The sentence begins with a metaphor of the body as home. (Clare 11) When I first read it, the idea felt comforting since home feels like safety and belonging. However, the feeling shifts in the next line with “but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies.\u201d (Clare 11) Your body is not just yours because it is never singular. It is shaped by all of the other bodies that surround you and touch you and leave their marks.<\/p>\n
The repetition of “body\/bodies” makes me think about what the body really entails. Instead of a person existing alone (singular) , our existence is always connected to others (collective). The words haunted, strengthened, and underscored make this idea even more refined. Being haunted by other bodies means that we carry our memory, inheritance, or trauma. To be strengthened by other bodies suggests that we support and uplift. To be underscored by other bodies implies others making us feel invisible.<\/p>\n
I love that this passage doesn’t make us imagine the body as a perfect, closed off home. It tells us that the body’s walls are thin and made of relationships, history, and experiences. In some ways, it is an unsettling idea in the sense that we are never alone in our bodies. It does have a reassuring feel that we carry more than just ourselves.<\/p>\n
Thinking of the body as home in this way reshapes how I think of identity. It disagrees with total independence and reminds us that we are always surrounded by others. Living in a body is about living with others.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The sentence begins with a metaphor of the body as home. (Clare 11) When I first read it, the idea felt comforting since home feels like safety and belonging. However, the feeling shifts in the next line with “but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by … Continue reading No Body Lives Alone<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5709,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[344663],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall-2025"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5709"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1414,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1413\/revisions\/1414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/lgbtqlit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}