We All Have a Right to Exist
Thoughts on functioning, eugenics, and finding freedom among one another.
[CW: Discussion about eugenics]
The Suppression of Individual Forms
I operated my body with function, but without form. I moved within the world and traversed throughout my surroundings. I performed explicit tasks and checked implicit boxes.
I manipulated my mouth to produce the speech sounds that others seemed to want to hear. But rarely did this beget communication. Try as I might, I could never quite summon the courage or comfort to use my voice as a way to express meaning in a manner that might facilitate mutual knowing and understanding. I did not like the sound of my voice, guttural and alien to my own ear. And so I placed more emphasis on the formulation of the proper keywords and phrases than I did on learning how to speak in congruence with my identity.
I knew that my body could do things, many of which were amazing — fight off infections, transform food into energy, perform labor, and then sleep in order to restore itself and do it all again. It’s just that, my body never felt like mine.
The mode of embodiment most natural to me — freely fluttering the fingers that extended from sporadically flailing limbs — involved the exhibition of precisely the behaviors that would elicit suspicion or smirking or othering. And like my voice, I learned to wield this gooey cage in order to execute the actions that others seemed to want to see. My anatomical telos shifted to focusing on the sameness of my body with that of others, rather than the embracing and following of those naturally occurring inclinations. We all ate food and then had energy after all.
Of greater importance to me, for the purposes of integrating into a world that felt too loud and too close, but to which that was no alternative, was what I could do with my body rather than how I could be inside of my body.
The Policing of Heterogeneous Forms
I remembered of course when Bender bemoaned his status as “a hideous triumph and form and function,” after joining a community of outdated robots. But I never knew the origins of that combination of words, and did not have a clear idea of what it might mean. Within the context of a computer, I might have thought that function referred to the computing power of the machine and form referred to how it might look on my desk.
In 1896, Louis Sullivan coined the term “form follows function” in an article for Lippincott’s Magazine, entitled “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered.” This concept has served as one of the guiding principles of modern architecture. Sullivan is considered one of the fathers of the skyscraper and this essay, along with the proliferation of that credo, came at a time of rapid technological advancement.
Coupled with breakneck innovations of technical methods, society also saw a massive influx of people into urban areas (and corresponding increases in population densities) due to the prospect of new employment opportunities. With much urban architecture precedent no longer relevant, the credo espoused the idea that the purpose of a building or particular structure (i.e. function) ought to determine its shape (i.e. form).
This is in many ways a severe, and perhaps even unjust, oversimplification of a complex era of architectural development whose evolution was influenced by (and also influenced) a vast myriad of interconnecting social and economic factors. But the urban skyscraper, in large American cities, did become an integral component of a cataclysmic shift in how humans had historically organized themselves within a given space. Mass urbanization upended a paradigm and begot societal changes that extended well beyond the legacy of Louis Sullivan.
It seems that, without being conscious of it, we were also collectively and tacitly renegotiating what acceptable forms our bodies might take, following their changing function within a new landscape.
It is interesting to consider that with these giant structures jutting towards the heavens, and with our newfound reimagining of function, this time period also saw the emergence and meteoric ascendancy of an organized eugenics movement. With the well-deserved negative connotations of the word now, it is tempting to forget the extent to which this set of beliefs began and progressed, not as a fringe movement, but with the stamp of approval of much of mainstream society.
Some prominent proponents were Theodore Roosevelt, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Winston Churchill. A eugenics argument was also at the core of the initial campaign to promote access to birth control; it served as the basis for Fitter Families Contests at various state fairs; it guided the xenophobic bent in America’s Immigration Act of 1924, signed into law by Calvin Coolidge; and it gained a secure foothold in common law when the Supreme Court reached an almost unanimous decision in 1927.
This case ruled that the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, due to her being “feeble-minded,” did not violate the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the majority opinion, stating that Buck “is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring…and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.”
While it reached its tragic and monstrous crescendo with the atrocities of the Holocaust, it remains worth noting that the United States carried out 70,000 forced sterilizations throughout the 20th century. It was so common among Black women that it was referred to as a “Mississippi appendectomy,” and civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer received a hysterectomy in 1961 without her consent. The 2021 documentary, Belly of the Beast showed that California performed nearly 1,400 sterilizations in its prisons between 1997 and 2013.
This not whatsoever meant to be an argument for any type of causality between these parallel historical timelines. The evolution of modern-day architecture, the underpinnings and effects of mass urbanization, and the widespread propagation of the eugenics movement are each for more complicated topics than I can fully examine within the purview of this essay.
My goal is for these examples to serve as catalysts for us to reassess how we understand and value “high-functioning” bodies, why we even have a need for this label, and what constraints that might place on those who cannot conform to these dictates.
The Liberation of Multiform Bodies
So how do we get free? And who benefits from our sacrificing embodied harmony for corporeal productivity? What do our surroundings ask of us, and who among us is in that position of authority to do the asking?
Consider the differences between bringing coffee to a public park and drinking it in a Starbucks; or sitting in a library’s reading room versus browsing titles in a chain bookstore. Jenny Odell, in her 2019 book, How to Do Nothing, describes public space as a setting wherein we can resist the individualistic pull of capitalism. We are each free to exist with one another, choosing to spend time in a place that makes no polite demands for our resources.
Two humans — one of whom lacks secure housing, the other runs a Fortune 500 company — can enter their local library and enjoy the same access to our collective accumulation of knowledge. In this same vein, Jane Jacobs, in her revolutionary 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, celebrates the spontaneity and beauty that emerges when a diverse group of people shares space within a city:
“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”
I hope that we can cultivate that symbiotic richness of nondemanding public areas in a way that allows us to shed those internal pressures of productivity and resist the constancy of doing. One word that I have used as a self-descriptor and that others have used for me — a word that I am now working to banish from my vocabulary — is “high-functioning.” I suppose it is somehow meant to be a back-handed compliment, denoting my competence at earning gold stars at the business factory.
But it seems that I never have a say in the standards that determine whether or not I am worthy of this term. Who benefits from my functioning at a high level?
Well, I do insofar as I am able to complete tasks at a job that then affords me conditional access to basic human rights such as stable housing, food security, and healthcare. But my functioning in this capacity is ultimately an act of compliance, and it helps to further solidify our shared understanding and unspoken agreement of what does and does not hold value.
Robert F. Kennedy spoke in March of 1968 at the University of Kansas and made a remark about the gross national product that later became famous. His words below eerily mirror the stark contrast that I experience when comparing my personal sense of fulfillment correlated with my acquiescence to perform in a manner deemed acceptable to others:
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
And with the climate crisis becoming increasingly difficult to ignore, it may well prompt us to reassess where all of this productivity and doing and functioning has gotten us. Would we be so eager to define and measure these terms if we placed higher value on Indigenous practices of ecological stewardship? Or if we shifted our focus to exploring and implementing community policing methods that do not criminalize black and brown bodies?
One reminder that I offer myself daily, even hourly on certain days, is that I have an unconditional right to exist within public space. It is only within the past two years that I have consciously started to unlearn my assorted masking techniques (e.g. the suppression of stimming) and have begun to reconcile and accept my gender identity. I have a right to exist and feel free within myself.
And that is becoming a central tenet of the narrative that I am still learning to tell myself. I can remind myself and I can offer that reminder to each of you, to all of us: we all have a right to exist just how we are, regardless of how our bodies and minds may dissent or diverge from the expectations of a society whose obsession with productivity seems to be interwoven with its own undoing.
