception. This doubling of proprioceptive sensories works very well with the conceptualizations of cognition, consciousness and memory outlined by Brian Massumi (2002), where bodies process sensation in two different ways: First, in conscious processing, consciousness eliminates a whole host of sensations in order to linearize and make sense of the wealth of bodily information processed by the body. Second, in nonconscious processing the body operates according to a much different logic of nonlinear resonances and intraactivity. Consciousness is very much about the separation of sensation into distinct sensations that are linearly occurring. Conscious, normative logic says that in order to pick up the pen on the table, I must first visually identify it, than reach to grasp it, before finally holding it in my hand. In contrast to this linearized normative understanding, the nonconsious body operates nonlinearly—studies show that the body is already in motion to touch an object before consciousness comes along and officially tells us to grab the pen. If we translate this kind of thinking into proprioception—and there’s every reason to believe this is a justifiable extension—than nonconscious and conscious proprioception would operate according to different logics—one where conscious proprioception is based on the simplistic linear logic of consciousness, while nonconscious proprioception operates according to the body’s internally generated, unique nonlinear resonance, as various stimuli and the concomitant sensations are transmitted throughout the body. These sensories are part of an affective becoming, whereby our porous embodiments intrarelate with our associated surroundings, which give lie to the myth of the isolated and distinct body as container model underlying normative understandings of embodiment. In this context, “trans*time” refers to the unique, anti-chrononormativity of our nonlinearly expressed proprioceptively enmeshed embodiments. As our bodies’ proprioceptive sensories bring together past-present-future—those nonlinear temporalities to which I referred at the start of my paper—bring into being unique temporal dimensions that highlight the materiality of the becoming of trans* embodiments and their nonlinear continuities. Trans* experiences of, for example, dysphoria are not simply the consequences of living with a trans exclusionary sex/gender system. Dysphoria is also evidence of the complex temporalities inherent in trans* experiences, and has the effect of throwing subjects back in time to previous incarnations of identity. The resultant feeling of being out of place is an indicator of time being out of joint (among other things). Here, the original imposition of sex and gender on the body conflict with its contemporary expression. Past, present, and future commingle in these unpredictable moments, which foist themselves on our bodies at random times and in random places, and surface even years after transition is ostensibly complete. Given the unpredictability of these affective encounters, the nonlinear enmeshments common in trans* experiences 5

DRAFT – DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION highlight the uniqueness of trans* temporalities, where the nonlinearity of sensation, in general, and proprioceptive sensation, in particular, produce temporalities that are unique to each becoming. As these processes produce new entities, the uniqueness of each becomingtrans* transforms the spatial and temporal context in which the becomings occur. Since becoming is never complete, the temporal framework of trans* temporalities enmeshes becoming-trans* in an open-ended past-present-future—the continuity of which is made possible in part by the body’s proprioceptive sensories and the nonlinear temporalities they instantiate. Baril, A. 2016. ‘Doctor, Am I an Anglophone Trapped in a Francophone Body?’ An intersectional analysis of “trans-crip-t time” in ableist, cisnormative, Anglonormative societies. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 10 (2): 155-172. Fidland, E. 2011. The Case for Proprioception. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 10: 521-540. Crawford, L.C., 2008. Transgender Without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification Women’s Studies Quarterly, 36(3), pp.127–143. Freeman, E., 2010. Time Binds Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, Durham: Duke University Press. Hayward, E., 2008. Lessons from a Starfish. In N. Giffney & M. J. Hird, eds. Queering the Non/Human. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, pp. 249–263. Hayward, E., 2010. Spider Sex City. Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 20(3), pp.225–251. Massumi, B., 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Stryker, S., 2008. Dungeon Intimacies: The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism. Parallax, 14(1), pp.36–47. Sundén, J., 2015. Temporalities of Transition: Trans- temporal Femininity in a Human Musical Automaton. Somatechnics, 5(2), pp.197-216.

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