Bodies Yearning on the Borders of Becoming

Abstract

Signaling scholarship from Laurel Richardson, this essay is a performative reflection on three embodied axes of social difference as articulated through autoethnographic expressions of experience: a man who suffers from gynocomastia, a woman who suffers with Crohn’s Disease, and another women who was a chronic self-injurer. Each performative reflection serves as a vulnerable act of self-disclosure, resistance, and control. Each, according to Richardson, is a product of critical discernment that cannot be separated from the producer, the mode of production, the method of knowing, and its role as a collective story; displaying an individual’s story by narrativizing the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs. Each story pivots on the construct of bodies yearning on the borders of becoming.