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- Amanda Marcotte writes, “As Lorraine noted in her post on this the other day, one of the primary features of turning someone into an Other that you can feel superior towards is to symbolically cast them as embodied and then implicitly or even explicitly cast yourself as superior and transcendent of bodily concerns. How does this work? Well, . . . you have racists who think that white people are smarter than black people and concurrently that black people are better athletes, which is a way of saying that black people are embodied but white people are somehow transcendent. Fundie homophobes obsess over anal sex because to them, penetration is about humiliating and embodying the penetrated one, showing that she is just a fleshy thing that will die. That men can get penetrated means men are soft, fleshy beings that will die and this causes them to panic.” More, including the application to torture and some good links.
