Corporeal Rudderlessness

From Susie Orbach, Bodies

It has become a feature of postmodernist thought to celebrate multiplicity, to elevate fluidity over knowing and complexity over simplicity, and to see embodiment, like femininity and masculinity, as something we achieve through performing or enacting the body we want to have. In this kind of theorizing, it is believed that the body can be anything we want it to be, with corporeality no more than a symbolic construct. 

Playful and enriching as such ideas can be within literary theory, it is painfully apparent that they are not playful or enriching for those whose corporeal rudderlessness propels them to seek extreme solutions to what they experience as their physical incongruities. Postmodern theory is insufficient to cope with the demands of the post-industrial body. It celebrates fragmentation, a fragmentation that, in fact, requires understanding, deconstructing, nourishing and then knitting together. (…) I know from the labile bodies that I encounter in the consulting room that their "owners" are on a search for anchoring which, once secured, perhaps allows for playfulness and masquerade to follow. But there needs to be a body there for the person in the first instance. (…) The celebrating of numerous self/body states that postmodernists engage in seems to applaud the very distress of the pre-integrated body. The celebration of multiplicity unwittingly dismisses the ways in which the individual seeks a bodily coherence. (91-2)

I had to look up "labile."  

Definition of labile
1: readily or continually undergoing chemical, physical, or biological change or breakdown: unstable
2: readily open to change