Assigning inherent “goodness” (or otherwise positivity) to the body is well-intentioned but ultimately harmful essentialism...
And, dare I say, its ultimate logical conclusion (distant and unintentional as it may be) is eugenics.
Disclaimer: Not all chronically ill/disabled people hate our bodies. There’s no universal experience of embodiment for ANYONE, much less for people whose bodies aren’t normative, but the truth is that a lot of us DO hate our bodies and our feelings regarding our bodies deserve to be respected and acknowledged.
On the one hand I am very glad to see glimpses of people trying to move their politics around the body away from desirability/fuckability.
However, this feel good sentimental narrative that we should be kind to our bodies BECAUSE our bodies are “good” to us is bio-essentialist rhetoric, which can only universally apply to abled bodies (and ONLY through assigning the body separately sentient moral agency).
There are millions of people whose bodies aren’t “good” to them. Millions of people whose bodies are kinda trying to kill themselves, even! Despite that objective fact, all of us still deserve to have our bodies be treated with kindness and care.
My body isn’t “good”, but… Does my body HAVE to be “good”? Why does anybody’s body have to be “good”?
When you insist that the reason my body deserves care and kindness is a criteria I can’t live up to (ie. ”your body does its best to keep you alive and healthy, so you should repay the favor by caring for it!”), all I hear is that I don’t deserve said care or kindness, or that I simply don’t count, like I’m not here or like my presence here is an irrelevant, insignificant, inconvenient, bleak outlier due to the reality of my body.
In order to insist that all bodies are universally and essentially “good”, you have to erase the existence of bodies like mine. You can choose to erase us symbolically/rhetorically, or you can choose to erase us literally.
Now, do I think that people who’re trying to spread the ideal that all bodies are universally, essentially “good”, want to kill disabled people? NO. Of course not. It’s obvious that it’s a noble - if highly misguided - sentiment.
But the thing about eugenics regarding disabled people, is that it comes, at least in great deal, from considering our mere existence as an inconvenience, including a narrative inconvenience.
Every time a chronically ill/disabled person tries to bring up the fact that we exist whenever healthy able-bodied people are having these Feel Good fests over the inherent “goodness” they’re assigning as a blanket universal trait to all bodies, we’re relegated to a distasteful disclaimer that able-bodied people are begrudgingly acknowledging only so we’ll finally shut up, to then shove us right back under the rug again after it’s done.
We are inconvenient to this notion, and when disabled people become too inconvenient to abled society, we’re erased; at first symbolically, but sooner or later, materially, even if “only” by neglecting us.
The solution to our human reality exposing this platonic, liberal, bio-essentialist narrative for the fallacy that it is, isn’t to force us to deny our reality for your personal comfort or convenience. The solution is to build a narrative that doesn’t contradict reality AND still offers all human beings and our bodies kindness and care in our diversity.
The body isn’t a moral agent, it’s a physical entity that simply exists. It didn’t ask to exist, it doesn’t necessarily try to perpetuate its own existence, and just how (other) animals aren’t good or bad, neither is the human body. The human body doesn’t need to be actively “good” or “kind” in order to deserve care and kindness.
Also, not to be rude, but I refuse to woobify my relationship to my own body. I will not pretend that I don’t feel utter despair regarding the body I was involuntarily cursed with until the day I die just to not make able-bodied people uncomfortable or to be more palatable to them and their world-view. I did that for far too long and all it got me was making both my mental AND PHYSICAL health way, way worse.
tl;dr The human body isn’t “good” or “bad”. It simply is, and by the mere fact that it exists it should be tended to, no matter what. Assigning moral value and agency to a body is bio-essentialism. Hanging the right of a body to care and kindness on an arbitrary criteria gives footing to said right to care and kindness being taken away if said body doesn’t meet this criteria that is wrongly assumed to be universal/inherent. The body doesn’t have to be fuckable or productive to deserve care and kindness, and it also doesn’t have to be “good”. It just has to Be.
