Bodily Boundaries Research Articles

Our other Others: on perpetration, morality, and ethnographic unease

AbstractThis article critically assesses the impact of political and moral positions within contemporary anthropology. Re‐examining ideas of advocacy and the ethical within the discipline, it argues for an alternative political anthropology that focuses on perpetration rather than victimhood, offenders rather than the offended. If anthropology wants to be a discipline that works against social wrongs and suffering, then understanding the positions and perspectives of those causing them is, we contend, a necessary point of departure. Yet how can we approach people ethnographically who transgress bodily, legal, and moral boundaries, and why is this not more commonly done? In answering these questions, we analyse mainstream disciplinary ethics, both current and historical, and highlight some of the reactions that the study of perpetrators evoke in anthropologists. This illuminates an inconsistency within political anthropology. While there is ample theoretical and ethnographic nuance within the subdiscipline, this complexity seems to fade when we focus on perpetration. We suggest that anthropology engages more fully in the study of perpetration and approaches the issue by clarifying how (mis)dynamics are anchored within shared social worlds and historical becomings. This article thus calls upon us to expand our anthropological attention and curiosity beyond what might be morally comfortable.

Personal Autonomy and Human Corporeality: What Protects the Right to Personal Integrity?

This paper discusses the controversial and evolving nature of the right to personal integrity in the context of modern legal discourse, with a specific focus on its intersection with bodily boundaries and bio- and digital technologies. It points out that the traditional understanding of this right may no longer be sufficient to protect individuals, especially given the advancements in digital technologies, the Internet of bodies (IoB), as well as the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.This research highlights the ongoing debate and legal complexities surrounding the right to personal integrity and personal autonomy, especially in the face of technological advancements, and suggests the need for a broader perspective to safeguard human dignity and physicality, both in the physical and digital domains. For these purposes, the evolving legal landscape is explored, with reference to the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).We believe that the classic concept of the right to personal integrity no longer ensures the security of the individual, and in order to achieve this goal, it is necessary to expand its scope taking into account the human dignity, especially in the context of the continuous progress of bio- and digital technologies.

Bras, Bounce, and Bodily Boundaries: Exploring the Materiality of Moving Bodies

ABSTRACT In this paper, we draw upon new materialist scholar Karen Barad’s writings on bodily boundaries and entanglements to explore the materiality of moving bodies. Engaging with Barad, we are interested in the ways humans and nonhumans become inextricably linked during movement practices through the case of women’s embodied relations with their sports bras. Using a diffractive research approach, we speak to different ways of knowing and thinking about moving bodies that consider the various forms of materiality that become entangled during physical activity. To accomplish this, we focus on three body-bra entanglements: i) sweat/bra/body, ii) forces/movement/bra, and iii) memories/bra/humans. We explore how bodily boundaries are constantly being formed and renegotiated as a result of the various human-nonhuman intra-actions. In so doing, this paper highlights the agency of mundane material objects (such as the sports bra) as entangled in women’s movement experiences.

The attitude to nails as a representation of the boundary of the bodily Self

The concepts of “cultural skin” and “second skin” are discussed as two behavioral patterns of Ego protection and representation of the boundaries of the bodily Self based on the relationship to nails. Two forms of manifestation of the second skin (encapsulation/fusion) are distinguished. The phenomenon of representing the bodily Self boundary as a combination of encapsulation/fusion is obtained. The online study involved 464 women who first answered the questions and identified themselves in three categories (nail biting, long nails, neat nails). Then it was necessary to perform blank methods: “Diagnosis of the bodily Self” (I.V. Lybko), “Self structural test of G. Ammon” (ISTA). According to the results of the analysis, the sample was divided into four categories depending on the measure of affective attitude towards nails and patterns of behavior towards the nail plate (nail care/self-harm). Using the Kruskal-Wallis test, it is proved that the attitude to nails is associated with different ways of representing the boundaries of the bodily self.

‘The only thing missing now is her being on the outside’: bodily borders/boundaries within father-foetal bonding interactions for UK expectant fathers

Pregnancy and becoming a parent are heavily gendered experiences, experiences which feminist geographers have convincingly situated as significantly spatial. This paper makes an important contribution by addressing the general absence of expectant fathers’ voices/experiences within geographical work on pregnancy/parenting. Drawing upon periodic in-depth interviews conducted during pregnancy and after the birth, it interrogates the manifold ways geographical notions of bodily borders, boundaries, and interior spaces mediate expectant fathers’ encounters with their unborn baby. It firstly examines how, whilst expectant motherhood is characterised by notions of interiority and (inter)connection with the growing foetus, expectant fathers’ experiences are heavily demarcated by the relentless dichotomy of ‘inside’/‘outside’. Fathers drew on this heavily spatial (though literal) metaphor when describing their interactions with the foetus ‘inside’ the womb and their excitement/anticipation of when (following the birth) their child will finally be on the ‘outside’. Secondly, the paper explores the array of multi-sensory inter-embodied interactions fathers had with their unborn child—literally through the body of another person—exploring how these constitute anticipatory acts of love/intimacy. Thus, it forges an agenda for greater consideration of the everyday ‘pre-parenting’ geographies of expectant fathering, calling for feminist geographers to more critically consider fathers’ care-ful emotional, embodied experiences during pregnancy/expectancy.

Space and perceptual boundaries

In consideration of the spatial structures of sensory experiences, an ‘Externality Thesis’ is commonly proposed, according to which awareness of sensory boundaries is also an awareness of the presence of a space beyond these boundaries. The paper evaluates the Externality Thesis in the context of vision and touch. More specifically, relying on mereotopological theories, it is shown that the notion of spatial boundaries is ambiguous as it encompasses various distinct ways in which entities may be connected by a boundary. It is argued that only some of these ways are able to support the Externality Thesis. In particular, it is claimed that while bodily boundaries of which one is aware in tactile sensations are such that the awareness of them provides support for the Externality Thesis, the analogous claim is not true about the boundaries of the visual field.

Bodily boundaries transgressed: corporal alteration through ornamentation in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic at Boncuklu Tarla, Türkiye

Lack of contextual evidence for the use of small personal ornaments means that much of our understanding of ornamentation traditions within archaeological cultures is reconstructed from ethnographic comparisons. New in situ finds from the areas around the ears and mouth in burials at Boncuklu Tarla, a Neolithic settlement in Türkiye, add a novel dimension to the interpretation of stone ‘tokens’ or ‘plugs’. This article presents a new typology for these artefacts and argues for their use as ear ornaments or labrets in a practice involving significant and lasting corporal alteration.

Metamorphosis, Mediation, Mannat

In the South Asian discourse of Sufism, or Islamic mysticism, ‘natural’ functions can be transcended and bodily boundaries are permeable. Defying species boundaries, this relational ontology entails a belief in the capacity for bodily transformation, or metamorphosis, from one category of being to another (as from human to nonhuman animal). In turn, both human and animal actors enter into conversation with mediating ‘spirits’. To this day, these religious entanglements, passed down through generations, allow Sufi communities in Bangladesh and Pakistan to protect ‘sacred’ animals at shrines as vital refuges for wildlife species and to make an important contribution to their conservation. The relational dynamics allow for the cultural division between human and non-human life forms (plants, animals, and spirits) to be problematized, and permeable boundaries to be dissolved into liminal and dynamic zones of interaction. Deeply entangled, agents both human and non-human actively participate in shared ritual configurations that take place within and are nourished by a locally embedded Sufi spirituality. Ritual and devotional practices revolve around their intercessory mediation (shafa'at) with the divine, which endows them with spiritual agency, as they engage in cycles of exchange, such as the practice of taking vows (mannat). Within the framework of this Sufi-inspired, locally embedded spirituality, it is possible for animals to be genuine agents, to have spiritual ‘agency’ and to be involved in cycles of exchange.

"The Invisible Woman" and "In the Rehab Waiting Room"

I have been ruminating lately on the notion of “white space,” “writer’s block,” and selfhood following a traumatic brain injury that caused word-finding problems during the acute phase of my recovery. I have coined the term, “neuropoetics” to denote the attempt to describe in poetry and flash fiction the experience of “drawing a blank” or being silenced by a medical condition.
 Attached you will find three poems for your consideration: “Memory Villanelle,” “The Invisible Woman,” and “In the Rehab Waiting Room.” I was inspired by Laurie Clements Lambeth’s statement regarding the use of formal structure in her poetry about her Multiple Sclerosis, the blurring of bodily boundaries: “I needed the cage of a villanelle—so restrictive, in that very few lines can truly further the poem along, and yet so obsessive a form—to house the poem” (171). I have tried the same technique to describe the connection between memory and identity. “The Invisible Woman” takes as much from the Marvel universe as H.G. Wells; in it, I use the figure of Sue Storm and her dubious gift of being ignored as representative of the experience of an “invisible disability,” or something neurological rather than physically identifiable. Finally, “In the Rehab Waiting Room” was accidentally inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, as per the epigraph. It was an early attempt to capture the feeling of being a “blank slate” or having that post-traumatic “blank stare” that avoids eye contact with others

The Beast Within, the Beast Without Zoomorphic Armour Ornament and the Human-Animal Divide in the Material Culture of Renaissance War

Drawing on and accentuating classical motifs, the surfaces of Renaissance armour are inhabited by an impressive variety of animal exuviae: leonine protomes and paws, ram’s horns, shells, tails, beaks, and wings. This essay examines the role of zoo­morphic armour around the period of the Italian wars (1494-1559) and brings into focus early modern ideas about the behavioural and morphological proximity of living beings, illustrating the period’s fluid perception of the human-animal divide. It argues for the centrality of ornament in military material culture and concludes by establishing armour as the period’s main figurative stage for experimenting with the permeability of bodily boundaries, and the mixing of human and animal forms.

Orgasm as women’s work? Rethinking pleasure, ‘sex’ and the power dynamics of orgasm through the embodied experiences of orgasmic meditation practitioners

Drawing upon interviews with 33 practitioners of ‘orgasmic meditation’ in the UK and US, I question the extent to which the practice of orgasmic meditation might facilitate ways to uncouple orgasm from negative gendered constructions. I explore how the practice in some cases enables people to establish clear bodily boundaries and encourages women to centre their own pleasure, as well as opening up space to rethink what constitutes a ‘sexual’ practice. Theorised through a queer feminist perspective, I argue that tensions remain with orgasm as a form of women’s work, with an onus upon women to police bodily boundaries, and with moments where boundaries are broken.

The social justice issues of smoke im/mobilities

ABSTRACT In 2014, the Hazelwood mine fire burned for 45 days. Local communities were impacted by smoke and ash, and there were reports of raised carbon monoxide levels. Local news and social media reported residents experiencing numerous physical symptoms of smoke inhalation, including bleeding noses, coughing, wheezing and chest tightness. Paper masks to filter particulate matter were made available to residents to wear outside. The dust and ash constantly seeped into homes and offices, which required cleaning daily and sometimes multiple times during the day. Smoke was free to move across physical and bodily boundaries while those most vulnerable were hampered by lack of movement: pregnant women, the elderly and children were advised to leave the area. However, this suggestion to ‘simply’ move ignored the context of a community disproportionately impacted through years of economic decline and societal change. This paper explores the unequal mobilities of smoke and people that arose as a result of this event and draws on concepts of mobility justice (Sheller 2018) and emergency mobilities (Adey 2016) to reflect on the political dimensions of uneven mobility in times of crisis.

Writing “INFINITYLOOPS”

Transmigration refers to movements made across, between, through, or beyond spatial, spiritual, and bodily boundaries—motions to which queer and trans studies scholars have long imputed important political and social valences. This essay tracks the many transmigrations of the silkworm Bombyx mori, the source of commercial silk, through an archive of literary and critical writings by W. G. Sebald, Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Jen Bervin. The author pays special attention to the trans-migration silkworms make through their own bodies, or metamorphosis, thus opening the way to a less anthropocentric account of transmigratory processes. This essay shows how silkworms and silk cross and recross the constructed lines dividing East and West, matter and language, natural and synthetic. In doing so, silkworms enter a broader collective of trans-migrating bodies in which certain bodies are granted free movement at the expense of other, often racialized, queer, or animal bodies. The author argues that the embodied, quotidian metamorphosis of the silkworm exemplifies an alternative mode of trans-migration that refuses transcendence and instead ties us, by silken threads, to the vicissitudes of the present moment.

“She’s Afraid of Gaining Weight and Losing Her Husband”

This study uncovers the ways rural Appalachian Kentuckians adopt disordered eating patterns in highly motivated attempts to lose weight. The author engages with affective political ecology to explore what disordered eating is, what might produce it, and what it produces in others. This study utilized a mixed-methods approach. Pre-surveys (June 2020; n = 182) and post-surveys (March 2021; n = 56) included the twenty-six-question Eating Attitudes Test (EAT-26) to assess rates of disordered eating, along with demographic and food procurement questions. Participant observation and thirty-two (August–December 2020; n = 32) in-depth semi-structured interviews provide experiential and self-reported data about disordered eating behaviors. Twenty percent of survey respondents had a high overall score on the EAT-26. All interview participants reported engaging in and/or observing disordered eating behaviors in efforts to lose weight, which produced ripples of embodied experiences. Disordered eating slipped between bodily boundaries, altering the material and felt realities of family, friends, and coworkers of dieters. These data suggest high rates of disordered eating behaviors among participants, due primarily to dieting for weight loss. This counters the stereotype of the fat rural resident as lazy or unmotivated while offering fertile grounds for exploring affective political ecology and the sociality of disordered eating.

Self-Care as Social Crafting: Transnational Narratives During COVID-19

ABSTRACT Contrary to public health framings of self-care as individualized bodily regulation, people’s transnational COVID-19 narratives revealed self-care to be a means of crafting social relatedness. In their self-care practices, interviewees drew on their richly structured field of relations, exercised dexterity and discernment in attending to them, and forged new webs of relatedness. Moreover, some recounted moments of radical care when they disregarded bodily boundaries in co-isolating with and caring for infected friends or relatives. These narratives of caring with rather than in isolation from one’s social entanglements provide an alternative imaginary through which we can consider future pandemic responses.

사회 정의를 위한 교육 맥락에서 ‘불편함’의 교육적 가능성 탐색: 정동 이론에 기반하여

Discomfort has been regarded as a de-politicized and psychologized matter such as personal preference or an inappropriate object to be corrected, with its pedagogical possibilities not being fully explored in the context of teaching for social justice. This study aims to explore the educational potential of discomfort as a drive for ethical and political self-transformation and solidarity for social change. For this purpose, this study explores the dynamics of emotion in the context of teaching for social justice and interrogates how discomfort has been located within it. Affect theory is utilized to expand the existing understandings of emotions, and from here, the educational potential of discomfort is emerged. Through the lens of affect, discomfort can be seen as a force that fetishizes ‘Other’ and reproduces social injustice and inequity, at the same time, it can be seen as a force to make it possible for us to question the existing bodily boundaries between ‘Us’ and ‘Other,’ thus fostering new ethical and political ‘becoming’ and affective self-transformation. To utilize discomfort as a pedagogical resource in teaching for social justice, some relevant issues are discussed such as ‘critical affective literacy,’ ‘classroom as a safe space,’ and ‘the relationships between pedagogy of discomfort and pedagogy of empathy.’ The need to conduct more theoretical and empirical research on affective dimensions of teaching for social justice in South Korean context is suggested.

Questioning Masculinity and the Gender Binary in Fashion

Abstract This article introduces the work of Belgian designer Glenn Martens as creative director of the Paris-based brand Y/Project and its “unisex” approach to fashion. Drawing on queer theory and theories of non-binary and genderqueer identities, the proposed investigation addresses the power of fashion in rethinking bodily gender boundaries and in imagining possible escapes from the tyranny of the gender binary in fashion. To do so, I propose a qualitative multidimensional reading of the brand, in which I look at how Martens critically questions normative assumptions about masculinity and the male dressed body. The analysis takes into consideration the Y/Project e-commerce with its structure and positioning in the online retailing system, the design of garments, and the visuality of fashion shows.

Are Linguistic and Motricity domains intertwined in Schizophrenia? A preliminary analysis.

IntroductionThe disruption of minimal Self is believed to be a core element of Schizophrenia and intimately connected to a disruption of bodily self, which in turn leads to impairments in intersubjectivity dimension. Motor abnormalities have been associated to Schizophrenia since the early conceptualization of the disorder, as well as inefficient body-related multisensory integration processes are considered nowadays a plausible origin of disembodied Self. In particular, there is evidence for significant abnormalities in Peripersonal Space (PPS) extension in Schizophrenia patients. PPS is the plastic sector of space immediately surrounding our body, whose coherent representation is based on efficient body-related multisensory integration processes. With a specific experimental task based on multisensory integration processing, we estimated PPS size and PPS boundary’s demarcation in 27 Schizophrenia patients, confirming a narrower PPS size and weaker bodily boundary in patients, thus paving the way for a deeper investigation of the mechanisms underlying the disruption of bodily self (Ferroni et al., Schziophr.Bull.2022, 5 1085-1093). We suggest that disembodiment might be responsible for the loss of the immediate linkage between Self and others (“intercorporeality”), so linking the disruption of the corporeal dimension to specific anomalies of intersubjectivity in Schizophrenia patients. Since language is one of the most important instrument through which intersubjectivity unfolds, it is intriguing to hypothesize a connection between language and multi-sensory processing.ObjectivesTherefore, the present study was aimed at investigating possible correlations between patients’ motor impairments in multi-sensory integration processes and their alterations in language and communicative interactions.MethodsTwenty-five outpatients were recruited in an experimental task investigating PPS extension; they were administered the Scale for the Assessment of Thought, Language and Communication (TLC) and the Clinical Language Disorder Rating Scale (CLANG).ResultsOur data showed significant correlations between TLC and CLANG total scores and PPS size, with narrower PPS size for more severe formal thought disorders and higher language and communication impairments.ConclusionsOur preliminary results seem to confirm the presence of a link between language impairment and multi-sensory processing, suggesting that bodily and linguistic disorganization may have a common origin which has yet to be explored in depth. Future research is needed to identify linguistic and motor endophenotypic patterns, potentially intertwined with each other, capable of early predicting Schizophrenia development and thus usable as early diagnostic tools.Disclosure of InterestNone Declared

Досвід материнства під час війни: дескриптивно-феноменологічний аналіз

The article analyzes the individual experience of the first ten months of moth­erhood before and during the full-scale war between Russia and Ukraine using the method of descriptive phenomenology of the body. Corporeality is considered as a basis for a possible description of the motherhood experience. In the analysis, I apply the ideas of Luce Irigaray (deconstruction of the complex image of mother­hood in art, science and philosophy) and Yulia Kristeva (analysis of the Western Christian tradition of depicting a mother with a baby and the narratives embed­ded in it) in the context of returning the discourse about motherhood to women. Based on the ideas of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Young, I turn to a phenom­enological analysis of the body, namely, the female body, as the “first locus of in­tentionality.” In particular, it is about experiencing drastic bodily changes during childbirth and the first weeks of motherhood, the blurring of bodily boundaries between the nursing mother and the baby, the establishment of a common every­day life through the establishment of new repetitive rituals, its cancellation due to the need to flee and the attempt to restore it in a new place. In this regard, I provide the phenomenological interpretation of the home as a space of experiencing security, individuation, privacy and storage (Young) and its loss. I have singled out the processes of sleep and eating as the two main bodily manifestations of anxiety in everyday experience. A key element of the physical maternal experience is breast-feeding, which provides a suitable range of feelings: from pain and sacrifice to comfort and euphoria from union with the child. It was revealed that the specificity of the female body and its adaptation to new requirements within motherhood (in particular, additional weight, softness, endurance, inertness, etc.) made it possible to adapt to new critical circumstances associated with the beginning of a full-scale war, deprivation of a home, experiencing a threat and oppression.

Courtly Carnality: Consuming Flesh in the Lai d’Ignaure

ABSTRACT In the Lai d’Ignaure twelve ladies who share the same lover are tricked by their husbands into eating his heart and genitals, cooked as meat in a stew. When the jealous husbands declare that they have fulfilled the ladies’ desire for flesh, the ladies counter with the claim that they were already replete with Ignaure’s love, and they swear to die since they could never again have a meal of such worth. I argue that in Ignaure, as in other eaten heart stories, consuming the lover’s flesh underscores a core carnality of courtly love, but here it also opens up an alternative model of love, focusing on consummated pleasure rather than desire, and celebrating the dissolution of bodily boundaries against a heteronormative distribution of gender positions. By claiming sexual satisfaction and forming a female homosocial collective based on their unapologetic sharing of a lover’s flesh, the ladies invite a reconsideration of courtly love that values female pleasure over male desire, satiety over lack, and community over exclusivity. I demonstrate that circulations of flesh in Ignaure subvert the political, social, and gendered structures that define the court, for the lay calls on provocative ways of understanding—and enjoying—flesh.