Riddling (with) Riddled Embodiments

Abstract

Educator, youth, guardian, animal, counsellor, toddler, best friend, coach, and bully—bodies and embodiments assemble, congeal, and explode as the emergent and contingent matters of being and thinking with young people collide with the stringent, evidence-based rational dictates of the predominant Eurowestern machinery by which we are often taught to understand children and adolescents. In such a space, embodiments “are”—embodiments are not a thing, not an experiment, not uncertain; they are archetypes, sturdy characterizations, and firm conceptualizations of the body. Trapped in this vein of theorizing the (human) body, our ways of knowing embodiments are strong armed into clarity through traditionalist science and psychology, and are enduringly loyal to a singular, stable definition of the body. Amid such structuring of the body, embodiments exist in the midst of a highly regulated material-discursive milieu that skilfully holds embodiments at arm’s length from creativity, potentiality, and liminality.