Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation

By Robyn Henderson-Espinoza

The body that Robyn Henderson-Espinoza inhabits is a nonbinary body, a trans body, a body in two races--and a body continually in discovery. Theirs is also a body on sojourn invested in experience, body understanding, and engagement in and for human thriving. Henderson-Espinoza relates coming into a new body story, beginning with the deep emotional work of connecting the abstract intelligence of their mind with their body's intelligence, to explore the relationship between living and becoming, doing and listening.

Combining that deep listening and living with their work in activism, Body Becoming offers us a way of understanding the body beyond constructions--political or medical-industrial-complex defined--toward cultivating the body as important in our endeavors to build a more inclusive vision for democracy. Mixing memoir and faith, somatics theory and body practice, Henderson-Espinoza steers us through territory both familiar and difficult--as we discover embodiment as the primary place of deep wisdom, where culture shifts originate and materialize--and a better world becomes, as we too become.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781506473581

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Praise for Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation

"In Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza does remarkable work in translating so many of the fears of marginalized folks directly related to how our bodies are perceived in wider society. Their focus on the complexity of presentation reveals a critical truth to readers who may be new to these conversations: that there is ultimately no way our bodies can be hidden from the bigotry that targets our existence. I cannot recommend this book enough. It is essential reading for anyone hoping to engage in a good-faith effort to dismantle systems of oppression."

—Charlotte Clymer, transgender activist, military veteran, press secretary

"Robyn Henderson-Espinoza’s Body Becoming is pure gift. The story and wisdom of this nonbinary, transgender, Latinx theologian on the autistic spectrum presses squarely into the center of what it means to be embodied. In Body Becoming, Henderson-Espinoza takes readers along on their journey to understand, accept, and embrace embodied living. We all need this book. And in the midst of the COVID pandemic, we are ready for it. Get this book."

—Lisa Sharon Harper, president and founder of Freedom Road and author of The Very Good Gospel and Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and The World—and How to Repair It All

"In Body Becoming, the wonderful Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza leads people like me—people stuck in their heads—toward a fuller experience of personal embodiment with wisdom, intelligence, and candor. But more than that, Dr. Robyn shows us how everything—really, everything—is somehow linked to our relationship with bodies, both human and corporate, spiritual, political, and otherwise. To say this is a brilliant book about embodiment is underselling it. It’s really a brilliant book about everything."

—Pete Holmes, comedian, host of You Made It Weird, and author of Comedy Sex God

"Robyn Henderson-Espinoza has written a brave, intellectually astute, and artistic book in Body Becoming. In a time when so much of theological exploration devalues the body and destroys it, Henderson-Espinoza takes seriously the word that we must have life and life in its fullness. It is theory. It is poetry. It is love. It is witness. Somehow Robyn has created theological beauty that has learned how to witness and celebrate and embrace and make whole. This book is more than a freedom journal or active theology—it is a prayer, a sermon, and a love note to so many people trying to get free."

—Danté Stewart, author of Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle

"The disembodied nature of modern society offers both personal and societal peril. In Body Becoming, Dr. Robyn holds these two perspectives in balance, offering the reader a bridge from knowing their body to making room for everyone else to do the same. This book is both life-changing and world-changing at once."

—Mike McHargue, author of Finding God in the Waves: How I Lost My Faith and Found It Again Through Science and You’re a Miracle (and a Pain in the Ass): Embracing the Emotions, Habits, and Mystery That Made You You

Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza’s body is a vast terrain of storied longings, traumatic memories, and troubling tensions. You would think that they would want to do everything to get away from it, to renounce it. Instead, by embracing this intelligent territory, they redeem it from its significatory internment as a fait accompli, electing instead to think alongside Deleuzo-Guattarian philosophies, relational cosmologies, liberation theologies, and the soft secretions of their own compelling narratives of struggle and emergence to weave an account of the body that is simultaneously strange, emancipatory, and—yes—joyful. I might be so bold as to prophesy that by the time you are done reading Robyn’s book, you’d walk past the mirror to look outside the window—just to catch a glimpse of your face.

—Bayo Akomolafe, executive director and chief curator of the Emergence Network and author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home

"Body Becoming: A Path to Our Liberation is an eye-opening, powerful book. In sharing honestly about their own understandings of their body and detailing the wisdoms and challenges they’ve encountered while blazing a new path toward embodiment, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza tracks, deconstructs, and reframes humanity’s relationships with our bodies. Vulnerable, provocative, and freeing, Body Becoming will help you see your body like never before and will empower a deep connection with the living, breathing entity that is you."

—Matthew Paul Turner, #1 New York Times bestselling author of What Is God Like? and When God Made You

Even before the Spanish mystic Teresa of Ávila reminded us that Christ has no body on earth but ours, embodiment has been a core reality of Christian spirituality—but it’s confounding how many forces conspire to keep us alienated from our own bodies and from each other’s. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza writes vulnerably and powerfully to invite us all to make the necessary reconnections with our bodies, with one another, with God, so that we may truly embody justice, freedom, and democracy. Their vision is a vision of hope, truth, healing, and love. Read this book, and join the revolution!

—Carl McColman, author of The Big Book of Christian Mysticism: The Essential Guide to Contemplative Spirituality and Eternal Heart: The Mystical Path to a Joyful Life

"In Body Becoming, Dr. Robyn Henderson-Espinoza invites you into a rich conversation about bodies. Robyn’s reflections on a lifetime of embodied becoming will stimulate you to reconsider your relationship to your human body, and to the social relationships into which our human bodies plunge us as part of the body politic. Some books give you vital information. Some ask important questions. Some help you see from a new perspective. This book offers all of the above, plus this: it invites you to feel in your body your interconnection with all the bodies, human and otherwise, in which we live, move, and have our being. A beautiful book from a beautiful human being."

—Brian D. McLaren, author of Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It

Body Becoming

A Path to Our Liberation

Robyn Henderson-Espinoza, PhD

Broadleaf Books

Minneapolis

BODY BECOMING

A Path to Our Liberation

Copyright © 2022 Robyn Henderson-Espinoza. Printed by Broadleaf Books, an imprint of 1517 Media. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Email [e-mail] or write to Permissions, Broadleaf Books, PO Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440-1209.

Scripture quotations are from New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Published in association with Cathleen Falsani, www.sinnersandsaintsconsulting.com.

Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-7357-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-7358-1

While the author and 1517 Media have confirmed that all references to website addresses (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing, URLs may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

To every body who is awakening in these moments of catastrophe, confusion, and chaos, and to every body that has endured catastrophe, confusion, and chaos. May we find one another in a new reflective light so that we sojourn the paths to our shared liberation. I am not free until we are all free. If that resonates with you, then this book is for you.

There exists 1,000 unbreakable links between each of us & everything else. The farthest star & the mud at our feet. . . . The pine tree, the leopard, the river & ourselves—we are at risk together, or on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.

—Mary Oliver

Democracy is the road to socialism. . . . The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle for democracy.

—Karl Marx

We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal [and that] intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.

—Gloria Anzaldúa

Contents

Prólogo

I Rupture

What Is a Body?

Whose Bodies Count?

II Becoming

Becoming Body

Bodies and Embodiment

III Difference

The Journey to Becoming Embodied

Bodies, Violence, and Embodiment

Mind, Body, Skin, Scars

IV Repetition

The Healing Power of Somatics

The Politics of Bodies in Motion

Embodiment as a Vision for Democracy

Epílogo

A More Perfect Union: Stories of Embodiment in Community

Reflection and Somatic Offering

Acknowledgments

Prólogo

When I first began to explore this book idea, my proposal to the publisher came from a deep place within my own interior life—my own developing relationship with my body, my own coming to grips with ways of being that were disembodied due to how I was socialized, my work in academia and church communities—while also meeting cultural biases toward the body. I wanted to lift up the messiness of the stories of bodies, including my own coming into my Trans body and how it felt so liberating.

By the time I sat down to write this book, we were living in a global health pandemic and facing a great amount of uncertainty around the existential threat to ourselves, our livelihoods, and so much more. My writing necessarily entered a new phase of its own becoming as the United States saw an acceleration of anti-Black racism, police violence, and incompetence on the federal level. I knew I had to write from an embodied place; from my own unstable standpoint that is working class (at times working poor), Queer, Trans, and Latinx; and from the life of an endless hustle to make ends meet and imagine the world I long to inhabit. The uncertainty of all that was emerging asked something of me, something specific and particular. The returning and repetitive question that swirled around in my mind and perhaps in my body was this: What are the conditions for embodiment, and who am I as a curious intellectual activist who longs for an embodied life?

What emerged after that year of writing is this book, which weaves together my own coming into my Trans body with a critical look at which bodies count in this country and why this is so—even as it seemed like the world itself entered into a new phase of its own becoming and in some ways its own embodying of radical difference. What I mean is that I was already in my Trans body before writing, but I was not embodying my Transness until I started to trace the landscape of my Transness and leaned into embodiment.

What you will find in this book are stories, recalled memories, and reflections informed by my own intimations of politicized theology, ethics, and imaginations for another possible democracy, all informed by my deep struggle and my hope against hopelessness. I write about my own complex history of violence and the ways trauma impacted me in material ways. I write as an exercise of imagining another possible world through a rearticulation of democracy, beginning, always, in the body. I didn’t set out to write a book on democracy, but the more the United States began to reveal how precarious our current democracy is, the more I felt compelled to consider definitions of democracy and varying critiques of democracy within the field of political theory to help me rethink democracy. I also write as a theologian and as a storyteller who believes we have to imagine our own being rooted in our material bodies so that democracy can also be embodied rather than remaining an ecosystem of transactions.

This book also traces the contours of the philosophy of becoming, which has been central to my entire academic project and is something we can all learn to embody, if only we can get out of ideas we hold on to around mechanistic change. Becoming is rooted in relationality and asks us how a turn toward a generous and emergent relationality might accelerate processes of becoming that help us pivot out of mechanistic change and into a relationality that might actually save us. While I work to translate a lot of the philosophy of becoming and occasionally eclipse some aspects of becoming, in this book, I work to capture the central pieces to becoming related to bodies, my body, our bodies, our democratic bodies, and our collective bodies yearning for not only social healing but collective liberation. In the end, there is always more to say. But this book is a start. And points of departure are always important, as they nurture our roots.

When I take another look at these chapters now, I’m aware that a kind of formula emerges within these themes: bodies, becoming, motion, democracy. These four things may help us rethink our moment and cast a vision for another possible world. After all, it is the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, who inspired me to think about another possible world through their own ecosystem that is rooted in liberating themselves from capitalism and the Global North.

The four major themes of this book, listed as sections, are rupture, becoming, difference, and repetition. These four themes are inspired by the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, a French postwar philosopher, and Félix Guattari, a French psychiatrist. They envisioned a philosophy and theories that overhauled continental philosophy, specifically the field of ontology, and their overhauling of philosophy impacts how we think, produce knowledge, and act in the world. When I discovered their work in my PhD program while living in Denver, Colorado, I was immediately drawn in, mesmerized by the way they wrote and collaborated with such skill. I sought out all the books they authored. They collaborated on many projects, working in community, and I found their work compelling. Their work helped me imagine another possible world through the lens of what I call the politics of radical difference. My dissertation, on the materiality of the body, used the works of Deleuze and Guattari and the works of Gloria Anzaldúa. Each of these four themes can also be found in and throughout Anzaldúa’s works, especially when she writes about her own body, the body of the borderlands, and the people who emerge from liminal space, which she theorizes as nepantla, a Nahuatl term that means in-between or middle space. The inclusion of these four themes helps guide the book into deeper folds of becoming, more compelling versions of embodiment, and helps imagine what is truly possible with an embodied life. This book echoes much of what Ignacio Ellacuría wrote about being contemplative in the way of justice. I am thinking about a kind of embodied life that compels us all toward a life of contemplation for the sake of justice.

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We live in a world that is deeply composed of motion—people move on a global scale and create and re-create borders—and as we come into contact with these folds of necessary change, we see how related bodies, becoming, motion, and democracy actually are. My hope is that this book extends into a somatic awareness that what it takes for another possible world is a deepened awareness of our individual and collective felt sense—a life together, if you will, a politics of being en conjunto, a term I heard frequently growing up in Texas. Being en conjunto is an orientation to(ward) togetherness. Conjoined in a life together, if you will, so that our hyperindividualized orientations don’t catapult us into a wayward life. There is so much pain on a global scale right now, and we desperately need visions for another possible world. This is why it’s important to lean into the process of becoming and develop a somatic—an embodied—practice so that we can actually be in relationship with ourselves and with the world around us. So many of us have lost our habitat to gentrification; we no longer can afford to own land or even a house and no longer hear soundscapes of birds singing in the morning nor hear the trees whistle as the branches sway in harmony. How can we be in relationship with ourselves and with one another when a scarcity mentality is our guiding light? After all, many of us are emerging after being quarantined for almost two years, having lived through a global health pandemic (that still continues as deadly variants emerge), watching from our mobile devices and our couches as the coronavirus ravished the entire world. There are other struggles that we are confronting in these moments that have been ongoing for centuries, like anti-Black racism, the war on the poor and working class, and how to love our neighbors south of the border who desperately need a place to call home but are not welcomed because of our militarized borders, along with refugees in the Middle East needing a place to call home after Babylon, our US empire, invaded their countries. Pain exists on a global scale, and we desperately need another possible world.

An emergence back into the world requires us to participate in its becoming and in its embodied difference. How might having an orientation to a somatic practice accelerate new visions for another possible world? If we don’t do this work, we won’t survive ourselves or our impossible world.

Not everyone’s language is grounded in theories that inform theological, ethical, or sociopolitical realities, but I hope you will bring your own language to this exploration, understanding the specific articulation here, as I believe that all theology is ethics and every theology is meant to be lived out in material bodies; our movements, too, need to embody deep practices of theological and philosophical reflection so that our movements are more than transactions for justice making and actually create conditions for embodied practices of material folds of justice