{"id":18459,"date":"2019-04-02T14:39:39","date_gmt":"2019-04-02T14:39:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/?p=18459"},"modified":"2019-06-04T10:31:44","modified_gmt":"2019-06-04T10:31:44","slug":"i-walk-natural-phenomena-and-the-bodies-we-inhabit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/2019\/04\/i-walk-natural-phenomena-and-the-bodies-we-inhabit\/","title":{"rendered":"Out of Body Experience, Meryl Pugh"},"content":{"rendered":"

I love walking.\u00a0 I do it a lot, mostly in the city where I live.\u00a0I love swinging my arms and finding my stride and being surprised by buildings going up or buildings being torn down, by unexpected details on the buildings still standing.\u00a0 I love letting the foot traffic pass me, feeling curious about where people are going, who they\u2019re talking to on their mobile phones.\u00a0I love being ignored, or merely glanced-at in passing.\u00a0 I love finding somewhere to sit when I\u2019m tired, watching the carp in the pond near the Guildhall, the summer pigeons in the park on Baylis Road as they float on their wings in the pond.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There are impediments; sharp handfuls of gravel, bolts, nails.\u00a0 For example:<\/p>\n

\u2018Have you seen him yet?\u2019[1]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018What, no dog with you?\u2019[2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2018Cheeky bastard!\u2019[3]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s still a surprise when it happens, to be reminded that there are some who assume they\u2019re entitled to my attention, that for some I exist merely as an object of the gaze, as something requiring policing.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t stop me walking, not like it used to, when I was younger \u2013 partly because the gravel is far more occasional, these days.\u00a0 Having hit 50 recently, I\u2019m starting to experience the benefits of the older woman\u2019s \u2018cloaking device\u2019. \u00a0As I continue to age, society will increasingly consider me extraneous, irritating, wrong in wanting to be out in the world at all, let alone visible, audible.\u00a0I will still be policed.\u00a0 It may well be a warped sort of celebration, then, to enjoy this flipside of misogyny, but I do, sliding past all the eyes, walking as the invisible woman.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s irritating to even think about this.\u00a0 All I really want to do is step out the door as a person or even just a creature \u2013 and walk amongst my other fellow creatures.\u00a0 To catch the fall of itchy London Plane seed as it heaps in drifts in the Bloomsbury squares.\u00a0 To see if the sloes and the hops appear again in Leytonstone\u2019s late summer.\u00a0 To see how many bluebells this year are Hyacinthoides non-scripta and how many are the Spanish or hybrid varieties, and what day the swifts arrive and whether the greylag geese are rootling about in front of the ITV building.\u00a0 To find white buddleia and green alkanet, to feel my ribcage vibrate at the traffic lights as a driver turns up the volume on theirfavourite track, to catch steel pan music as I lean on a railing and watch the wake of a river boat slop against the concrete.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That wish is not entirely accommodated in a city consisting as it does of structures \u2013 physical or otherwise \u2013 overwhelmingly built with abled, white, straight, cisgender men in mind.\u00a0Nevertheless, I walk.\u00a0 I step out of the door and I move through the city as if this body-self, with its uterus and its breasts, will never be thrust into visibility against its will again, as if it is the norm, requiring no policing.[4]<\/a>\u00a0 I walk as if it is the norm to use a public toilet\u2019s bin for my tampon or pad, a drinking fountain to help me take my fibroid pain medication, as if it is the norm for clothes to be stained sometimes by menstrual blood or sweat.\u00a0 I walk as if the speed with which I move, the space I take up when I rest, the attention I do or do not give to my fellow creatures is mine and mine alone to decide. \u00a0And I walk, I sit, I loll in fellowship with other humans, all of us in all our variety, because to move through the city invisibly or visibly, however we feel, should be \u2013 is \u2013 our right.<\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This from a middle-aged, white man on a mountain bike as he and his companion(male, similar lycra) bombed along the wooded track past me.\u00a0 You\u2019d think he\u2019d be more interested in the substantial potholes and puddles, quagmires and random scrub ahead than a person he didn\u2019t know who\u2019d happened to stop to look at a tree.\u00a0 But no.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This from a middle-aged, white man as we converged upon the same path in a local park.\u00a0 He said it twice, to make sure I\u2019d heard him.\u00a0The first time, I said \u2018Nope\u2019.\u00a0The second time, I said \u2018Nope\u2019.\u00a0And kept on walking.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t have a dog either, but apparently it\u2019s only weird for middle-aged, white women like me to walk without dogs, or men, or children, or other women. Alone, then.\u00a0 It is weird for my category of person to walk alone is what I\u2019m getting.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 This from an older-than-middle-aged white man as I crossed in front of a car on a supermarket\u2019s exit road.\u00a0 He was some distance away down the main road and had to shout above traffic.\u00a0 The car, which was in a queue, had stopped to let me across.\u00a0 The shouter may have been drinking.\u00a0 I wasn\u2019t sure if he was in a really good mood or angry.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, I\u2019m aided in part by my own privilege as white, abled, cisgender.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In light of Meryl Pugh’s upcoming event\u00a0Out Of Body Experience<\/i>\u00a0at the Southbank Centre and her poetry collection Natural Phenomena<\/i>,\u00a0she explores the way in which her body moves through the city she lives in to engage with the patriarchy and feminism that divides it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[237,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18459"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18699,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18459\/revisions\/18699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}