ORCID ID
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7940-235X
Date Awarded
2023
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Department
American Studies
Advisor
Michelle Lelievre
Committee Member
Leisa Meyer
Committee Member
Simon Stow
Committee Member
Diane Detournay
Abstract
In Their Shoes: Embodied Experience, Knowledge Production, and the Politics of Empathy is an interdisciplinary study that engages the dynamic relationship between three concepts—empathy, embodiment, and experience—to approach the guiding query: how do we move people to act? To address this question, I bring together the physical and emotional aspects of movement by examining how empathy, as an affective and political structure, becomes a mode for encountering the other. Through an examination of empathic discourses across ostensibly disparate sites and institutions, I demonstrate how widespread the experiential and embodied discourse of empathy is. This dissertation traces a genealogy of individuals who simulate embodied experiences in order to develop empathy through a structure I call empathic experiments, which are designed by their participants in order to acquire knowledge that they presume is inaccessible unless they simulate certain embodied experiences. Each empathic experiment involves a form of bodily manipulation that allows the individual to enter into the world of the other. My case studies include autobiographies of white individuals in the twentieth century who physically altered their bodies to pass as black, reality television series that similarly seek out cross-racial empathy through either physical makeover or home-swapping, and travel-based experiential learning initiatives in higher education. By tracking the movement of empathy through space and time, and across these contexts, I articulate how the supposedly subjective capacity for empathy is routinely redeployed as a punitive technique in the service of adjudicating which bodies and lives possess value in the social world. The empathic relation, meant to bind the subject to the other, becomes a social technology whose function is to preemptively foreclose the humanity of the other. This dissertation’s central claim is that the assertions of embodied knowledge and the experiential truths undergirding empathy institute authoritative claims about universal personhood, one that effects an erasure of the lived experience of the disenfranchised by those with the power to shape the very field of knowledge itself.
DOI
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-6hhy-ba38
Rights
© The Author
Recommended Citation
Shilo, Molly, "In Their Shoes: Embodied Experience, Knowledge Production, And The Politics Of Empathy" (2023). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. William & Mary. Paper 1717521868.
https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-6hhy-ba38
