At her book launch, Elizabeth Mackinlay presents as a slim, small woman, with a delicate finesse and care-fully crafted femininity. I am a much larger roughly-hewn figure who is not known for her embodied elegance. As a lived life, my mostly masculine working-class body is starkly different from that of Elizabeth’s fleshed-out feminine being. Yet there is something in the words she spoke and wrote, the care-full but potent prose and poetry in Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches: Autoethnography, Feminism and Decoloniality that resonated with me immediately upon listening to her words and reading her book.
A key theme of Critical Writing for Embodied Approaches is, as the title suggests, Mackinlay’s embodied story. Embodiment is a well-known feminist tenet, but Mackinlay’s feminism does something new that is exciting, subtle, and heart-breaking. Throughout the book the author guides us with her “heartlines,” those lines on one’s palms that are said to...
University of California Press