Bodies in Resistance


Book Description

As part of the emerging new research on civic innovation, this book explores how sexual politics and gender relations play out in feminist struggles around body politics in Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, as well as in East Africa, Latin America and global institutions and networks. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the book looks at how feminists are engaged in a complex struggle for democratic power in a neoliberal age and at how resistance is integral to possibilities for change. In making visible resistances to dominant economic and social policies, the book highlights how such struggles are both gendered and gendering bodies. The chapters explore struggles for healthy environments, sexual health and reproductive rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence, the human rights of LGBTIQA persons, the recognition of indigenous territories and all peoples’ rights to care, love and work freely. The book sets out the violence, hopes, contradictions and ways forward in these civic innovations, resistances and connections across the globe.




Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance


Book Description

In this sophisticated study of power and resistance, Jean Comaroff analyzes the changing predicament of the Barolong boo Ratshidi, a people on the margins of the South African state. Like others on the fringes of the modern world system, the Tshidi struggle to construct a viable order of signs and practices through which they act upon the forces that engulf them. Their dissenting Churches of Zion have provided an effective medium for reconstructing a sense of history and identity, one that protests the terms of colonial and post-colonial society and culture.




Bodies in Crisis


Book Description

Born and raised in Argentina and still maintaining significant ties to the area, Barbara Sutton examines the complex, and often hidden, bodily worlds of diverse women in that country during a period of profound social upheaval. Based primarily on women's experiential narratives and set against the backdrop of a severe economic crisis and intensified social movement activism post-2001, Bodies in Crisis illuminates how multiple forms of injustice converge in and are contested through women's bodies. Sutton reveals the bodily scars of neoliberal globalization; women's negotiation of cultural norms of femininity and beauty; experiences with clandestine, illegal, and unsafe abortions; exposure to and resistance against interpersonal and structural violence; and the role of bodies as tools and vehicles of political action. Through the lens of women's body consciousness in a Global South country, and drawing on multifaceted stories and a politically embedded approach, Bodies in Crisis suggests that social policy, economic systems, cultural ideologies, and political resistance are ultimately fleshly matters.




Oppression and the Body


Book Description

A timely anthology that explores power, privilege, and oppression and their relationship to marginalized bodies Asserting that the body is the main site of oppression in Western society, the contributors to this pioneering volume explore the complex issue of embodiment and how it relates to social inclusion and marginalization. In a culture where bodies of people who are brown, black, female, transgender, disabled, fat, or queer are often shamed, sexualized, ignored, and oppressed, what does it mean to live in a marginalized body? Through theory, personal narrative, and artistic expression, this anthology explores how power, privilege, oppression, and attempted disembodiment play out on the bodies of disparaged individuals and what happens when the body’s expression is stereotyped and stunted. Bringing together a range of voices, this book offers strategies and practices for embodiment and activism and considers what it means to be an embodied ally to anyone experiencing bodily oppression.




Embodied Resistance


Book Description

Ethnographies about transgressing social expectations of the body




Unburied Bodies


Book Description

The human body is the locus of meaning, personhood, and our sense of the possibility of sanctity. The desecration of the human corpse is a matter of universal revulsion, taboo in virtually all human cultures. Not least for this reason, the unburied corpse quickly becomes a focal point of political salience, on the one hand seeming to express the contempt of state power toward the basic claims of human dignity—while on the other hand simultaneously bringing into question the very legitimacy of that power. In Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead, James Martel surveys the power of the body left unburied to motivate resistance, to bring forth a radically new form of agency, and to undercut the authority claims made by state power. Ranging across time and space from the battlefields of ancient Thebes to the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, and taking in perspectives from such writers as Sophocles, Machiavelli, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Judith Butler, Thomas Lacqueur, and Bonnie Honig, Martel asks why the presence of the abandoned corpse can be seen by both authorities and protesters as a source of power, and how those who have been abandoned or marginalized by structures of authority can find in a lifeless body fellow accomplices in their aspirations for dignity and humanity.




Vulnerability in Resistance


Book Description

Vulnerability and resistance have often been seen as opposites, with the assumption that vulnerability requires protection and the strengthening of paternalistic power at the expense of collective resistance. Focusing on political movements and cultural practices in different global locations, including Turkey, Palestine, France, and the former Yugoslavia, the contributors to Vulnerability in Resistance articulate an understanding of the role of vulnerability in practices of resistance. They consider how vulnerability is constructed, invoked, and mobilized within neoliberal discourse, the politics of war, resistance to authoritarian and securitarian power, in LGBTQI struggles, and in the resistance to occupation and colonial violence. The essays offer a feminist account of political agency by exploring occupy movements and street politics, informal groups at checkpoints and barricades, practices of self-defense, hunger strikes, transgressive enactments of solidarity and mourning, infrastructural mobilizations, and aesthetic and erotic interventions into public space that mobilize memory and expose forms of power. Pointing to possible strategies for a feminist politics of transversal engagements and suggesting a politics of bodily resistance that does not disavow forms of vulnerability, the contributors develop a new conception of embodiment and sociality within fields of contemporary power. Contributors. Meltem Ahiska, Athena Athanasiou, Sarah Bracke, Judith Butler, Elsa Dorlin, Başak Ertür, Zeynep Gambetti, Rema Hammami, Marianne Hirsch, Elena Loizidou, Leticia Sabsay, Nükhet Sirman, Elena Tzelepis




Closer to Freedom


Book Description

Recent scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. Camp discusses the multiple dimensions to acts of resistance that might otherwise appear to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.




The Body in Crisis


Book Description

A major theoretical work by Brazilian dance scholar Christine Greiner explores the political relevance of bodily arts in the age of neoliberal globalization




Drama and Resistance


Book Description

Provides a cultural and historical context for medieval popular drama. In Drama and Resistance, Claire Sponsler explores the intertwined histories of bodily subjectivity, commodity culture, and theatricality in late medieval England. In a fascinating consideration of popular drama in the period from 1350 to 1520, she argues that many types of performances during this time represented cultural evasions of the imposition of disciplinary power. The medieval theater was a social site where resistance, masked from the full scrutiny of authority by theatricality, was practiced, articulated, and enacted. Sponsler examines three key discourses of authoritarian bodily and commodity control -- clothing laws, conduct literature, and Books of Hours -- and pairs them with three kinds of theatrical performances that enact resistance to disciplining codes -- Robin Hood performances, morality plays, and Corpus Christi pageants. She considers the contradictions and inconsistencies in the repressive official discourses and analyzes the ways in which the staging of forbidden acts like cross-dressing, social and sexual misbehavior, and violence against the body challenged these discourses. Drawing on recent social theory, Drama and Resistance is an important contribution to medieval studies and the history of theater.