Bodily Relationships Research Articles

‘Fighting for breath’: Inhabiting uninhabitable places

In 2021, clean-air activists Choked Up put up hacked road signs in the London neighbourhoods of Catford, Brixton and Whitechapel. The signs stated: ‘People of colour are more likely to live in an area with illegal pollution levels’. They also demanded ‘Clean air for all’. The following year, Breathe: 2022 by artist Dryden Goodwin was installed across the borough of Lewisham. Depicting people struggling to breathe, like the road signs, the delicate pencil-drawn images were a way of ‘making the invisible visible’. These interventions highlight both the elevated levels of air pollution in particular locations and the unevenness of its distribution. They also point to how places and bodies are interconnected in the air that ‘we’ breathe. Foregrounding this activism, this article draws on Nirmal Puwar’s conceptualisation of the ‘somatic norm’ whereby particular spaces are (or, rather, become) ‘reserved’ for particular bodies and, concomitantly, the ‘ontological anxiety’ provoked when bodies enter into spaces not meant for them. I extend Puwar’s work on Space Invaders in two ways. First, reading air quality research data through work which has theorised the spatial–bodily relationship, the article explores how the yoking together of spaces and bodies can serve to locate people in places which are not fit for habitation. Second, I draw attention to the highly corporeal and emotional ways in which these interconnections are manifested, and like the visceral registers of ‘ontological anxiety’, I consider what this might tell us about spatialised and bodied power relations. To render the asymmetries in air pollution exposure not only visible but sense-able, the article draws on a mobile, emplaced and embodied methodology of walking and cycling through London. The processes of moving, breathing and leaving put into relief both the deep fleshiness of spatial–bodily interconnections and the palpability of the power dynamics which permeate them.

Experiencing Animals from Corporeal Perspective in Contemporary World

The research hypothesis is that language impacts the way we understand and define animal body. The article analyses the relationship between language, body and signification. The second hypothesis is that a gaze and a phenomenological relationship with animals can open up a dialogical relationship with animals. Later, the article investigates certain case studies of animal bodily experience starting from animal representations in our world, zoo animals, animal cloning to human bodily relationship with pets which is impacted by the capitalist system. The article is using the phenomenological approach of M. Merleau-Ponty as a research method which emphasises the importance of the experience of animals and their representations from a corporeal perspective. M. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method focuses on the lived experience of the body as central to our understanding of the world. The hypothesis of the research is that animals are viewed from a corporeal perspective from the human point of view and that humans humanise the animals. The research’s results prove that language forms the way we understand animals from bodily experience because it creates a narrative and a way of prehension of the animal body. Secondly, representations of animals in our daily life create a humanised view of animals which is a non-realistic depiction of animals. Finally, the article reveals that M. Merleau-Ponto phenomenology helps to create a connection between animals and humans, creating a realistic relationship between humans and animals.

Qualities of Queer Imagination: Animating the Pedagogical Promise of Queer Creativity and Potentiality

This article aims to explore characteristics of queer imagination that cultivate alternative desires and bodily relationships, making them more tangible as possible alternatives. By doing so, it provides an opportunity for educators to think about the pedagogical qualities of queer imagination and how they can offer alternative perceptual strategies that overcome limitations imposed by a recent influx of far-right laws and initiatives. It explores possible aesthetic and pedagogical models based on queer imagination that resist preestablished and essentialized understandings of how things are. The implications of this pedagogy indicate how educators and students might become queer connoisseurs who appreciate the ephemeral queerness of art objects. These queer imaginative strategies for envisioning alternative life possibilities should be of special interest to those interested in supporting the experience of queer students.

Anarchiving the New York Avant-Garde: The Phantom of Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth

This featurette addresses the encounter with the illicit digitised images of Barbara Rubin’s psychedelic short film Christmas on Earth (1963-65). Following So Mayer’s interpretation of Derrida’s archive fever as the ache of a phantom limb (2020), I take the film as an urgent invitation to question history and open it up to the ghosts who haunt it, demanding rightful recognition. This practice of anarchiving, to use Brian Massumi’s term, the disjointed digital archive of counter-cinema aims at reactivating the power of Christmas on Earth and building a sensual, bodily relationship with it across time and space. The hope is to revisit the past and relodge forgotten memories in contemporary contexts, so they can be inherited as a political legacy. 
 This article contains images that feature nudity and sexual activity.

Feeling into Paula Dawson’s Holograms

This article discusses the Australian artist Paula Dawson’s (b. 1954) landmark work of art holography To Absent Friends (1989), a triptych of an empty bar, devoid of life except for streamers and abandoned champagne glasses cluttering the countertops. The largest analog holograms ever made, Dawson’s work pushes the limits of holography in both scale and subject matter. By attending to the experiential aspects of Dawson’s holograms––the interplay of looking, touching, and moving that they elicit––I situate holography within a longer history of art and aesthetic experience than is typically lent to this medium. By extension, I consider the relationship between the optic and haptic senses in both making and viewing holograms, which recall earlier artforms and theories of haptic viewing. I emphasize holography’s similarities to relief sculpture and trompe l’oeil painting and draw on ancient theories of extramission as well as nineteenth-century aesthetic empathy (Einfühlung, or feeling-into) to discuss the haptic sensation and somatic movement activated by these elusive images. I suggest that holographic images draw the beholder into a dynamic, bodily, and intersubjective relationship that happens in neither virtual nor real space-time but somewhere between the two. While viewers are denied physical entry into the virtual space of the holographic image, by feeling into the image and acting on their tactile impulse in real space, they effectively collapse the distinction between what is real and what is virtual. While Dawson’s holograms are not moving images, I suggest they are animated images that move their viewers, both physically and emotionally.

CORPOS QUE DANÇAM

O dançar a dois proporciona uma comunicação mais íntima e direta entre os pares, estimulando as relações corporais e consequentemente, a corporeidade daqueles que a praticam. Instigados a compreender como se processa a articulação entre corpo e corporeidade na dança, bem como sua influência nas relações corporais no dançar a dois, realizou-se uma revisão narrativa da literatura, de caráter descritivo, com uma síntese qualitativa dos trabalhos analisados. Os dados evidenciados permitem a reflexão acerca de um corpo que, influenciado e moldado pelo tempo, pela cultura e pela sociedade, possui uma íntima relação com a dança, construindo sua corporeidade por meio das partidas e oportunidades no dançar a dois.

A política do amor: (des)subjetivação dos corpos em Love, de Gaspar Noé

Este artigo propõe uma leitura do filme Love, de Gaspar Noé, observando-se os movimentos de (des)subjetivação dos personagens, a partir da perspectiva do controle sobre a vida instaurada pela biopolítica. No decorrer de suas cenas, a produção cinematográfica em análise esvazia um possível subjetivismo que poderia ser sugerido pelo título, de forma que o amor é construído como uma relação puramente corporal. Essa dessubjetivação, mais que um aspecto temático, é incorporada à própria composição estética do filme, cujas fotografias e enquadramentos, ao promoverem a hiperexposição de cenas de sexo, operam uma fusão dos corpos que leva à dissolução dos indivíduos. Procura-se demonstrar, dessa maneira, que há nessa construção estética uma encenação da violência implícita nas relações sexuais e na própria ideia de amor, uma vez que ambos são codificados por discursos que pressupõem, em última análise, o controle da vida e da morte. Por fim, procura-se evidenciar que a produção de Gaspar Noé assume uma dimensão política quando, ao trazer para o palco a hiperexposição da obscenidade, promove uma reconfiguração do sensível que permite entrever possibilidades de reencontro entre o sujeito e o corpo.

“Every day it’s tuo zaafi”: considering food preference in a food insecure region of Ghana

This study takes the role of food preference in food insecurity analysis seriously. Guided by feminist political ecology, I do so by underscoring bodily relationships to tuo zaafi a cereal based porridge upheld as a culturally important meal across semi-arid West Africa. Drawing from 12 months of mixed methods fieldwork in Upper West Ghana, I look at perceptions of this salient meal as well as rates of consumption of it to uncover how food preference features in food insecurity. I use the refrain routinely evoked by my interlocutors during the height of the food insecure season—“Every day it’s tuo zaafi” as an anchoring datum point, an affectively effective statement. In this examination, I argue that when effectively acknowledged and assessed, food preference is a facet of food security that helps to not only identify hunger, but also articulate the experience with it. This articulation is important because it provides a necessarily broader perspective on the relationship between culture, food and health that challenge neo-liberal hued solutions to hunger.

Semantička analiza telesnosti u pesničkom diskursu Momčila Nastasijevića

The paper semantically analyzes the corporeality in the poetic discourse of Momčilo Nastasijević. The verses indicate the semantic structure of the body through its sensuous, affective and ontological segment. The conceptual distinction between the body and corporeality is emphasized, by pointing to the body as a conceptual domain that is conceptualized through the plant world and corporeality as a quality that arises in bodily intercommunication. Corporeality is semantically formed in the fusion of bodily relationship and the dynamics of its meaning finds the words whose semantic content is dynamic, and in most cases these words are lexemes that denote processes in the vegetative world. Corporeality is not limited to the material appearance of the body, but is recognized as a space in which the body exists incorporeal and immaterial. Corporeality arises in the human physical-physiological substance of the body, but at the same time it is in the human being an inseparable form with the soul (feelings). There is an ontological component of meaning of the corporeality based on Christian ethical theses. Corporeality is also a metaphysical presupposition of human existence. It is confirmed in the songs with verses about the insatiability of thirst, i.e., eros, which is not bare libido sexualis, but longing and necessity for another being, i.e., the necessity to know the spiritual and divine principle through another body (another being). The function of desire is also shown in conceptual representations of corporeality. According to the poet's essays, desire is the disharmonization of the human personality, and that connotation predetermines the negative meaning of corporeality. In that sense, the body is a state of death and carries the potential for perversion. Hence, the thought of bodily renunciation and prohibition of bodily desire appears in the verses, which is also the influence of Christian views on Nastasijević's poetics and semantics of corporality.

Pendidikan Seks dalam Al-Qur’an; Perspektif Tafsir Tarbawi tentang Larangan Mendekati Zina

Al-Qur'an contains many terms that contain sexual content both directly (mubasyarah) and symbolic (kinayah), including furuj (genitals), semen (sperm), nuthfah (mixing of male and female sperm), arham (womb), al-mass (contact, conjugal relationship), al-lams (contact, conjugal relationship), preacher (contact, conjugal relationship), rafats (words and actions that lead to bodily relationships) , bigha '(prostitution), adultery, fahisyah (vile deeds), abkar (virgin), murawadah (seducing), and so forth. In general the mention of the above terms in the Qur'an covers four contexts; first, the context of the explanation of halal and haram law. Second, the context of scientific knowledge in verses about the creation of humans. Third, the historical context in the stories in the Qur'an, and fourth, the context of the language in which the Qur'an outlines issues of sexuality in polite, symbolic language. Talks about sexuality and sex education are by no means the invitation to pornography, or the spread of atrocities among humans, or encourage people to commit adultery or do damage. One of the themes of sex education in the Qur'an is the prohibition of adultery. This theme is becoming increasingly interesting for several reasons. First, the prohibition of adultery is narrated by the Qur'an with the expression "Don't approach the adultery". Secondly, the increasingly rampant adultery along with facilitation arising from the development of communication and information technology. Third, some people feel taboo to speak and provide sex education to their families, even though this theme has been alluded to by the Qur'an and hadith. The prohibition of adultery in the Qur'an which is stated by Allah with the phrase "Do not approach the adultery" shows that adultery has a very large attraction. Therefore, all factors that have the potential to bring someone closer to adultery must be shunned in order to avoid the vile deeds. At least there are three cases that can lead someone to adultery, namely khalwat, seeing pornographic and pornographic shows, and free lifestyles.

Boire l’horizon : l’essai méditerranéen selon Jacques Lacarrière

Jacques Lacarriere was Lawrence Durrell’s friend and they shared a passion for Mediterranean countries, espacially Greece and Egypt. Lacarriere apprehended spaces by walking, and his texts–his essay, L’Ete Grec, as well as his translations from Herodote and Pausanias—are shaped by this bodily relationship to Mediterranean lands. This essay will explore Lacarriere’s immanent style as a mode of description of Mediterranean lands that can be compared to Durrell’s, Albert Camus’ and Herbert Zbigniew’s own empiric writing, but remains singular, since it is based on sensual and sensitive experiences.

The view from here, there and nowhere? Situating the observer in the planetarium and in the solar system

The projection planetarium has probably been the most important single device for communicating astronomy in the twentieth century and since. I look at the ways in which early twentieth century planetariums encouraged the rehearsal by spectators of different spatial positions and bodily relationships with regards to (models of) the solar system. Acquiring a proper understanding of the solar system did not simply require participants to adopt ‘the view from nowhere’ but involved a spatial, physical and sensory journey through multiple viewpoints that often also rehearsed an idealised history of astronomy. Widely praised for its illusionistic rendering of the night skies, the modern planetarium was also a showcase for the precision technology of its maker Carl Zeiss, offering an experience simultaneously of simulated Nature, of astronomy and of technological mastery. Astronomy, the quintessential science of space and time, afforded in the planetarium an occasion for reflecting in broader ways on individuals’ and humans’ place in the modern world. Planetariums may be understood as materialising and promoting particular epistemological and pedagogical conceptions of the knowing subject; while they partook in the collective reflection on Nature, science and technology in modernity.

A Review on the Advantages and Types of Wireless Networks

The term wireless network stands for the system where the links are helped make without the wired bodily relationship. The wireless network is actually of different type like Wireless LAN, Wireless POT, Wireless Ad-hoc network etc. These networks are preferred according to the use. Nowadays, the cordless system is liked over wired as a result of low cost as well as mobility. In a wireless network, it does not assist the central unit because the nodes in the cordless network are not repaired. The downside of the cordless system is they require high security than the wired network since the information is sent in the sky; hence there is an additional chance of interception which can be strengthened through the shield of encryption strategy. The wireless unit is easy to mount; connectivity is feasible without the bodily cabling. This paper gives an overview on the advantages and types of wireless networks.

‘Like nothing I’ve ever felt before’: understanding consensual BDSM as embodied experience

This paper aims to illustrate how the consensual sexual practice of BDSM (bondage, discipline, dominance and submission and sadism and masochism) can be interpreted as a method of embodied exploration. It will detail the various ways that engaging in BDSM, either as the dominant/top or submissive/bottom partner, is able to enhance feelings of corporeality and explore bodily relationships with the world and with other people. For many practitioners, BDSM places the body into central focus, and this work will elucidate the ways that this can be conceptualised as ‘embodied exploration’. Taken from a project examining the erotic experience of BDSM, this research adopted an existential phenomenological approach. Existential philosopher Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is not simply another object in the world, but that people are inextricably linked to the world through their bodies as body-subjects. Nine participants were recruited for the study, and variation in self-identified sexual role, gender, sexual orientation and age was deliberately sought for the sample. Template analysis, a method of hierarchically organising and structuring thematic findings, was used to analyse the interview data of the research participants. The salient themes relating to BDSM as embodied exploration are discussed in this paper with particular reference to unfamiliar physical and emotional sensations, imposed corporeal limitations and experience a sense of embodied liberation.

Autistic Children: Bodily Factors in the Use of Language

This paper addresses factors other than symbolic capacity that can influence the use of language by children on the autism spectrum. Chief among the issues considered are the influence of bodily experience on the articulation of words and the influence of fantasies concerning bodily relationships on the construction of words and sentences. It is suggested that such considerations may shed light on the behavior of those children on the autism spectrum whose symbolic capacity is greater than might be assumed from their use of language, and also on that of some children with selective mutism.

Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect by Heather Houser

<i>Ecosickness in Contemporary US Fiction: Environment and Affect</i> by Heather Houser

Of Cows and Women: Gendered Human-Animal Relationships in Finnish Agriculture

In the Nordic countries, the tending of cattle was regarded as women’s work in agrarian culture. This was also the case in Finland, where the gendered division of labor on farms was fairly strict until the mid-20th century. The purpose of this article is to discuss the gendered representations of animal husbandry and cows in written narratives collected in a public writing competition. The writing competition about the cow was arranged in 2004 by the Finnish Literature Society and the Union of Rural Education and Culture, and an exceptionally high number of stories were sent to the competition. It will be argued in the article that gender, embodiment and emotions are often intertwined in the practices of animal husbandry. According to my interpretation, one reason for the division of labor was the bodily relationship with cows, which was allowed for women but not for men. In addition to the division of work, there are other aspects of cattle tending in which gender and embodiment emerge in the narratives. For example, the cows are also frequently gendered: one typical way for especially women to represent cows is to emphasize their gender and to articulate solidarity between females.

Trilogy of Body Imaginary: Dance/Movement Therapy for a Psychiatric Patient with Depression

The purpose of this study is to discuss the application of dance/movement therapy to the case of Chun-Li, a 56-year-old woman diagnosed with major depression with psychotic features, and underscore the relevance of psychic meanings to the treatment process. The treatment consisted of three phases: phase one was focused on building the therapeutic relationship with Chun-Li through regimens and health-enhancing exercise that are rooted in Taiwanese folklore; in phase two, she was encouraged to pay attention to her body and make verbal interpretations in relation to her movements; and phase three was intended to help her embody the inner imagination, making contact with her inner conflict and revealing her traumatic event. In this paper, three aspects of the casework are discussed and related to the theories and practices of dance movement therapy: (1) the bodily relationship in ballroom dance; (2) the effect of the partnership in ballroom dance on Chun-Li; and (3) the imagination invoked by a moving body in dance. This article attempts to explain the meanings of significant body experience and body knowledge development through the transformation of the body.

Staging Postmemory: Self-representation and Parental Biographying in Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El rumor del incendio

Mexico in the 1970s was at the peak of what Vargas Llosa called its “perfect dictatorship” under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). This perfection, however, did not preclude resistance from student groups, militias, and peasant movements. Decades later, theatre company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol would stage this rebellion in their documentary play El rumor del incendio (2010) and its accompanying textual and digital publications. Director and actor Luisa Pardo plays both herself and her real-life mother, Margarita, in the play. This study examines the strategies used to convey the family ties between Margarita and Pardo, which include documentary evidence, bodily relationships, and genealogical connections. It shows the way that theatrical self-representation challenges the auto/biographical genre by blurring lines between biography and autobiography, as well as redefining drama, asking spectators to consider the stage as an alternative source of historical fact.

Image as Relic: Bodily Vision and the Reconstitution of Viewer/Image Relationships at the Sacro Monte di Varallo

Author(s): Bell, Margaret F. | Abstract: This essay addresses issues of vision and the role of the material image in devotional practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo, a fifteenth-century Italian pilgrimage site built by Franciscans to simulate the experience of visiting the Holy Land through mimetically recreated sacred places. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, the small chapels that marked the Sacro Monte’s recreated the sacred sites were filled with life-size tableaux representing episodes from the life of Christ. Visitors could interact physically with the tableaux until the mid-sixteenth century when architect Galeazzo Alessi designed glass partitions, or vetriate, to separate the viewers from the figures. The following paper discusses the impact of the vetriate on the nature of viewer/image relationships at the Sacro Monte. Previously, scholars have viewed the vetriate only as disciplining instruments of the Counter-Reformation, designed to prevent viewers from wrongly venerating the material image by restricting physical access to the tableaux. Through an analysis the Libro dei Misteri (1565-1569), the book in which Alessi recorded his plans for the Sacro Monte, I argue that in fact the vetriate created an ambivalent relationship between the viewer and the material image by disciplining the viewer’s physical relationship with the tableaux while simultaneously enshrining the images in a manner similar to a reliquary. I approach the vetriate as frames that not only influence the viewer’s bodily relationship to the tableaux but also his or her mode of engaging with the image. I argue that the vetriate, by virtue of their construction and decoration, would have signaled to the viewer the importance, even preciousness, of the tableaux. The mimetic qualities of the Sacro Monte as well as contemporaneous literature that addresses reliquaries and the partitioning of ecclesiastical space, support the argument that the vetriate enhanced rather than diminished the material importance of the tableaux and their role as relic-like links between the viewer and the life of Christ.