On Embodiment, Identity, and Who Gets to Take Up Space
Some years ago, I attended a keynote lecture at a rather prestigious conference—The speaker, a visiting professor, was a brilliant woman—a specialist in ethics and philosophy, with credentials and publications longer than words starting with ‘Q’ in the dictionary. And yet, when she stood to speak, the room… shifted.
Not physically, of course. But there was an unmistakable pause, a hesitation—as if the very walls were momentarily confused by the mismatch between who she was and where she stood.
It was then I realised something uncomfortable but important: power lives not only in our ideas, but in our bodies. Or more precisely, in how our bodies are read by others.
We are trained, often unconsciously, to associate certain shapes, voices, and movements with authority. The tall man with a deep voice. The white hair that signifies wisdom. The tailored suit that suggests control. And conversely, we are conditioned to doubt the small voice, the accented speaker, the face we don’t expect at the front of the room.
Power, then, is not evenly distributed—not just institutionally, but viscerally. Some people enter a room and are presumed competent. Others must spend their energy convincing everyone they belong before they can even begin.
It is one thing to be excluded from a boardroom; it is another entirely to walk into that boardroom and feel, in your bones, that the air was not made for you. Power operates through space, posture, expectation—and silence.
This is particularly evident in matters of race, gender, disability, and queerness—those identity markers that are not theoretical but profoundly embodied. I have seen colleagues ignored until someone taller, and often with a paler skin tone, repeated their idea. I have watched people interrupt women not because of their words, but because they never fully saw them as speakers.
We must, therefore, ask not only who has a voice, but whose voice is welcomed without suspicion.
In Christian theology this is deeply significant. If the divine became flesh—if God did not hover abstractly above us but walked among us in a specific Palestinian body, in a specific time—then we must take bodies seriously. Not as distractions from reason, but as sites of power, vulnerability, and sacred presence.
Jesus touched lepers. He let women interrupt him. He spoke with foreigners and honoured their speech. That was not just kindness; it was a radical disruption of social scripts about who could be, indeed SHOULD BE seen, touched, and heard. One might say it was divine politics—incarnational justice.
Which brings me to the crux of this reflection: to create just spaces, we must not only include diverse people—we must reimagine what power looks like in the first place. It means rethinking who gets to sit, who gets to lead, and who gets to take up space without apologising for their existence.
And for those of us in bodies that are often welcomed, that means doing more than making room. It means changing the shape of the room entirely. Not offering patronising access, but sharing presence as equals, refusing to measure power by voice volume or shoe size or proximity to an acceptable accent.
Because the question is not whether power is in the flesh—it is. The question is whose flesh we’ve decided gets to matter.
And if we’re honest, many of our institutions still run on a kind of bodily orthodoxy—a subtle theology of height and dress code, of gait and tone. The real work, then, is not just in writing new policies. It is in unlearning the old instincts.
So the next time someone unexpected stands to speak, and you feel the room pause—perhaps you yourself pause. And listen. And let the room be re-formed around a new kind of power: one that speaks not from privilege, but from truth carried in the body, with courage.
