During the coming year as a graduate associate in the Center, Rachel will explore how the individual utilizes his or her body in the continual process of authoring his or her own subjectivity. This examination of the production of one's self, where one is both subject and object, is informed by and intersects with topics in aesthetics, phenomenology, feminist studies, and critical race theory (among others). Her research will address the implications that the visual attributes of the body have on the forming of the self and how these attributes contribute to our memberships in social, cultural, and ethnic groups. Specifically, she will look at individuals' bodily practices as indications of their actual or desired memberships in different groups and will compare conceptions of race held by the blind and the sighted.