The body, the common denominator. However shaped, colored, disabled, scarred, or gendered, we all have a body; a unifying fiber of human existence. I find Jayna Brown’s chapter Letting the Flesh Fly…, to be a source of enlightenment. Brown explains the power of the body in it’s capacity to induce empathy through visceral connection (p 60). Of course! That’s why performance is such a powerful art medium. The corporeal and visceral are interconnected, and interdependent one might argue. From childhood on, the human brain is formed through sensory experience; the body’s interaction with the outside world stimulating brain circuitry. This is how we learn from the youngest age hot from cold, things that hurt. It is my opinion that we most often learn those cues from our own accidents in stumbling through life; however, when imposed with physical pain by the hand of another human being therein forms an emotional response, "Why me? Why would you hurt me?”
When confronted with physical expenditures of the body via descriptions of histories of torture, performance, etc., I often feel sensations in my guts; an empathetic response. Brown explains, “Female abolitionist appeals were empathetic, imploring women to feel slave suffering in their own bodies as a way to engage their moral commitment” (p 57). I wonder then, is this experience different for men? I’ve observed a corporeal response in men when witnessing another man endure a kick to the testes. I also wonder, if the insensitive race mimicry performed by white women in the minstrels solely to entertain must somehow disassociate the pain endured by those they mimic?
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