F
Freire and the Body
Antonia Darder
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA,
USA
It is the human body, young or old, fat or thin, of
whatever color, the conscious body that looks at the
stars. It is the body that writes. It is the body that
speaks. It is the body that fights. It is the body that
loves and hates. It is the body that suffers. It is the
body that dies. It is the body that lives!
—Paulo Freire (in Freire & Faundez 1989)
Introduction
Freire left behind a legacy that speaks passion-
ately to the relationship of the body to emancipa-
tory forms of education. This encompasses a
pedagogical perspective that remains fully cogni-
zant of the primacy of the body in the construction
of knowledge. Freire’s philosophical renderings
are anchored to an understanding of teachers and
students as material beings and thus call for a
pedagogical process informed by a humanizing
ethos of the body to support reflection, dialogue,
and solidarity, as we labor for the common good.
As teachers and students participate more fully in
the dialogical process of communal learning, the
materiality of their bodies also must be under-
stood as rightful allies in the formation and
# Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016
M.A. Peters (ed.), Encyclopedia of Educational Philosophy and Theory,
DOI 10.1007/978-981-287-532-7_529-1
expression of collective consciousness. Of this
Freire (1983) said, “true education incarnates the
permanent search of people together with others
for their becoming fully human in the world in
which they exist” (96). With these ideas in mind,
this essay considers some of the salient ways in
which the body is made central to Freirean
thought.
Banking Education and Disembodiment
In Teachers and Cultural Workers: Letters to
Those who Dare to Teach, it is apparent that for
Freire (1998b) providing a rightful place for the
engagement of the body in the classroom encom-
passes an integral view of students as
multidimensional human beings. It is this integral
view that is often negated within banking educa-
tion, where a more complex understanding of the
body and its significance to intellectual and polit-
ical formation is generally absent – unless it is
being directed toward corporal control of stu-
dents. Since the epistemological focus of tradi-
tional education privileges cognition, other
important ways of knowing are easily ignored or
dismissed. As a result, student voices and physical
expressions of the body that fall outside the main-
stream cultural register are systematically
silenced. It is also worth noting that this phenom-
enon is predicated upon the prevailing notion of
the individual as psychological self, whose intel-
ligence and “ego strength” is supposedly gauged
2 Freire and the Body
by the ability to function effectively, irrespective
of external conditions.
In contrast, Freire (2002, 1993, 1989a) coun-
ters the limits of this Western pedagogical tradi-
tion that disembodies knowledge, supporting the
banking approach to education, which negates the
role of the body in teaching and learning. Freire
understood this to be tied to the intellectual history
of the West, where the mind and the body, as the
mind and the heart, are deemed antagonists in the
process of intellectual formation. This tradition of
disembodiment shapes antidialogical classroom
practices and expectations that students compart-
mentalize themselves, without contending with
the manner in which this approach to learning
reproduces asymmetrical relations of power that
oppress organic constructions of knowledge.
Freire (1998a) recognized that such
disembodiment serves to disable the formation
of student voice, social agency, and democratic
participation – a process that can be even more
disabling to oppressed who seldom enjoy the
resources and opportunities of their more affluent
counterparts.
Accordingly, Freire (1993) noted that students
are expected to engage their studies as objective,
distanced, and impartial observers, even when the
object of their study may be intimately linked to
brutal conditions of human suffering that are a
part of their lived histories. He rightly argued
that traditional academic expectations affirm that
feelings and intuition corrupt the process of teach-
ing and learning and, thus, should be feared. Of
this he argued, “the categorical negation of emo-
tion and passion, the belief in technicism, ends in
convincing many that, the more neutral
[or disembodied] we are in our actions, the more
objective and efficient we will be” (p. 106).
Hence, university students, for example, are
slowly but surely socialized to labor as uncritical,
descriptive, “neutral” scholars, dispassionate,
disembodied, and alienated from the subject of
study. This results from a pedagogy conceived
epistemologically in deeply estranged ways,
devoid of the very qualities that humanize our
existence.
Freire posited that, unfortunately, educators
prepared in a banking pedagogy seldom possess
the necessary political acumen about the body to
deflect deficit notions embodied commonsensi-
cally within the classroom. This further incapaci-
tates the human sensibility necessary for critical
engagement of the larger conditions of inequal-
ities that shape the lives of historically oppressed
populations. Common authoritarian responses to
student physicality also ignore or misinterpret
meaning and intent behind student behaviors out-
side the mainstream, converting the body into an
object that must acquiesce to the teacher’s will or
be expelled (Darder 2015). In the process, little
attention is given to the dialectical relationship
that students have with their material world – a
relationship that for working class youth of color,
for example, requires constant navigation of the
minefields of structural oppression perpetuated by
racism, poverty, and other forms of social exclu-
sions. The unfortunate consequence is that
disembodied knowledge seldom leads teachers
and students to grapple critically with deeper
moral questions of education, which would
undoubtedly challenge social and material rela-
tions that sustain human suffering and structural
inequalities.
The Estrangement of the Body
Freire (2002) made a variety of references in
Pedagogy of Hope that reflect his recognition
that the material conditions of estrangement that
shape the lived histories of oppressed students,
workers, and their communities are made visible
and are profoundly expressed through their bod-
ies. This can be witnessed in their skin, their teeth,
their hair, their gestures, their speech, and the
movement of their arms and legs. As such, student
bodies provide meaningful maps of identity and
powerful insights into the tensions, struggles, and
needs that students from oppressed communities
express in the classroom and out in the world. In
concert with Marx, Freire (1998a) understood that
hegemonic schooling is founded on a politics of
estrangement, which like that of estranged labor
functions to alienate youth from their bodies and
the natural world. He considered the estrangement
of the body akin to “that invisible power of
Freire and the Body
alienating domestication. . . a state of refined
estrangement. . .of a loss of consciousness of the
body” (p. 102).
Hence, banking education exists as an arena of
domestication, where abstract knowledge and its
constructions are decontextualized, disembodied,
and objectified. In response, students are forced to
acquiesce to its alienating function, limiting ratio-
nality, and technocratic instrumentalism. With this
in mind, Freire (1998a) asserted in Pedagogy of
Freedom that it is insufficient to rely on abstract
approaches to learning, where disembodied words
and texts are privileged in the construction of
knowledge: “words not given body (made flesh)
have little or no value” (p. 39). His concern here
was with the manner in which educational pro-
cesses of estrangement cause false dichotomies
that alienate students from their material
world – the only true realm from which liberatory
education can be forged.
Given the significant role of the body in the
pedagogical process, Freire noted how the onto-
logical and epistemological estrangement of the
body in banking approaches interfere dramatically
with the capacities of students to know them-
selves, one another, and their world. Ignored is
the obvious fact; our lives unfold within the vital
experiences of the flesh and its sentient capacity.
Instead, the body is seen as an object to be con-
trolled, contained, or transcended, given it’s
potential to disrupt the hegemonic order. This
negation sidelines the affective and relational
needs of student bodies that must endure, resist,
and struggle to become free from the social and
material entanglements of a society that imprisons
them, both ideologically and corporally.
Repressive views of the body and sensuality
within education also serve to negate, overtly or
covertly, the cultural knowledge and wisdom of
oppressed cultural populations, whose epistemo-
logical view and expression of the body in their
cultural process of knowing may differ substan-
tially from the mainstream’s dichotomy of body
and consciousness. In the process, this often alien-
ates and estranges students from ways of life,
including human suffering, which exist outside
of the limited scope of the hegemonic lens,
whether linked to class, gender, ethnicity,
3
sexuality, skin color, physical constitution, or spir-
itual beliefs.
Unfortunately, it precisely the power of sensu-
ality, with its revolutionary potential to summon
dissent and nurture empowerment, that is system-
atically stripped away from student experiences
within the classroom. In response, Freire’s view of
the body challenges conservative ideologies of
social control historically linked to Western ped-
agogical traditions, which negate the body’s rele-
vance. Disembodied views of teaching and
learning have also led to pedagogical practices
that perpetrate violence upon the oppressed
through an erasure of the body and the annihila-
tion of the flesh in the act of knowing. Accord-
ingly, inequalities are reproduced through class,
racialized, gendered, ableist, and heterosexist per-
ceptions and distortions, which are embedded,
wittingly or unwittingly, in prevailing attitudes
of hegemonic schooling.
Teachers, whose bodies too are similarly
restricted, alienated, and domesticated by their
workplace are under enormous pressure to follow
strict policies and procedures for classroom con-
duct, instead of employing more creative and
humanizing approaches, grounded in the actual
needs of students. We can return here to Freire’s
(2013) notion of “the human being as a conscious
body” (p. 128) and his assertion that domestica-
tion is responsible for “a loss of consciousness of
the body” (Freire 1998a, p. 102). As a conse-
quence of this disembodiment (a symptom of
estrangement), Freire recognized that teachers
generally experience an uphill battle in meeting
standardized mandates, which systematically
functioned to also extricate student bodies from
the equation of their learning.
Meanwhile, educators who struggle to imple-
ment liberating strategies in this context of
estrangement are also often forced to become
masters of deception – saying what the principal
or district office wishes to hear, while doing
behind closed doors what they believe is in the
best interest of youth. Unfortunately, having to
shoulder the physical stress of this duplicity can
drive some of the most effective teachers away
from their chosen vocation, given the intolerable
alienation this engenders. While others, who
4 Freire and the Body
simply feel defeated or frustrated by the pressure,
adopt more authoritarian approaches manipulate
or coerce cooperation, justifying their decision
with contradictory rhetoric about the pragmatic
necessity. What cannot be overlooked is that
authoritarian practices of the classroom not only
“blindfold students and lead them to a domesti-
cated future” (Freire 1970, p. 79) but also alienate
teacher labor as well.
Implicit here again are deficit assumptions and
debilitating preconceptions projected upon
teachers or students whose bodily appearance or
expression is perceived to be outside the classed,
racialized, patriarchal, heteronormative, abled, or
spiritual mainstream of acceptable classroom
behavior. Consequently, students from working
class and racialized communities, where the
body’s spontaneity is given greater primacy and
freedom in the act of knowing, are often expected
to sacrifice the creative and sensual knowledge of
their bodies to an atomized, abstracted, and dis-
passionate logic of being. As such, Freire (2005)
pointed to “the need for an interdisciplinary read-
ing of bodies with students, for breaking away
from dichotomies, ruptures that are enviable and
deforming” (p. 52) in the forging of a critical
praxis of the body.
Critical Praxis of the Body
Freire’s ideas on the body point then to the need
for teachers and students to labor in the flesh. This
is to say that liberatory forms of teaching and
learning must be rooted in the materiality of
human existence, as a starting place for critical
praxis. Freire (1993) argued, “It is [through] this
process of change, of transforming the material
world from which we emerged, that creation of the
cultural and historical world takes place (108).”
However, there is nothing automatic or “natural”
about this process of social change nor is it a
process that can solely rely on calculating logic
or cold rationality. Moreover, given that the
body’s sentient quality overwhelmingly shapes
student experiences, their bodies constantly resist
or desist, adjust or rebel, rejoice or despair in their
desire to experience the freedom to be.
As a political and organic entity, the body plays
then a significant role in making sense of the
material conditions and social relations of power
that shape our lives. Similarly, a praxis of the body
can support teachers in building a democratic
educational practice, where students are not
asked to confront themselves and each other as
strangers, but rather in the spirit of human kinship
and community. This link between the body and
communal life is also central to Freire’s under-
standing of conscientização, which can only
unfold and evolve within the context of solidarity
and political participation – in the flesh (Darder
2015).
So much so, that in Pedagogy of the City,
Freire (1993) spoke to the undeniable centrality
of the body in the act of knowing the world: “The
importance of the body is indisputable. . .its
importance has to do with a certain
sensualism. . .even in connection with cognitive
ability. . .it’s absurd to separate the rigorous acts
of knowing the world from the [body’s] passion-
ate ability to know” (p. 87). Freire’s own passion-
ate way of being in the world and his many
references to the "beauty of the body" and "the
restlessness of bodies," bore witness to the ways
in which the body's sensuality and sexuality had a
determining impact on consciousness and reason.
In Pedagogy of the Heart, Freire (1998c)
commented on the “gradual improvement in per-
formance on the part of the student, as the peda-
gogy of questioning started to gain ground against
the pedagogy of answers, and as issues around the
body were addressed” (p. 62).
Yet, despite major institutional efforts to
repress and control the desires, pleasures, and
mobility of the body within the classroom,
Freire’s writings support the view that students
seldom fully surrender their bodies or readily
acquiesce to authoritarian practices – practices
which in themselves provide the impetus for resis-
tance, especially in those students whose dynamic
histories are excluded within mainstream educa-
tion. Instead, Freire (1970) recognized that in their
Freire and the Body
struggle for freedom, students who are repressed
will “try out forms of rebellious action” (p. 64),
engaging in the construction of their own cultural
forms of resistance that may or may not always
function in their best interest.
Yet, often, expressions of student resistance are
enacted in the classroom through alterations of the
body – be they clothing, hairstyle, posturing, man-
ner of walking, way of speaking, the piercing and
tattooing of the body. These actions represent then
not only acts of resistance but also alternative
ways of experiencing, affirming, and knowing
the world, generally perceived by officials as
transgressive and disruptive to the social order.
In a footnote in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire
(1970) made reference to the pedagogical signif-
icance of this phenomenon by saying that teachers
cannot “see youth rebellion as a mere example of
the traditional differences between generations.
Something deeper is involved here. Young people
in their rebellion are denouncing and condemning
the unjust model of a society of domination. This
rebellion with its special dimension, however, is
very recent; [in that] society continues to be
authoritarian in character” (p. 154).
Freire contended that often this authoritarian-
ism led to historical absences of the body in the
classroom, due to institutional fears associated
with the body’s real potential for disruption and
subversion. Thus, he called upon an emancipatory
ethical commitment to counter the disembodiment
of our humanity – a commitment that lies at the
heart of Freire’s liberatory pedagogical project. To
endure daily confrontations with oppressive
forces, for example, Freire (1998a) urged us to
“struggle for the material conditions without
which our body will suffer from neglect” (p. 95).
Nevertheless, often missing from educational dis-
courses is precisely this ethical connection of the
body to critical praxis.
The Body as Ethical Terrain of Struggle
Freire (1993) embraced the totality of the body in
the act of knowing, insisting “It is my entire body
5
that socially knows. I cannot, in the name of
exactness and rigor, negate my body, my emotions
and my feelings” (p. 105). With this in mind,
Freire (2002, 1989) posited that the human body
constitutes an ethical terrain of struggle from
which all emancipatory knowledge must emerge.
Without the materiality of the body, our teaching
and learning is reduced to processes of abstraction
and fragmentation that attempt to falsely render
knowledge a neutral and objective phenomenon,
absent of history and ideology. Accordingly,
Freire (2002, 1998a, 1993) understood the body
as the medium for our existence as subjects of
history and as politically empowered agents of
change. We are molded and shaped by the struc-
tures, policies and practices of economic domina-
tion, and social exclusion, which violently insert
our bodies into the alienating morass of an inten-
sified global division of labor.
Therefore, it is not surprising that in Pedagogy
of the Heart, Freire (1998c) merges the question
of the body to ethics, when he asserts, “I refuse,
for all these reasons, to think that we are eternally
destined to live the negation of our own selves. In
order to be in the world, my conscious body, my
unfinished and historical being, needs food as it
needs ethics. The fight would make no sense to me
without this” (p. 89). Hence, for Freire, the inte-
gration of the body served as an indisputable
ethical dimension of revolutionary praxis and
this, emancipatory education, in that, ultimately:
It is the body that lives!
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Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power,
and liberation. South Hadley: Bergin & Garvey.
Freire, P. (1993). Pedagogy of the city. New York:
Continuum.
6 Freire and the Body

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