Being Worlded: Empathy and the Superhuman Strength of Opening Up

Abstract

This essay explores the possibilities of empathy as a textual openness to social difference that decentres interpersonal encounters. It analyses how empathy can be considered a passive voice action of being opened to difference, described as the act of being worlded, rather than an active search to take other people’s perspectives. This process of being worlded can be understood as superhuman, in the sense that it may operate independently of authorial practice or challenge the sufficiency of personal subjectivity. The essay analyses this approach to empathy through a close reading of The Secret to Superhuman Strength (2021), a memoir by the American graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. By situating the memoir’s representation of yoga in relation to South Asian yogic discourses of superhuman strength, this essay argues that rather than an act of writing about others, empathy may involve being written by otherness.