Somatic education and embodied discourses: Using the Feldenkrais Method to challenge dominant discourses in the sexually abused body context

Abstract

Abstract In an autoethnographical study for a master’s degree in dance, the author shares how somatic education enabled her to challenge the dominant discourses that were integrated following the incest she experienced in her childhood. Considering that our identities are a function of the constraints that act on us and influence our subjectivity, the author explains how these discourses have influenced her relationship to her body and how the Feldenkrais Method made a new perception of self and of the world possible. She describes her experience of the self-educating process, a process that revealed the plasticity of a self capable of adapting to the whole of her life experiences. From the development of somatic authority to creative self-fashioning, the author draws from a variety of inspirations to nurture her thinking about, and show the role played by, somatic education.