Narratives of the Body and Shame: Degrees of Invisibility/Visibility in Public Spaces

Abstract

Narratives of the Body and ShameDegrees of Invisibility/Visibility in Public Spaces Vijaya Nagarajan1 (bio) It is the first day of classes, spring semester, in January 2022. I am on my way to work at my university.2 I am standing at an East Bay BART station, a part of the public transportation train system in the San Francisco Bay Area. This particular day, I notice, to my surprise, that my experience in these normative public spaces is entirely different from the semester before. Every time the train screams into the station, the hair bristles on the back of my neck, and rivulets of sweat run down my arms. I press my back hard against the concrete wall, just about nine feet away from the tracks. My feet, in my fastest running shoes, are ready to run in either direction. But the problem is, I do not know and cannot know exactly where my attacker will be coming from. I am afraid, in a way I have never been before. I have spent most of my life in the United States, though not all of it. I am an immigrant from India. I arrived as an eleven-year-old Tamil girl from New Delhi in 1972, fifty years—a half-century—ago. I never expected that I would face this kind of fear as a sixty-year-old woman in the United States. I somehow [End Page 127] imagined that by now, I would feel a deep sense of belonging here inside this landscape, this place I would easily call my own. The reason is, as a child, I had simply imagined a linear curve in the degrees of inclusion I would experience as I spent more and more time in the United States. But as we clearly know, popular movements of feminism and anti-feminism, racism and antiracism, and environmentalism and anti-environmentalism do not linearly construct themselves in the historical periodicities of time. Instead, the historical timelines of racism and antiracism movements, feminism and anti-feminism, and environmentalism and anti-environmentalism are nonlinear, so that they are shaped as much by anti-racism resistance movements and racism movements propelled by specific charismatic, popular figures and the politics, economics, and religions shaping both civic and personal lives. I hope that my eyes peering over my black pandemic mask do not reveal my terror. Normally, when I was waiting for a BART train, I would have a book to read for fun in my hands, my eyes absorbed, without any sense of danger. Or I would be looking at my cell phone, texting and catching up on digital life. Or I would start talking to the person next to me, also waiting in line. But I no longer feel I can do those things. I no longer have that freedom. I watch, though, how other folks on the platform can still do those things. That incident that happened a few days ago has only touched some of us in a way that has changed us, changed our behavior, changed our standing in the world. Instead, I watch, closely scanning the faces all around me, trying to guess which one might hate the color of my skin, or the shape of my eyes. I feel strangely disarmed, as if the usual protections around me have been stripped away. I am vulnerable and everyone can see me. It is too much. My trust in public spaces has completely disappeared. It is as if I have become too visible, all of a sudden. I realized then that we are back in one of those periods of intense anti-Asian hate. And I felt the fears embedded in my body growing fast like wandering shards of nonbelonging as I waited for my BART train. Over the weekend just before this inaugural BART ride of the spring semester in January 2022, a NYT article reported: "The police said Michelle Go, 40, of Manhattan, was shoved in front of an R train as it approached a 42nd Street platform in Manhattan on Saturday morning. In a horrifying instant, a man walked up to a 40-year-old woman waiting for the subway in Times...