Human Bodies in Motion: The Performative Intra-Actions of Materialization

Abstract

The human body in motion is both a material body and a body inscribed with sociocultural meanings. The new materialist premise of examining phenomena, such as bodies in motion, as hybrids of matter and meaning now offers a pathway to seamlessly bring nature and culture together in a more unified research agenda. Barad’s agentic realism, particularly, presents a promising option to analyze physically active bodies as socio-material practices through both natural science and social constructivist insights. This, however, requires rethinking the nature of natural and social scientific research to more fully comprehend the complexity of physical activity. To illustrate what such research might look like, I first present Barad’s critiques of realist science and social constructivist representationalism to arrive at their suggestion of meeting the universe halfway, performatively, through a relational ontology of the production of material bodies. I conclude with my attempt to think with Barad’s philosophical framework to consider how researchers of the moving human body may meet “halfway” to examine the materiality and mattering of the physically active body.