The Body's Defenses Against the Mind

In The Body's Defenses Against Itself, Fatima has an obsession with the perfection of her body, both in the original narration and in her frequent flashbacks to adolescence. In her retelling of those teenage memories, this means she is preoccupied with being thin, especially in contrast with Christinia: "Her stomach made her one of the heftier girls in the class, and when I got up the courage to look down on her, I made a point of flaunting my thinness—the only desirable thing about my body—over her tendency towards chubby" (Thompson-Spires, 54). Fatima feels a loss of control because of her experience with hyperhidrosis and the constant competition between herself and Christinia, so she uses the perfection of her body as a coping mechanism, giving her some semblance of confidence while also gaining her an edge over Christinia.

Fatima's obsession with her body expands beyond her looks, and into the issues of her everyday bodily function. In the flashbacks, she narrates the experience of constant, metrorrhagic bleeding. In a visit to the doctor to try to solve the issue, Fatima tries to convince the doctor that the spotting is not due to sexual activity. When the doctor finally believes her, Fatima narrates "with my virginity established, she could treat me like a person instead of just a body (59)". She doesn't want to be seen as a body, even one with such elemental medical concerns like sweating and bleeding, and this furthers her fixation with perfection into a more primitive concern of cleanliness. 

As an adult, Fatima still carries these feelings. At the age of thirty-three, she gets her period for the first time after many years of using birth control. "I try to believe the bleeding is just part of the purgative process, the toxins pouring out to make me new inside, like the sweat is supposed to do in hot yoga, like a release after a large meal (62)". She has a fixation on purging to find cleanliness; purging food from her stomach, blood from her body, and sweat from her skin. Each one of these things, in its original purpose, is one of the body's defenses against its environment, a regulatory action that serves to keep the body safe or healthy somehow. However, by trying to distort these meanings to her own ends, Fatima turns the body's defenses against the environment into defenses against her image of imperfection. Because the image is in her mind, an unshakeable standard of what is unacceptable, Fatima turns bodily defenses into a defense against her mind. Because she seeks to control these processes, she turns a defense into a weapon, an instrument of health into an instrument of harm. 

It is important to note that this story recognizes the mind as a part of the body. Fatima says her favorite part of her Bikram sessions is Savasana, or "corpse pose," a position focused on bodily comfort so as to let the mind be free of constraints. The inclusion of this detail shows that Fatima considers the mind to be a part of the body; therefore, the body's defenses against the body can also become the body's defenses against the mind.

Fatima consciously corrupts these bodily processes, co-opting her discomfort of her teenage struggles with excessive sweat and blood, turning a negative into an unhealthy, medically unfounded positive. Fatima believes that if she becomes a perfect body, a clean body, free of toxins, of odor, of sweat, blood, and excess flesh, she will be more than just a body. By perfecting herself through these painful measures, she will transcend the vulnerability of being mocked or being reduced to the harborer of uncleanliness. She will be above the kind of one-upmanship that she experienced with Christinia, and will forever have something that makes her better than others, like the woman in the yoga studio. By perfecting herself, she will always have control over other peoples' perception of her, and she will always win.

Image: A selection of cultured plant calluses, the body's defense against itself, according to Christinia.