We don’t own our own bodies

Notes on autonomy and other cries

Hiii, sending you all love. On this week’s delight I’m sharing my thoughts on the kidnappings, genocides, and a moment of vulnerability onstage. Onto the delights…

On autonomy

We don’t own our own bodies

We don’t own our own bodies

We don’t own our own bodies

That thought has been replaying in my mind repeatedly after I saw the video of Rumeysa Ozturk’s abduction. Rumeysa Ozturk is a PhD student at Tufts University who was abducted by ICE for writing an op-ed demanding Tufts University end its complicity with genocide in Palestine. Rumeysa didn’t force someone to write or read that op-ed at gunpoint. She wrote that op-ed with her own body, spirit and, mind because in her soul she knows murdering people to steal their land is immoral. However, the government said you are not allowed to use your body to write thoughts we don’t agree with, hence we will come and steal your body from you and your community.

The government is telling Rumeysa and all of us, if we dare to use our bodies to do anything the government doesn’t like, the real owners of our bodies will come and take our bodies away.

The real owners being the government.

If we, and I mean we as a collective, had bodily autonomy, there would be no world where someone could kidnap us from the streets and nobody stops them. In fact, if anybody were to try to stop the kidnapping, that anybody would also be kidnapped.

Of course it’s not surprising a state built on theft would legalize the theft of bodies and land. However, I think sometime along the way people forgot or confused this brutal state for a democracy. Or worse, there are people who support a ruthless state because the cruelty benefits them.

On the confusion of an autocracy for a democracy: The state has played a significant role in redefining freedom. The foundational lie of this country is that freedom is domination. You’re free insofar you are able to dominate others. People believe this lie. They seek to be overseers (i.e., bosses). Why would you want to be the boss of someone else’s life? Why do you want to wield power over someone’s destiny? ‘Cause you are a winner! The American dream says only losers want to love others and be poor.

I remember one of the conversations in White Lotus when the woman tells her lorazepam-induced husband that their daughter needs to fear poverty as much everyone in their social class does. What is poverty other than the state legitimizing the disposal of one’s body? How does one become poor? Who prevents them from accessing what they need for survival? The state! The state deprives our bodies because it owns our bodies. If the state doesn’t own our bodies, then what right does it have to decide which bodies deserve to be housed and clothed.

Also, White Lotus is extremely pro-colonialism, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Nonetheless, if what this country calls freedom is actually domination, of course we don’t own our own bodies.

I was talking to my husband the other day on the preposterous level of unfreedom we endure, being so severe to the extent the state can assign our genders. The state, an institution with no knowledge of who you are, what your daily thoughts are, has given itself the power to tell you who you are and who you cannot be. You cannot be you as long as the state deems it unacceptable; you cannot exist unless the state ordains you the right to exist. Your body is a vessel to serve the interest of the class hierarchy constructed and enforced by the state. When you are no longer serving the hierarchy of dominance created by the state, you learn who really owns your body, and it’s not you.

So our bodies don’t belong to us and they never will as long as an institution that has the power to “ordain” and “retract” rights exists.

I wrote this poem when I let the sadness engulf me.