Analysis Of The Body Politic By Hiromi Goto

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Hiromi Goto is the author of The Body Politic, a poem depicting racialized identity struggle. She is a Japanese-Canadian writer, whose poem is based upon her own personal experience. Goto presents this first-hand experience of the identity crisis immigrants and those who do not fit into rigid binary stereotypes face in daily life. She highlights her internal struggle to extend into public spaces when she doesn’t fit into the normative structures around her. The Body Politic is a journey for Goto that shows her audience her struggle to accept and understand herself. For Goto, this ability to understand her difference and the binary she fails to be apart of is the first step for her to begin to navigate an alternative way to extend through spaces within socially constructed institutions where her body does not fit in accordingly. Throughout this essay I explore the way binaries work in our world, and culture through the use of Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phemenology and the implications of …show more content…

She provides useful insights into both queer studies and phenomenological perspectives. Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience and consciousness, which is going to be further explored in this essay, through personal experience. Her chapter focuses on the ways in which we experience and orient ourselves within space, especially for those who engage in queer perspectives, first focusing on queer without a sexual connotation. For the purposes of this paper, I will not be discussing queerness in a sexual context, but rather in the way that it was originally defined as a spatial term, meaning strange, odd or to “twist” (Ahmed, 67) from the normative. In other words it is to deviate away from the norm binary previously discussed. Ahmed uses examples of vertical lines for the normative and in this example the deviant is the queer perspective since it fails to remain on this

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