page_title: Somatic theory
section_title: Stephanie Fetta
hierarchical_section_title: Somatic theory / Theorists / Stephanie Fetta
caption_attribution_description: English: Stephanie Fetta is Associate Professor of Latin@/x Literature and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
context_page_description: Somatic theory is a theory of human social behavior based loosely on the somatic marker hypothesis of António Damásio, which proposes a mechanism by which emotional processes can guide behavior, particularly decision-making, as well as the attachment theory of John Bowlby and the self psychology of Heinz Kohut, especially as consolidated by Allan Schore.
  It draws on various philosophical models from On the Genealogy of Morals of Friedrich Nietzsche through Martin Heidegger on das Man, Maurice Merleau-Ponty on the lived body, and Ludwig Wittgenstein on social practices to Michel Foucault on discipline, as well as theories of performativity emerging out of the speech act theory of J. L. Austin, especially as developed by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman; some somatic theorists have also tied somaticity to performance in the schools of actor training developed by Konstantin Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht.
context_section_description: Stephanie Fetta’s approach to somatic theory weaves together an extensive array of disciplinary discourses, ranging from cognitive science and neuroscience to sociology and Sophiology. As a literary and cultural critic, Fetta draws attention to and investigates the role of the soma in her study of US Latin@/x creative texts. Her scholarly work broadens the scope of somatic theory and literary scholarship by drawing support from the natural and social sciences to position the soma as a “psychobiological agent” and social actor, and thus an overlooked (albeit indispensable) lens in the study of social power (2018, 37). Building on both biblical and contemporary uses of the term, Fetta reconceptualizes the soma as ‘the emotional, intelligent and communicative body’ and explains that it refers to the gestures of the physical body in internal response to external social pressures. Hence, she is one of the first somatic theorists to employ the term soma along these lines—despite the current spate of studies in neurology, cognitive literary studies, behavioral science, body studies, affect theory, theories of mind (ToM) and philosophy of mind (PoM) which piece together the connections among cognitive processes, bodily feeling reactions, and evaluative perceptions. 
  In 2018, she published Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature, a detailed and analytic transdisciplinary study which renders the soma as “a pervasive yet unexpected site of subjectivity,” one she employs as a primary tool to investigate intersectional racialization and the transactions of race in her case studies of Latin@/x literature (xiii). This book develops somatic analysis as a line of investigation, which reviewers hold has applications in fields as diverse as the humanities, critical race theory, neurology, behavioral studies, and so on. Somatic analysis has inspired and been cited in a growing number of academic, personal, and artistic works .
  Fetta’s key applications of somatic analysis are as follows:
  Racial Shaming: a social technology that uses the somatic body to materialize Brown into social fact. Her thesis is anchored in two psychoanalytic theories, bioenergetic analysis developed by Alexander Lowen and affect theory put forth by Silvan Tomkins.
  Scenes of Racialization: a stepped social practice in which “bodies impose social asymmetries through somatic expression” (2018, xv). Fetta identifies four steps, or somatic sequences, through which the notion of race conditions personal and intersubjective interactions. The racializer begins by (1) identifying phenotypic and somatic cues as a reason to stymie somatic mirroring and withdraw interpersonal rapport with the racialized interlocutor, blocking any sort of empathy toward her or him. This leads in turn to (2) social rejection and somatic dissonance, which functions as a source of shame. In line with Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis, she argues (3) socially and culturally crafted sensory scripts are applied, (4) completing the process of racialization with a somatic expression of disgust, as registered through the senses (vision, audition and olfaction).
  Internal Soma: Fetta examines racialization from the perspective of the somatic interior body. In her case study of Oscar ‘Zeta’ Acosta’s Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), she takes heed of the parallels between Oscar’s struggle with internalized self-loathing and his nonconforming somatic stomach.
  Somatic Portrayal: a process relied on by successful Method actors, in which actors must override their own somatic expression by inhabiting and portraying the soma of their character. Fetta further complicates the performance goal of Method acting’s purportedly real somatic portrayal and contends that such portrayal may “rub up against another style of acting [she] refers to as body image management […] which lacks the naturalness of lived somatic expression” (2018, 95).  Extended to the concept of magico nanny, somatic performance is exacted of social inferiors, whose true somatic expression could betray vulnerab
caption: Stephanie Fetta is Associate Professor of Latin@/x Literature and Culture at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
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