“It Feels like You’re a Stranger in Your Own Skin”: Young People’s Accounts of Everyday Embodiment

3.1.1. Racialisation and Belonging

In our project, many young people spoke about how their sense of wellbeing and belonging was impacted by hate, exclusion and violence meted out on the basis of perceived race or culture. Reflecting on her own experiences, Violet (19, Chinese and South East Asian) recalled being singled out from her peers as one of the few “Asian” students in her classroom and being subject to racialised verbal attacks (in this case, “stupid claims” about eating rice). Violet observed how the nature and severity of these varied according to a person’s embodiment, where more hostile treatment was reserved for those with “darker” skin:

the darker you are generally it’s like a bit more difficult, so it’s kind of you’re being dirty, like unclean yeah that type of racism, not wanting to hold that person’s hand, kind of like that

(Violet: 19, Chinese and South East Asian)

Racialisation could also be less explicit. Oscar (16, European and Pacific) described how a stranger threatened his friend’s mother while she was picking them up from school:

Oscar: a man from across the road was like—I will set my dogs on you, you’re on my land. [My friend’s Mum] was across the road and it was just like—what? Yeah.

Octavia Calder-Dawe: And did you detect there was a kind of racist element to that?

Oscar: Yeah, I think there was a bit of, yeah, I would say there was a bit because I don’t think he would have done it to another person of his culture. I think that was just one of the things that played into it kind of thing.

This exchange points to the significance of embodiment in understanding racism and racialisation. Oscar felt the racism driving this exchange. Through his accumulated experience with racialised privilege, he understood this as a situation where race and cultural belonging were at stake, even in the absence of overly racist speech. Elias (19, Middle Eastern) also sensed how unspoken racialisation structured the way he was treated by others. In presenting his passport to border officials (an act that made him visible as Middle Eastern), he became subject to an intrusive racialised gaze:

they were like oh it is just a random check but I was like it is not a random check, you can, you are lying […] I know exactly what you are doing […] I was like this is not random it is just because I come from Middle Eastern country they were like yes but we can’t say that

(Elias: 19 Middle Eastern)

Here, Elias articulates what institutional actors prefer not to: “random checks”, scrutiny and detention are distributed along lines of embodied privilege. These small moments serve as powerful markers of belonging: who moves with ease, and who is considered suspect.

An interest in embodied privilege turns our attention not only to instances of racism and oppression but equally to naturalness and belonging, which settle on particular (often perceptibly white and Anglo) bodies. In our interviews, one place where we identify white privilege is in young people’s talk about “Kiwiness”. Kiwi is a reo Māori (Maori language) name for an Indigenous flightless bird that has become the “national bird” of New Zealand and is emblematic of the settler colonial nation on the international stage. New Zealanders travelling overseas are often referred to as “Kiwis” (or simply as “Kiwi” without an anglicising “s”). While the Kiwi identity is theoretically available to all, our interviews with young people demonstrated how Kiwiness maps most readily to white bodies. Pākehā and New Zealand European young people appeared to be able to describe themselves as Kiwi with particular ease:

I’m just a Kiwi I’m like Kiwi I would say yeah. Just a New Zealander I would identify it with to me yeah. I haven’t really thought about that kinda kinda side.

(Annabelle, 20, NZ European)

The potential exclusions of a “Kiwi” identity became evident in an exchange with Amy (16, Chinese). Amy articulated how she felt that her embodiment as a perceptibly Chinese person constrained her access to a Kiwi identity, despite being “more like a Kiwi”:

Octavia: […] So, how would you be, in what ways would you be not Kiwi or not Chinese in a full sense? How do you know this?

Amy: It’s like, how I think is [I’m] probably a bit more like a Kiwi but then, my lifestyle is not that much. Also, if I go to China, I find it hard to just communicate straight in Chinese because sometimes I want to say something but I realise I don’t know how to say it. And if I, yeah, but then also I look Chinese so I am not fully like Kiwi. Yeah.

Octavia.: So, your sense of, this is quite a tricky question, but what would a Kiwi look like?

Amy: Like just colour. Yeah.

Here, Amy describes how skin colour, as well as “look[ing] Chinese”, affects her access to Kiwiness. To be “fully…Kiwi” is to look like you belong; to look like you belong is to not look Chinese. Entangled with this account are a raft of exclusionary, racialised ideas about what a “real” New Zealander looks like: who belongs and who does not. Picking up on this thread when asked about the racism he observed around him, Connor (18, Pākehā) recalled:

[at uni] there was someone that made a post on the internet about how all these Asian international students should just go home […] it just caught a lot of people off guard and it made a lot of these students feel like unsafe and unwelcome

(Connor: 18, Pākehā)

Zoe (17: NZ European and British) also described a related pattern of racialised exclusion in her account of “one of those ‘where are you really from?’ things”:

the girl across from me was like “oh so where are you from?” And I was like “Auckland”. And she said “No, no, no, where are you from?” And I said “Auckland”. And she said, “where are your parents from?” And I was like, “New Zealand and Britain” […] and then she said “where are you actually from?” […] She’s like “yeah, but you’re brown” or “your skin,”

Zoe was born in Aotearoa and speaks with a local accent. As she herself makes clear, the contestation evident in this exchange is about skin colour and belonging. Zoe’s embodiment as not-white has prompted these highly racialised questions about where she is from and where she belongs, precisely because New Zealand and Britain are imagined as white.

Of all participants, racialised exclusion and dehumanisation were described in the most vicious terms by Aya (19, Middle Eastern). Aya described herself as a “clear Muslim woman” and spoke about being “attacked on a daily basis” in Aotearoa as a consequence of her embodiment:

it’s probably just like, the way that I actually look different, like as a clear Muslim woman, and yeah like it’s just, I think it’s, I don’t know how to explain it, but I think it’s hard being a person who is different, and I think that affects my wellbeing, it kind of makes me almost uncomfortable in some situations, and just being surrounded by people that don’t always accept me, or yeah accept me, it’s pretty hard […] the name calling isn’t a big deal to me, but being told that I shouldn’t you know be, shouldn’t be here or I don’t fit in, or like you definitely aren’t part of us, that’s kind of the hard part.

(Aya, 19, Middle Eastern)

Aya’s account makes clear the relentlessness of hostility directed against her on the basis of her perceptible embodied identities. She is perpetually told—with words, but also gestures and stares—that she is “different”; someone who “shouldn’t be here”. In the passage below, Aya describes how embodied privilege facilitates this abuse. Racialisation marks out certain bodies as targets and empowers others as agents of abuse. Violence becomes comfortable, something that is “easy for them to do”:

it’s really easy for [people] to do it, like personally when I’m like how does one walk up to someone and be like you’re gross, how does someone walk up to someone and be like you’re a terrorist because you cover your hair, literally it shocks me that people find it ok to do it, but people are really comfortable doing it which is a big, big problem

(Aya)

In Aya’s account and elsewhere in our study, an embodiment lens helps us to tune into the everyday workings of power. In doing so, this approach opens up matters of profound importance for understanding young people’s lives, illustrating how embodied privilege is distributed, sensed and acted on.

3.1.2. Ableism

In our conversations with young people, ableist restrictions on embodiment showed up most consistently in talk about fatness and thinness. Interviews offered clear insight into the functioning of thin privilege and the stigma and devaluation of fatness and fat people. Whereas a considerable amount of body image scholarship is concerned with individual cognitive processes, an embodiment approach invites us to foreground social dimensions, illuminating how qualities of health, vitality and worthiness infuse into some bodies and not others. In a healthist context, a moral glow elevates the “super healthy” (Bea, 17, South East Asian), and health is strongly aligned with achieving thinness and avoiding fatness. It was striking, for instance, that when asked to speak about physical health, many participants responded by talking about body fat:

Octavia: is anything affecting your wellbeing that is related to your physical health?

Amy (16 Chinese): I don’t … when I was young, I was quite fat

Octavia: And one other thing is just around physical health generally. What’s that been like for you?

Ash (18 NZ European): I mean … back in high school, I ate too much and kind of put on a bit of weight

Octavia: In terms of physical health has that been okay for you along your life?

Daniel (17 South East Asian)l: I used to be really fat when I was a kid but then winter came and I started doing sports and stuff. I became skinnier.

This kind of meaning making was drawn out at length in an interview with Reuben (16, Pākehā), who spoke in considerable detail about his embodied experience of “feeling fat” (once again, in response to a broad prompt about physical health):

It’s been a really rocky road. I struggled a lot for a while because I was so insecure. That was, I always forget about that because I am just very confident and happy now but I used to just feel so bad. I just really felt fat always. My brother has always been, a high metabolism, really skinny frame and I just always, no matter what I did, felt really fat.

(Reuben: 16 Pakeha)

The “rocky road” of physical health for this young person is not what one might have imagined: this is not a narrative of illness, functional restriction or physical pain. Reuben’s difficult journey hinges on the pain of embodied shame, of feeling insecure and inferior “no matter what I did”. It is significant that fat features here as a feeling. Probed further, Reuben noted that it was “so hard to explain”:

Octavia: I am really interested in, what is feeling fat? Like, how would you describe what that is?

Reuben: It’s so hard to explain, but it is just this feeling that I was carrying this … it was horrible. […] I just felt this constant grossness, and I wasn’t even that big at all, seriously, now that I look back on it. But it was still that feeling of not being as skinny as everyone else who just was effortless.

A theory of embodiment helps us to explain how sociocultural webs of value come to be taken up and lived out—in this case, self-perceived fatness maps onto a sense of disempowerment, “constant grossness” and inferiority. There was no sense from the conversation with Reuben that he had experienced social exclusion or accessibility issues directly arising from fatness (for example, difficulty finding clothing in his size or comfortable seating). Instead, fatness has become a shorthand for embodied distress and dissatisfaction, which he linked to body fat and awareness of his own appetite:

I always just felt like I couldn’t stop eating and it was just this constant, like I needed food. And that in turn made me feel really insecure and really fat […] since I went vegan and I started going to the gym, I have just felt so much better. And I developed a really good metabolism from going to the gym all the time so that I can have a really good relationship with food where I can eat and be happy and not worry.

(Reuben)

Across these three short passages, we see how Reuben’s “rocky road” to physical health and his difficulties with his own body arise through a weaving together of the physiological (metabolism, flesh and fat, the clamour of appetite) with elements of biography (being the younger brother, a feeling of comparative inadequacy), as well as broader sociocultural threads (a healthist moralisation of thinness and bodily discipline).

A second element of embodied ableism running through our conversations with young people relates to assumptions about “normal” capabilities and productivity. For some participants, these structuring assumptions became evident in situations where they experienced substantial disruption to their work or study through illness or injury. These disruptions altered their embodiments, also altering the ease with which they navigated school and work. Annabelle (20, NZ European) described being diagnosed with chronic fatigue, a diagnosis she queried and resisted. Although she worked full-time in a physically demanding hospitality role, she decided not to tell most of her co-workers. She explained that she “didn’t want everyone knowing what was wrong” or “to think of me that I’m sick”:

I haven’t told anyone at work […] I just feel like that if I say that I’ve got [chronic fatigue] that they might you know judge me or yeah say you know “oh don’t work too hard”. But it’s like I don’t want you to think of me in that way because I’m working really hard. […] I didn’t tell the other person that I work with just cause yeah I just want her to see me you know just to like think of me that I’m sick in a way. […] I was like oh my god you know people with this condition they don’t do anything.

(Annabelle: 20, NZ European)

Similar ableist logic is evident in Rose’s talk about living with a traumatic brain injury. Rose (18, NZ European and European) explained how she struggled to come to terms with a shift in her embodiment, which altered her concentration and focus:

it was really hard because I think the way I cope with things is working towards a goal or working, often with things academic, I do have really high expectations for myself in school. […] It is now a year and a half later and I am still having a lot of these symptoms that really do restrict my ability to engage in university […] it is really hard to go up to a lecturer or go up to someone involved and kind of talk about [my injury]. In the same way, I don’t want people to ever think that I am using it as an excuse and a lot of that is probably around how you can’t see a head injury and you can’t see the effect it is having on someone’s life. And so yeah, I think, it is kind of hard getting over that.

(Rose: 18 NZ European and European)

In contrast to Rose, Liam’s (17, NZ European) ways of thinking, moving and being in the world have never been an easy fit with mainstream schooling systems. He described “always” having an embodied awareness of being different: “I have always known […] I haven’t been like others”. This embodied awareness of his difference was especially pronounced in schooling:

I saw this thing from Albert Einstein and this drawing of all these animals and then basically the idea was that there was an elephant, a giraffe, a fish in a fishbowl, a monkey and basically this human set a task to these animals of trying to climb a tree—there was this tree. And of course, the only one that could properly do it was a monkey and that is like school.

(Liam: 17, NZ European)

Liam’s striking extended metaphor emphasises the futility and violence of institutional processes for those “fish in the bowl” who are expected to “climb that tree”. His choice of animals with profoundly different bodies and functional capacities (monkey, elephant, giraffe and fish) draws attention to the embodied nature of success and belonging at school. Liam suggested that those who think, move and communicate in ways that challenge normative ableist expectations are simply not accommodated:

Our education system for me personally—what if you are the fish in the bowl? The fish is an amazing swimmer but it is never going to climb that tree, regardless of how much content or how much tips, tricks or assessments on how to climb a tree you shove down it’s throat. It is never going to be able to do it; it just doesn’t fit […]

there are a lot of fish at school, but we are only teaching how to climb a tree really. And that tree is to get a good job so we can get money so you can live a good life, really. Which is not something that I believe in, that you just … there are elephants, there are giraffes and there are fish, you know? We can’t just teach to that monkey. [we can’t keep] shoving things down their throat and expecting them to only come out as a monkey when they want to be something else and do something else.

(Liam)

While a dominant ableist lens casts difference as deficit, Liam’s account is oriented to the unexplored possibilities and potentials of being “something else” beyond rigid achievement and productivity pressures.

3.1.3. Policing Gender and Sexuality

The third collection of social forces that we examine through an embodiment lens cohere around normative expectations of gender and sexuality. Young people who we spoke to identified the ways in which hegemonic expectations of masculinity and femininity shaped their lives. Being read as feminine was to be subject to intense appearance pressures. Interviewees explained how feminine bodies were frequently judged as too much or too little, too worked up or not carefully tended enough. At the same time, girls and feminine people who pushed “the limits of what to wear” (Julie, 17, South East Asian) could be slut-shamed for “not respecting yourself” (Julie) or dismissed as vain or stuck up. Lizzy (16, NZ European) explained how a guy she had turned down decided to punish her by getting “all of his mates and all of his mates’ girlfriends” to “bombard me with messages about how I looked”:

I was pretty self-conscious in Year 10 um and so I’d wear like a lot of makeup […] it was all just like a learning process, to to see what was OK with makeup and everything um, but like yeah I, it took me a while to get over with they would just make fun of how I looked just with how much makeup I was wearing and that um and also the weight kind of stuff

(Lizzy: 16 NZ European)

At the same time, feminine embodiment meant being told to expect less respect or that others expected less from you academically and physically.

My teacher she is like in the Black Ferns and so she basically kind of like outlines that they are treated way less, like more poorly than like the All Blacks. And they get paid much less as well and they are just like not as recognised

(Julie: 17, South East Asian)

I have this whole thing that if I show I’m weak, if I am sad or feeling down then I’m weak and with that weakness it is bad and I should shove it down. And with that I find it quite common in the conception in that males can’t show their feelings males cannot express how they feel without being judged or persecuted because it’s quote unquote not manly.

(Joseph, 18 NZ European and Māori)

It sucks being an emotional guy—very, very much so […] most guys can’t express their emotions. And I think it is not because they don’t want to, it’s because society has just made them and they are meant to be the ones that you, they are the rock. […] they are not meant to be feeling sad, upset or emotional […] they are meant to keep it in and fight it and stay strong.

(Liam, 17, NZ European)

Nic (18, NZ European) described particular disciplinary treatment from his dad, who has “always wanted me to be more masculine”:

I remember one time I just started crying it was really random, one night I just started crying like a lot and that was sort of led me to realise how bad things had been prior to that and like how I’d bottled everything up because I’d never cried over any of […it] and I remember my dad telling me to man up

(Nic)

In school life and home life, many young people who placed themselves outside cisgender and heterosexual norms described a relentless policing of their bodies. Parents, family and peers were described as profoundly attuned to markers of difference, with heightened significance placed on embodied attributes considered to be markers of gender and sexual minorities. Several participants described being quizzed by parents about their sexualities. Daniel (17, South East Asian) explained,

Daniel: I mostly have girlfriends, like friends who are girls. [Dad] is not also sure about my sexuality and stuff like that. So he would usually ask if I am queer or something like that and I would say no but sometimes I would think that he is still doubting if I am straight or not.

Octavia: Would that be a problem? If you were gay?

Daniel: No, he says that it’s not, it won’t be a problem but I think it would be if I were gay.

My dad doesn’t like it at all my mum pretends to be OK with it but she’s not. Like if I ever like married a guy my dad wouldn’t come. I don’t think I’d invite him.

(Nic: 18 NZ European)

At school, elements of voice, clothing and body language that could signal embodied difference made young people targets:

I never thought it would but apparently my voice gives it away [that I’m gay]

(Nic)

I kind of was being bullied for being like, a girl that was really chubby and wore manly shit. In a way people wouldn’t be saying it outright but they would be like thinking … Oh dike—you know?

(Ash: 18 NZ European)

It was this boy that I was best friends with at the start of the year and then just turned on me and would say the weirdest things. Like, at the time I had short hair, wore no makeup, whatever, normal. And then he would just say the most bizarre things, like say I was trans and I’m like what, was like—what? Not an insult, but okay. Just weird. Like, everyday it was constant and it reached a point where I just didn’t want to go to school.

(Reuben: 16 Pākehā)

Discussion with the two trans participants whom we interviewed further illuminated the stifling restrictions of cisnormative privilege. In addition to experiencing transphobia from people close to him, Ash (18, NZ European) described a sense of profound dislocation from his body, over which he experienced limited autonomy:

I don’t own my physical form because I’m just like… this sounds really weird but I’m basically just like … like a price tag now because everyone else is making decisions about what I do with my body. […] Because I’m on testosterone right, and that was my decision. But I had to go through months and months and months of them, asking me questions and doing like evaluations on me. And that makes sense right, but at the same time it makes me feel like I have no autonomy over my own body, which means that I’m not … that I don’t truly like own myself—does that make sense?

Ash’s comments depict a cisnormative system where the embodied sovereignty of trans people, especially young trans people, is contingent on the agreement and facilitation of others. Reflecting back on a very difficult period of embodied discomfort, Morgan (18, NZ European) explained the revelation of learning that he was trans:

I mean I just learned that I’m trans, like I’m a man, no wonder why I hate my fucking body, you know and you say it’s just a phase, no it turns out I just am not equipped properly. You know, it’s ridiculous, yeah. I can just imagine now just like for a section in your paper, just like the word ridiculous like pasted like 70 times and it’s like done.