13    Class and Embodiment

Making Space for Complex Capacity

Stephanie Moynagh

Like washing on a line, these theories flap in a contradictory wind, creating sound and limited insight constrained by the pegs that hold them.

Tanya Lewis (1999)

The ways in which our feelings and intuition can and do guide our movements through life is an intriguing area for exploration, one that is gaining space within discourses of embodiment and pedagogy. While settler-colonial institutions are far from valuing any knowledge that does not fall within the dominant paradigm, which privileges rational thought, nondominant ways of being and knowing have always existed and persisted. In this chapter, I discuss the value of emotional and spiritual ways of knowing and delve into some of the complex roots that condition and strengthen these forms of intelligence. More specifically, I focus on how social class experience relates to somatic knowledge. Emotional and spiritual intelligence are clearly woven into our daily lives, but the societal structures within which we live often repress and devalue these competencies. Later in this chapter, I examine how nondominant forms of knowledge can be specifically valued within formal learning environments.

My discussion of emotional and spiritual capacity and experience is rooted in frameworks of embodied knowledge, especially those informed by feminism and critical race theory, and is influenced by theoretical traditions concerned with intersectionality, decolonization, and phenomenology. As will become clear, I am indebted to the scholarship and activism of many Indigenous and Black women, including bell hooks, Leanne Simpson, and Jacqui Alexander, who have helped me reflect on social class and understand my position as a white settler. Joe Kadi’s Thinking Class: Sketches from a Cultural Worker (1996) has also had an immense impact on my thinking about the connections between class and knowledge.

My exploration of class, embodiment, and ways of knowing includes the profound impact of structural violence inherent to living under colonial, white supremacist, ableist, capitalist, heteropatriarchal systems. Though an in-depth exploration of how systemic, social, and interpersonal forces shape embodied knowledge is beyond the scope of this chapter, the complex and intersectional nature of social experience underpins its entire conversation. In sum, this discussion focuses on exploring the impacts of the privileging of mind-intellect; the embodied knowledges rooted in poverty-class cultures, whether they are related to the impacts of violence and trauma or are simply nondominant ways of being; and the emotional and spiritual intelligences that are often cultivated within poverty-class communities.

Throughout this exploration, I attempt the complex and difficult task of honouring survival while at the same time calling for transformative structural change. My lived experiences as a white, working-class, queer, currently able-bodied woman from poverty-class roots and French Acadian and Irish Catholic settler ancestry frame the doorway through which I enter this conversation. I strive continually to understand that my ideas and lived experiences occur within the contexts of settler colonialism and white supremacy, to recognize the grave importance of situating class oppression within the ongoing processes of colonialism and white supremacy, and to acknowledge the particularity of my experience and perspective. As a white settler, I am profoundly limited in my ability to develop a felt understanding of such processes since I do not experience the daily violence of racism or colonialism in the ways in which racialized and Indigenous people do. Certainly, experiences of poverty are vastly different for different people because of intersecting identities related to race, Indigeneity, and many other aspects of social identity. Beyond the limitations in my understanding, I am also implicated in the reproduction of the colonial nation and of white supremacy; thus, I carry the lifelong responsibility of acknowledging this history and ongoing reality and of working toward dismantling oppressive forces and building alternatives.

My understanding of class oppression across the settler-colonial state of Canada begins with its direct relation to colonialism, since the production of poverty through capitalism would not survive without the theft and exploitation of Indigenous lands. Maile Arvin, Eve Tuck, and Angie Morrill (2013, 12) describe settler colonialism as a “persistent social and political formation in which newcomers/colonizers/settlers come to a place, claim it as their own, and do whatever it takes to disappear the Indigenous peoples that are there. Within settler colonialism it is the exploitation of land that yields supreme value.” The appropriation of Indigenous land was especially crucial to the development of capitalism in Canada, a country whose economy continues to be founded on resource extraction and export. Respect for life and the relationships between living beings and the rest of the natural world is not important to the capitalist Canadian settler-colonial state (Woroniak and Camfield 2013). In 2013, Leanne Simpson, a Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and spoken-word artist, discussed the close ties between colonialism and capitalism with Naomi Klein:

Colonialism and capitalism are based on extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource. My relatives in the plant and animal worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold the extraction-assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being extracted meaning. Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment. That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. (Simpson, quoted in Klein 2013)

Writer and activist Harsha Walia emphasizes the need for social justice movements to recognize the structural relationship between systems of oppression and settler colonialism:

Indigenous communities face deliberate impoverishment. It’s not a coincidence that Indigenous communities and predominantly communities of colour face mass impoverishment.

Patriarchy within settler colonialism is organized around the destruction of Indigenous nationhood, Indigenous families and the deliberate targeting of Indigenous women. Obviously land destruction and environmental degradation are also part and parcel of settler colonialism. (Quoted in Hadley 2014)

Understanding the connections among colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and class oppression has helped me to understand what decolonization means to me as a white settler invested in transformative change. Decolonization can (and does) mean many things, and I believe that it is the right of Indigenous peoples to define and direct its meaning. As a white settler, I aim to be accountable to the reality that my ancestors and I have been complicit in colonial violence from our arrival on this land to this day. Though I am still learning what it means to be accountable to ongoing colonialism, to me this work includes supporting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination and actively working toward dismantling and building alternatives to the systems in place that prevent living sustainably with the land. First and foremost, in understanding my role and responsibilities as a white settler, I strive to continue listening to Indigenous people and actively supporting Indigenous-led movements.

My experiences of growing up on social assistance, being raised by a single mother who was excluded from the wage-labour system because of her disability, moving every year in search of safer housing, and facing other poverty-related challenges have informed my drive to understand how oppressive systems are connected and how we can build coalitions to work toward transformative structural change. My early understandings of the world included an embodied awareness of injustice through multiple and varied experiences related to being a girl and being poor. Though the colonial and white privileges that I and my family members experience have, in many ways, shaped our lives beyond measure, my class-based experiences have also impacted my world view and informed my relative lack of investment in dominant systems, institutions, and ideologies since childhood.

The embodied knowledges I bring to this discussion are in constant flux as I continue learning how to recognize and honour different forms of knowledge. My perceptions also continue to evolve as I move through a lifelong process of understanding all the ways in which my experiences and perceptions have been informed by the oppressive systems from which I benefit. These evolving perceptions also inform my ultimate limitations in speaking to the connections as well as the vast differences that exist within the intersectional experience of poverty as it relates to emotional and spiritual capacity. As such, the embodied knowledges that I discuss in this chapter are rooted in my particular experiences of class culture and trauma survivorhood.

Mind-Intellect Privileging and Embodied Experience

Though embodiment studies, with its wide scope, has significantly reformulated how we understand bodies and their engagement with the external world, an enormous gap remains between the validation afforded to many by such critical work and the assumptions that continue to inform dominant practice within state institutions. Much literature exists outlining the harmful impact of the Cartesian paradigm that dominates Eurocentric ideologies of the body and that privileges mind-intellect over any other form of knowledge. Such work is compelling in its call to recognize the disembodying consequences of the dominant paradigm and the far-reaching practices that continue to be built on its premises.

Heesoon Bai (2001, 86) identifies two such consequences in making clear that she reproves the “intellectualist bias and resulting disembodiment in our educational practice.” Bai contends that this bias has resulted in both “lack of intrinsic valuing of the world and inability to translate knowledge into action.” She explains that our linguistic-conceptual mind is “inherently disembodying in that it replaces percepts by concepts; when this happens, our ability to experience reality directly as a perceiving and feeling being is severely limited by the excessive (and obsessive) engagement with concepts” (87–89).

I have drawn heavily from theorists such as Bai in their interrogation of dominant knowledge-producing paradigms and this work has led me to explore the idea that “our” linguistic-conceptual mind, as referenced by Bai, may manifest differently depending on one’s social experiences. Though everyone educated within settler-colonial state institutions is influenced by the dominant Cartesian paradigm, nuanced distinctions remain in how we are socialized outside of such institutions, particularly as influenced by pervasive power systems that shape constructions of race, gender, and social class. One’s social experience outside of formal learning environments can contribute significantly to the complex interaction with systems that promote what Bai describes as the pervading “emotional alienation” from material reality as a result of “the hyperactivity of the linguistic-conceptual mind” (Bai 2001, 91). Later in this chapter, I come back to the impact of social class on one’s relationship to the notion of having a sensing and perceiving body; I simply note here that institutionalized mind-intellect privileging is not the only force at play.

The privileging of intellectual forms of knowledge ingrained in the state education system and much of the public arena at large has very real, detrimental, and multifaceted impacts on people across social locations, and in very different ways. Since all state institutions were built on colonialism and white supremacy, it is not surprising that the education system continues to maintain oppressive class structures, racial hierarchies, and a multitude of other forms of violence. In Peter McLaren’s widely cited book, Life in Schools, he describes how students are shaped by the “hidden curriculum,” which he defines as “the unintended outcomes of the schooling process.” McLaren explains that the hidden curriculum of a traditional education system “favors certain forms of knowledge over others and affirms the dreams, desires, and values of select groups of students over others, often discriminatorily on the basis of race, class, and gender” in order to “prepare students for dominant or subordinate positions in the existing society” (1989, 183). Deborah Orr (2002, 479) echoes many others in her description of how the hidden curriculum continues to persist in schools (479). Orr further details how sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia produce privileged groups that are identified with “the mind and intellectual activities of cultural production, while subordinated groups are affiliated with the body, emotion, and physical and reproductive labour” (479).

The failure of education systems to respect and value the intelligence of what is often perceived as the “mindless” body includes emotional and spiritual knowledge. Marjorie O’Loughlin (2006, 145) argues that “what needs to be given greater emphasis is the recognition of the role of the body as agent within a world of bodies which continually transform themselves and their world.” As she goes on to point out, “Knowledge is not simply that which must be understood; it is always felt and responded to somatically” (my emphasis).

One’s relationship to somatic experience and somatic ways of knowing can be greatly influenced by the socialization embedded in social class structures. A number of academics have written about the connections among class, embodiment, lived experience, and ways of knowing. Emily Martin’s (2001) research regarding different forms of resistance to dominant discourses involving women’s bodies speaks to these connections. Martin’s research reveals that working-class women are less inclined to adopt medical understandings about women’s bodies, preferring instead to emphasize how their own body feels, looks, or smells. It is reasonable to assume that the somatic responses given by women in Martin’s research stemmed largely from their direct lived experience of social class. Of course, given the intersectional nature of class-based lived realities, the somatic experience of poverty is vastly different for different people and communities. My childhood experience of (white) poverty, for example, which resulted from a single mother’s exclusion from the ableist wage-labour system, is in many ways incomparable to the added somatic and psychic experiences of poverty related to colonial violence and racism.

Although many aspects of social experience contribute to somatic knowledge, Martin’s research suggests that lived experience of marginalization, including exclusion from certain levels of formal education, fosters particular kinds of nondominant knowledge. In the American context of Martin’s research, poverty-based barriers to health care provision force reliance on one’s own knowledge and that of one’s community, combined always with knowledge fostered within cultures rooted in other social identities and collective experiences related to race, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, and more. Martin’s research asserts that this everyday resistance to dominant ideology acts as an example of a phenomenological perspective, in contrast to perspectives informed by the Western medical model, which are divorced from accounts of women’s direct experience (2001). Her work illustrates the distinct quality of somatic experiences and expressions of working-class women, who could very well contribute to knowledge discourse if they were more widely recognized as worthy of such.

Along the same lines, Kathy Davis (2007) speaks of Paula M. L. Moya’s (1997) criticism of the poststructuralist rejection of experience from the perspective of marginalized women of colour. Davis discusses the ways in which the bodily experiences of socially marginalized groups have been excluded from dominant medical and postmodern feminist discourses alike. She references Dorothy Smith (1990) in calling for space to be made for discursive agency in exploring “how women knowledgeably, competently, and flexibly draw upon, interpret, and re-articulate cultural discourses as they negotiate their life circumstances” in ways that include somatic experience (Davis 2007, 59). This affirmation speaks to the need to recognize that experience, including emotional experience, is always mediated by cultural discourse and institutional practice, yet it can and should be given genuine credence for the information and knowledge it contributes to discourse and theory formulation itself. Along the same vein, Kadi (1996) writes of how middle- and upper-middle-class academics have traditionally sought out the experiences and stories of working-class and poor people for use in shaping theory. The drive behind my desire to write about class culture and knowledge is informed and inspired by Joe Kadi, Dorothy Allison, and others who have written about their own class-based identities and who have insisted on valuing the many knowledges that arose from the materiality of their lives.

Embodied Trauma: Coexisting Winds

The attachment of meaning to our embodied experiences is not a simple process. Embodied experience varies widely, always shaped by the pervasive impacts of power structures that affect different bodies in different ways. Making sense of our somatic experience is also influenced by cultural discourse and by the limitations of cognitive processes of understanding. The research cited above relating to working-class lives, sentient experience, and knowledge needs to be grounded in ever-deepening understandings of the impacts of an extremely harmful economic world order, intersecting forms of oppression, and the complex experiential effects bred by the material realities of so many people’s lives. Membership in identity categories such as working-class, working-poor, poverty-class, low-income, or cash-poor is also confusing because class-based experience and identity can shift dramatically over time.

My understanding of class as culture aligns with Rita Mae Brown’s description of class in her essay “The Last Straw” (as quoted in hooks 2000, 103): “Class is much more than Marx’s definition of relationship to the means of production. Class involves your behavior, your basic assumptions, how you are taught to behave, what you expect from yourself and from others, your concept of a future, how you understand problems and solve them, how you think, feel, act.” Brown’s comment speaks to the expansive ground that forging links between class experience and sentient knowledge attempts to cover. The exchange of labour for low wages and/or the systemic exclusion from the wage-labour system and making ends meet with very limited resources is conducive to engendering an array of embodied knowledges, some of which we may wish to celebrate and honour, but we must never lose sight of the violent structures that produce poverty and continue to cause great harm. The intersecting oppressions rooted in colonialism and white supremacy (and the concomitant patriarchal, ableist, and heteronormative forces) shape one’s embodied experience of poverty in distinct and immeasurable ways.

Dorothy Allison, an American writer with lived experience of intergenerational poverty, has explored themes of class struggle and childhood trauma and has spoken to the multifaceted nature of knowledge carried by white, southern US-based poverty-class communities. Through her novels and essays, Allison points to the need to discuss openly and honestly both the pride and the shame that many people experience around poverty and class culture. “I have loved my family so stubbornly,” she writes, “that every impulse to hold them in contempt has sparked in me a counter-surge of pride—complicated and undercut by an urge to fit us into the acceptable myths and theories of both mainstream society and a lesbian-feminist reinterpretation” (Allison 1994, 15).

The systemic and interpersonal violence stemming from colonialism, racism, poverty, and other oppressive structures can result in both embodying and disembodying experiences. Carla Rice and Vanessa Russell (1995) discuss the impacts of systems of oppression on the body in terms of the daily experiences of dehumanization in people’s lives, including the effects of poverty and classism, which are often compounded by other intersecting forms of violence. They acknowledge the ways in which many girls and women disconnect from their feelings and bodies and distrust their knowledge of the world because of experiences related to abuse and oppression (23). Rice and Russell name this survival strategy “female disembodiment.” Disembodiment is a defining effect of traumatic experience, and systemic oppression is increasingly being recognized as a fundamental source of trauma—trauma being the lasting effects of violence in the body-mind-spirit. Yolo Akili (2011) discusses this idea in his article “The Immediate Need for Emotional Justice”:

Oppression is trauma. Every form of inequity has a traumatic impact on the psychology, emotionality and spirituality of the oppressed. The impact of oppressive trauma creates cultural and individual wounding. This wounding produces what many have called a “pain body,” a psychic energy that is not tangible but can be sensed, that becomes an impediment to the individual and collective’s ability to transform and negotiate their conditions. (Akili 2000, para. 1)

Akili’s message here is pointed and powerful. I believe that the embodied energy, the “pain body,” that he speaks of can be the source of enormous and valuable capacity. This takes nothing away from the critical need to recognize the injustice and violence that is the source of this pain, nor does it negate calls for dismantling hegemonic systems. It is simply another conversation from a different angle, one that recognizes the capacities that can be generated through traumatic experience and pain—not for the purpose of minimizing the violence of oppression but to honour survival modes and skills and to validate the knowledge that is built through them.

The remainder of Akili’s article and his notion of emotional justice speaks precisely to this idea of cultivating a deep respect for emotional-sentient experience. Though he does not use the word knowledge, he speaks of taking emotional pain seriously and drawing from our embodied injuries to push forward our struggles for justice and change: “Emotional justice is about working with this wounding. It is about inviting us into our feelings and our bodies, and finding ways to transform our collective and individual pains into power” (Akili 2011).

Vanissar Tarakali (2010) contributes to this discussion through her psycho-educational work on trauma and oppression. She views the effects of trauma on embodied beings through a lens that gives space and value to survival skills. She acknowledges that interpersonal violence and trauma, as well as repeated experiences of social oppression (racism, sexism, classism, ableism, transphobia, homophobia, antisemitism, ageism, and other forms of systemic oppression), result in individuals and communities practicing whichever strategies have helped them survive in the past. She names these strategies—caretaking, appeasing, hypervigilance, spacing out, avoidance, withdrawal, isolating, and many other behaviours. I believe that Tarakali’s framing of survival strategies is valuable and important, especially in the context of raising awareness about trauma and healing. However, I also think it is valuable and important to examine the embodied effects of trauma that contribute to ways of knowing and being that can grow our capacities, serve us and those around us, without legitimizing or glorifying the violent nature of oppression.

I have found it confusing at times to separate capacity born out of traumatic experience from the aspects of poverty and working-class culture and existence that simply give rise to nondominant ways of being. Coexisting identities and experiences related to Indigeneity, racialization, gender identity, ability, sexuality, and citizenship (and many more) are often entwined with our experiences of class and shape our vast capacity for embodied knowledge. In navigating these intersecting pathways, I endeavour in this discussion to forge connections between class culture and sentient knowledge while recognizing the ways in which power structures affect bodies differently, producing variant somatic experiences. I also aim to create space for uncomplicated pride, for the pain, grief, rage, and limits imposed by systemic oppression and trauma, and for valuing the capacities and heightened senses that grow out of the combination of these elements.

Emotional and Spiritual Knowledge

As I sit in a nondescript coffee franchise writing this paper, as the ideas I am mulling over stimulate the cerebral areas of my brain, I am simultaneously holding in awareness (and at times am overcome by) the young employee working alone behind the counter, contending with the constant and impatient stream of early holiday shoppers wanting coffee. He has acknowledged that he is new to the job; he is visibly stressed and overwhelmed by the never-ending line. I am permeable to the emotional energy emitting from where he stands. Empathy provokes me to feel the tension of everyone’s demands on his newly trained skills, his spectrum of emotion, his possible resentment for being made to work a solo shift on a Saturday afternoon in December. I can physically feel some of the tension induced by silent frowns, tapping feet, and pointed glares shot his way when the full cash tray accidentally slips from his hands to the floor. Before conscious thought, I send empathetic glances toward him. I make a joke in an attempt to loosen the anxiety, vocalize at some point that it must be hard to single-handedly run the cafe on a day like today. Until the line finally clears, I attempt to hold the space with him while simultaneously doing my own work, and he seems to feel it (though I can never be sure).

I am aware that we project our own emotional experiences onto others to some extent in all encounters and that social location impacts our projections as well. Even with the enmeshed element of projection, though, the dynamic in this particular encounter remains clear: emotional engagement, an embodied interaction, is taking place alongside my exercise in intellectualizing the experience on this page, and at times, it takes precedence. This inclination has not always served me well. It can require intense personal reflection and careful attention to emotional boundaries. However, I believe that an act like this could be considered a form of intelligence, insofar as it lends itself to faculties of understanding, to connection and the ability to shift dynamics in the social world. Marjorie O’Loughlin (2006) describes this phenomenon as “fellow-feeling” and emphasizes the importance of developing and sustaining the capacity to empathize, coupled with a willingness to engage, all of which contrasts with dominant rational, objective, and detached ways of knowing and being. O’Loughlin asserts that she sees “the root of all emotions as lying in prior events in the lives of individuals and social groups which, over time, build a certain reservoir of reactions and response” (125). Her affirmation supports the notion that class identity and experience make significant contributions to the development of one’s emotional being and emotional capacity.

Kadi (1996, 147) speaks frankly and directly to the existence of such capacities for emotional response within working-class cultures:

Working-class people express feelings more than rich people, know how to laugh, cry, and love with abandon, find happiness in everyday life. And not because of anything innate, biological or essential. These tendencies clearly illustrate the workings of the class system. As working-class people, we haven’t been socialized into grim, restrictive sets of manners, social codes and behaviours. We don’t have to act politely or formally, don’t have to dole out emotions and feelings carefully and precisely, little bits at a time. . . . This doesn’t mean we’re all emotionally healthy and vibrant, able to express and feel deep, authentic emotion. But there’s more possibility for any of this to arise.

It is notable that Kadi, a self-identified feminist, does not acknowledge the profound influence of gender conditioning on emotionality. I do not believe that Kadi would negate or minimize the impact of such social forces; rather, through his omission, Kadi speaks to the weight that class culture, in all its complexity, places on emotional capacity.

While I believe that being socialized as female greatly influenced my emotional inclinations, certain aspects of my disposition and willingness to engage often feel markedly different from many of the women I walk alongside who come from more class-privileged backgrounds. My experiences with a poverty-induced unstable home life during childhood also contributed much to the emotional intelligence that I gained and carry with me today. Being immediately attuned to the emotional energy in a room and relieving tension if possible was probably paramount to my survival during my developmentally formative years. As a result, emotional attunement and perceptiveness are among the qualities that I relate most directly to my early life experiences, which were deeply shaped by the poverty-class conditions of the homes and communities I grew up in.

Stress, instability, and shame resulting from systemic discrimination and the weight of living with limited resources have profound effects on all aspects of health and family systems. Again, I can only speak to my own particular experience of poverty as a white, cis-gendered child of settler ancestry in urban maritime and southwestern Ontarian contexts. One’s experience of poverty at a different social intersection would look and feel very different. In my experience and observation, conditions of poverty and the instability that ensues can pose severe limits on one’s ability to cope and navigate social mores, while also serving to sharpen certain skills that guide survival and produce particular ways of moving around with more ease. The ability to be emotionally attuned to those around, to be highly perceptive and empathetic, to be able to summon scanning searchlights to suss out danger, to carefully consider all possible eventualities, to be incredibly resourceful—these are only some of the competencies that are shaped by experiences associated with poverty and working-class backgrounds.

In addition to focusing on class structure, feminist theorists have written extensively regarding discourse on sexism and racism, emotional conditioning, and knowledge production. O’Loughlin (2006, 126) details the historical “characterization of emotion as irrational because of its supposedly compulsive and disruptive nature, but also because of its historic association with women and ‘the feminine,’” as well as “its depiction as threat to the functioning of cognition and rationality.” This history, informed by profoundly racist and classist colonial ideologies and discourse, produces the systemic devaluing of emotional ways of knowing. Sara Ahmed’s critique of how emotions are perceived and discussed, in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), also contributes much to this discourse. Ahmed argues for the importance of examining how emotions are produced and cautions against thinking about emotionality as a characteristic of individual or collective bodies. She states that emotions become “qualities” that seem to reside in objects only through an erasure of the history of their production and circulation; that it is the objects of emotion that circulate, not the emotion itself (11). This notion is relevant to the conversation about how class conditions emotional capacity in that it is important to be clear that this conditioning is rooted in social and cultural forces and that one’s emotional response is subject to such forces at all times.

In exploring the sociality of emotions, cultural theorists have pointed to the sociohistorical contexts that produce systemic exclusionary practices around nondominant forms of intelligence. Kadi (1996), for example, speaks of “intelligence” as being similar to social constructions such as “race” in that it is defined in a limited and narrow way by the ruling class. Kadi asserts that despite the privileging of mind-intellect in the West, many different kinds of intelligence exist:

Equally valid types of intelligence enable a child to design and build a bird house, a mother to balance a budget with no money, an “uneducated” man to enthrall listeners with stories, . . . three young women to invent scathing responses to catcalls and whistles. These types of intelligence require creativity, humor, ability to ask questions, care, a good memory, compassion, belief in solidarity, ability to project an image of something that doesn’t physically exist. (51)

Emotional and spiritual capacities are closely entwined. People connect with spirit and embodied knowledge in a myriad of ways. My sister and I have always discussed the spiritual connections we feel despite not having been raised with religion or taught any spiritual practices. As we have worked on building containers for understanding our experiences, I’ve reflected on the factors in our lives that may have contributed to the openness we have had to recognizing moments where we sense the spirit world, listening to dreams and intuition and experiencing sensations that seem distinctively unphysical. In my own experience, I believe that growing up around the nonnormativity of poverty-class culture—which includes more emphasis on interdependence, less investment in “rational” ways of being, less faith in dominant institutions and the “truths” they espouse, and the out-loud-ness of different ways of being and experiencing the world that are characteristic of many poverty-class communities—informed my receptiveness to instances that I can’t immediately understand or classify, such as the sensing of spirit.

Jacqui Alexander’s (2005) compelling personal account of her own spiritual life and critical call for meaningful validation of spiritual knowledge has contributed immensely to discourse relating to social location and forms of knowledge that continue to be marginalized within dominant institutions. Her sentient expressions of sacred accompaniment—of guidance, identity, and the importance of “knowing who walks with you”—illustrate just one aspect of the deep wealth of knowledge possessed by many who live with strong spiritual connections. Alexander’s words are powerful in their frank assertion of truths and their critique of dominant values around knowledge production, including those within postmodern feminist discourse:

Those who would characterize this world of the post-modern and the identities of its inhabitants as absent of this essence or core would seem to be at odds with the thought systems of a great number of people in the world who live the belief that their lives are intimately and tangibly paired to the world of the invisible. (327)

Alexander goes on to assert that “taking the Sacred seriously would propel us to take the lives of primarily working-class women and men seriously, and it would move us away from theorizing primarily from the point of marginalization” (328). Though the extent to which a spiritual world view is seen by many to be vital to human well-being is beyond the scope of this chapter, spirituality is often cited as a source of personal and collective power. David Este and Wanda Thomas Bernard (2006) focus on the spiritual lives within a community of African Nova Scotians. They discuss the lived experience of people who speak of their spiritual health as an important aspect of physical health and overall well-being. That the material realities inherent to intergenerational poverty and working-class culture can be conducive to spiritual knowledge is widely accepted. It’s the devaluing and marginalization of such knowledges that closet what Alexander (2005, 301) calls “the strengthening of intimacy between personhood and sacred accompaniment.”

In my own family experience, my maternal grandmother spoke out loud to invisible worlds alongside connections with those physically present. Several different, coexisting narratives accumulated around her life and other family members’ experiences over time—including the presence of the invisible, internal stimuli, wisdom, spiritual devotion, mental health, psychiatrization, and intergenerational trauma. I use this example to reiterate the existence of simultaneous realities and to touch on the many different forms of spiritual connection. Reflecting on my own family also calls me to recognize the ways in which social location mediates our experience. It is undeniable that various members of my family would probably have faced very different consequences if they had not benefited from colonial and white privilege. Though forced psychiatrization and incarceration due to nonnormative behaviour are a part of my family’s experience, I know that if my grandmother had been Indigenous, she may not have had the privilege of keeping her six children, nor would she have been spared from residential schooling, displacement, loss of language, and cultural and spiritual genocide. Such experiences engender an array of psychic and spiritual knowledges that I could not personally speak to, but which many have written about.

Alongside the harm that my grandmother did bear as a result of the way she experienced life and expressed herself, it was also clear that her understanding of the world, largely informed by her relationship with an invisible realm, contributed to her capacity to communicate, intuit, and offer comfort and guidance to others.

I return here to Jacqui Alexander’s (2005, 326) question: “What would taking the Sacred seriously mean for transnational feminism and related radical projects, beyond an institutionalized use value of theorizing marginalization?” As Rice and Russell (1995) and Alexander (2005) suggest, there is a great need to move embodiment discourse beyond theorizing marginalization and toward making real space for the lives and experiences of those whose knowledges have been devalued and whose contributions should be integral to the development of theory itself. I aim to add to the many voices calling for the recognition of nondominant knowledge—including the capacity for genuine empathy, perceptiveness, and interconnection between embodied beings and the spirit world.

Implications for Pedagogy

All learning environments, both formal and informal, need to make meaningful space for nondominant ways of knowing and relating to the world: Indigenous knowledges, emotional and spiritual ways of knowing, trauma-induced forms of knowledge, and the widely varying learning styles that are born from widely varying experiences, to name a few. Orr (2002, 480) asserts that even the most radical pedagogies remain largely cognitive, thus functioning primarily on the intellectual level and inherently limiting the potential to effectively create the necessary conditions to achieve deep levels of transformation in students’ lives. Until such a time when the way we organize ourselves socially is dramatically different from the oppressive structures currently in place, formalized education systems would better serve students by integrating embodied approaches to teaching and learning. If a strong sense of humour, spiritual attunement, skills based in social and emotional communication, cooperative efforts, perceptiveness, intuition, camaraderie, storytelling, creativity, innovation, and materially resourceful inclinations were genuinely valued as intelligences equal to those perceived as “intellectual” competencies, more people living poverty-class lives may feel a sense of meaning, validation, and mobility within educational walls. Other examples are offered by Jenny Horsman in her work on women, violence, and literacy, where she argues that a society that values one form of reading—the reading of print—discounts all other forms. Horsman (1999, 31) makes reference to Indigenous educator Priscilla George, who talks about “stressing the value of the traditional ‘reading’ of the environment—the weather, tracks and so on—skills that many Indigenous people know well which are often discounted [in dominant institutions].”

As many educators have noted, current modes of teaching do not treat the learner as an embodied subject, and critical calls have been made for more holistic pedagogies that proactively acknowledge the interconnectedness of our mind, body, emotion, and spirit in the construction and pursuit of knowledge (Ng 2011, 1). As teachers and learners, we need to develop the language needed to express how we embody our emotional and spiritual struggles within learning environments, to recognize the capacity to feel strongly and to think, and to be supported in this process. We need to recognize ourselves and each other as whole people—mind, body, and spirit. We need to value our lived experiences and the intelligences that are cultivated through struggle and survival as much as we value more conventional notions of achievement.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I have aimed to highlight connections among colonialism, white supremacy, and class oppression as a starting point to a full discussion on how class-based experiences can give rise to particular knowledges and capacities. I discussed the notion that the historical entrenchment of rationality, foundational to Western-colonial social thought, takes a stronger hold among people who have benefited most from white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism and among those whose bodies reflect most closely the privileged norm. Valuable and varying forms of knowledge exist among people living outside of dominant norms in a multitude of ways, including people living within poverty and working-class cultures.

In delving into some of the complex roots that condition and strengthen nondominant knowledge, I explored how systemic and interpersonal violence and trauma stemming from conditions of poverty can result in both embodying and disembodying experiences. I have attempted to place this reality in conversation with the notion of honouring survival, valuing the existing array of poverty-class knowledges and competencies, and, at the same time, calling for counterhegemonic change. In the vein of holding complex realities, the aforementioned ideas stand to show that injury and resiliency can and generally do coexist—that one need not cancel out the other and that our education systems in particular need to make more space for forms of knowledge that reflect the full spectrum of lived realities. Finally, beyond reform to current structures, a massive dismantling of these structures is required in order for transformative change to take root. The success of this effort depends on broad-based connection building among people whose lived experiences inform our shared investment in nondominant ways of knowing, being, healing, teaching, and learning.

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