Body Politic Research Articles

An Epidemic of Nervous Breakdowns and Crisis Suicides in Britain’s War of Nerves, 1938–1940

Abstract As contemporaries noted, the long months from the Munich Crisis (autumn 1938) through to the end of the Phoney War (spring 1940) felt like a ‘war of nerves’. The battlefields were physical and material as much as psychological and imagined. Turning to sources that reveal visceral experience, we can explore the internal and internalized history of the international crisis. First, I listen to writers, politicians, academics, anthropological researchers, psychiatrists, and advertisers as one after the other they projected this overwhelming nervous disorder onto bodies and onto the body politic. In his largely forgotten Journal under the terror, 1938 (1939), the Bloomsburyite, prolific man of letters, and literary scholar F. L. Lucas emerges as a perspicacious narrator of the war of nerves, and he was both witness and victim of a world he described as filled with ‘nervous breakdowns’. Second, I exhume the casualties of this war of nerves, a group of people who exercised their bodily autonomy and self-determination to free themselves from the world in crisis. Based on a dataset of 185 cases, the ‘crisis suicides’ – ‘committed daily by people terrorised at the thought of a war’ – constituted an apparent epidemic. Together these bodies of evidence of bodily experience make a case for reframing and renaming the period, and identifying the first battle of Britain’s ‘People’s War’.

Undocumented migrant workers as activist citizens: resisting citizenship exclusion through photovoice

ABSTRACT This article discusses the foregrounding of migrant activism through a photovoice project that emerged organically from groups of undocumented South Asian migrant men in Greece. It argues that this collective creative action against the criminalization of migrant ‘illegality’ constitutes an active act of citizenship that contests, from below, exclusionary citizenship rights and formal modes of inclusion into the body politic of a nation state. Isin’s concept of ‘activist citizen’ (2008) allows us to interpret migrant participation as a creative political mobilization that challenged their formal citizenship exclusion. The act of becoming intentionally visible through photo-taking and the multimedia installation allowed them to undertake constructive resistance against their forced invisibility and migrant abjectness. By representing themselves as empowered activist-citizens, and by using their photos, videos, and texts as evidentiary material, the undocumented migrant workers sought to destabilize dominant imaginaries and discourses that present them as fearful, deviant masculine others.

Negative information hoarding in politically connected firms: The influence from the central environmental protection inspections

This study examines how managerial political connections affect corporate information environment in the context of central government environmental inspections. We find that politically connected firms are associated with higher crash risk than firms without such connections after central government inspections. In addition, we find that firms are more prone to crash risk when they are with achieved political connections (e.g. appointed as members of political advisory bodies), but not ascribed political connections (i.e. have work experience as government officials). Further analyses indicate that politically connected firms are more prone to crash risk after central government inspections due to increased reputational concerns. Overall, our study highlights that politically connected firms may face more challenges in managing negative information when there is intensified regulatory scrutiny, which exacerbates the risk profile of firms.

Against #CoronaJihaad: Online Somatic Nationalism and Offline Social Distancing in India during covid-19

Abstract This article examines the two waves of the covid-19 pandemic in India in 2020–2021. It disaggregates the different narratives constructed by the Hindu right-wing in online circles. It shows that by instrumentalizing the interactive and multimodal features of social media, the Hindu Right amplified the notion of Muslims as contaminants in the first wave of the breakout, accusing them of weakening the otherwise sacred, virus-resistant Indian nation. During the second wave, the Hindu Right downplayed the role of the Kumbh Mela, a major Hindu pilgrimage and festival, as a super-spreader event. Criticisms of the Hindu festival was deemed a foreign conspiracy aimed at harming India’s body politic. The article argues that the Hindu Right capitalized on the covid-19 crisis to promote religified and somatisized ideals of a ‘muscular Hindu India’ weakened by the Muslim Other from within. This narrative heightened the schism between Hindus and Muslims in India, with long-lasting effects that outlive the pandemic itself. Finally, the article problematizes the notion that digital technologies and virtual spaces necessarily overcome physical barriers and divisions, arguing instead that in the case of the right-wing Hindu Twittersphere, social media congealed intra-communal solidarities and inter-communal antagonisms online echoing divisions in the non-digital, offline world.

The Providence of Review and Writing through Revision

ABSTRACT In the uneven publishing landscape between Africa and the global north publishing industry, almost all editorial rejections or requests for revision are initially narcissistically injurious. They compel one to pause, to revisit their views, and perhaps they make writers second guess themselves. In this paper, I focus on review feedback as a productive pause. I think with the affects and potentialities that follow the initial injury. I posit that if we look past the wounding, most revisions can be transformed into practices of care. I contemplate what it means for one’s work to be attended to by others and the generative possibilities that different lenses might enable. This thrust to focus on the positive is not to dismiss the epistemic violences that being revised and corrected might enact. Instead, I suggest that as writers committed to our craft and ideas, we might mine the review process for glimmers of care even if this entails rummaging through the dregs of callous feedback. Focusing on two writing projects, I think about iterative review as involving a wide network of readers that include formal reviewers and informal readers that are part of a reading community of practice. I suggest that conceived of broadly, reviewers might mediate the writing process in ways that nurse underdeveloped ideas, push us beyond parochial reading practices, and widen the resonance of our work beyond our initial imaginaries. To read the review and publication process through body politics and geopolitics as potentially inhibiting and enabling, propels us beyond binaries and broadens the scope of review to consider the roles of our informal readers. Conceived of this way, review is an important part of the practice of writing. It enhances our craft, ideas and political commitments.

The body politic has private parts: market creation as a policymaking tool

Abstract Philosophical arguments about government contracting either categorically oppose it on legitimacy grounds or see it as largely anodyne. I argue for a normatively distinct kind of contracting – the advance market commitment, or AMC – and show that it is justified by the same liberal values that justify the welfare state.

Julius Malema, from Masupatsela to the Formation of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF): Historical Narrative

Julius Malema was born in 1982 during the apartheid era in South Africa and began his political journey at an early age. As he rose in the political space, he became prominent, playing a critical role in reviving the African National Congress Youth League (ANCYL). He was exposed to formal politics from the age of nine when he joined Masupatsela (Trailblazers), the youth brigade of the African National Congress (ANC) at the time. He rose to positions of power through joining the ranks of the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the ANCYL, and post his expulsion from the ANCYL, established his own organisation, the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), of which he is the current president, also known as the commander in chief (CiC). The article interrogates Malema's role in South African politics, and how he contributed to growing factionalism in the ANC. First, the article discusses Malema's early stages of joining politics, and his gradual growth, until he became the president of the ANCYL in 2008. Second, the article discusses his role in the politics of the mother body, the ANC, that is, in policies. Third, the article scrutinise why Malema was expelled from the ANCYL and, last, the emergence of the EFF in 2013 and its radical stance in the politics of South Africa.

From “melting pot” to “dumping ground,” or, the rhetoric of bodily incommensurability

ABSTRACT This article considers the deeply rooted ableism at the heart of xenophobic arguments against immigration at the turn of the twentieth century, tracing connections to contemporary warnings about foreign embodiment and criminality. Although the demographic under attack has shifted in the decades following the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, there are still shared root beliefs about miscegenation as automatically disabling publics. Because of how an anti-disability stance spans multiple eras of immigration, regardless of the racial or ethnic group in question, rhetorical work on anti-immigrant rhetoric should always consider where such arguments are enmeshed with ableist attitudes about whose bodyminds are worth including in the body politic.

Reconstituting the ‘good woman’: Gendered visual politics on social media during 2021 state election in West Bengal, India

This paper explores the visual politics of gender in electoral politics in West Bengal (WB). We examine how women political candidates visually construct their non-verbal political performance on social media, and how such visuals relate to social mores and societal expectations surrounding femininity. Drawing on theories of the social construction of gender and visual political communication, we conducted a content analysis of 1,033 visual artefacts from eight individual women candidates and 205 from the Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) pages of the four main political parties taking part in the January-April 2021 electoral campaign for state-level elections in WB. We analysed how these candidates construct gendered relationships with the electorate through different cues on the platforms, such as sartorial choices (traditional or Western attire), use of culture-specific religious symbols (sindoor or vermillion, bindi – forehead marking worn by married Hindu women), and gendered/non-gendered political actions like cooking or serving food, giving speeches or meeting constituents in political processions. Our findings about the visually performed politics show a combination of cultural, political, and gender signifiers, which are mediated and remain connected to societal expectations, and historical narratives. The candidates’ negotiation of these aspects, in turn, underscores a reproduction of colonial legacies and, in the present day, an ongoing production of societal differences. This study contributes to the growing body of literature on visual politics of gender, particularly in Asian contexts. It sheds light on the nuanced ways women politicians use social media to construct their visual identities, and how the deployment of body politics into the relatively ‘new’ online sphere reifies ‘old’ social, political, cultural symbolisms, and norms regarding gender. In this way, this article highlights the importance of considering pre-digital forms of gendered identity construction and visual representation when analysing the contested terrain of digital visibilities.

Institutional Trust and Economic Coping Strategies in Response to Sanctions: The Case of Russia and Iran

Sanctions have become an established feature of the economic landscape in Russia and Iran and may lead to economic insecurity and distrust of political bodies among citizens. However, few studies have investigated the way individuals adapt to these sanctions and whether their coping strategies are linked to their trust in institutions. To address this gap, we conducted a comparative study between Russians and Iranians, examining their economic coping strategies (ECS), including traditional ways of storing value, modern investments, cost-cutting measures, extra work, and resorting to social and material resources in response to sanctions and their relationship with institutional trust. Utilizing a cross-sectional research design, we administered surveys and obtained sample sizes of 364 and 311 in Russia and Iran, respectively. Our findings revealed that Russians exhibit higher institutional trust and lower levels of employing ECS compared to Iranians. Furthermore, we observed that lower institutional trust is associated with a greater overall use of ECS among Russians but not Iranians. When analyzing each coping strategy individually, we found that Russians with lower institutional trust tend to rely more on extra work, cost-cutting measures, and social and material resources, while in Iran, we observed this relationship for cost-cutting measures and modern investments. We concluded that in Russia, the financial insecurity induced by sanctions may have impacted institutional trust of those low-income individuals that were pressed to use certain strategies, while in Iran, the link between cutting expenses, modern investments, and institutional trust may be better explained by reduced life satisfaction and cultural factors. Given the role of institutional trust in well-being, it is crucial to protect at-risk segments of society from the adverse effects of financial challenges on their institutional trust.

Ain’t I a Woman? A Look at the Beauty of Blackness Amid the Internalized Body Politic of Genteel Whiteness

Ain’t I a Woman? This question was raised by activist and self-emancipated former slavewoman Sojourner Truth, who validly questioned the body politic of identity when contextualized to perceptions of female personhood. Essentially, what Truth challenged were presumptions about the standards set to revere female bodies through markers of genteel Whiteness, while the worth of embodied Blackness, precisely the beauty of Black women, is reviled. In this article, I seek to raise awareness about factors of patriarchy and societal ramifications. Patriarchy is a systematized phenomenology of norms privileging the male gaze. The White male gaze, particularly in strongholds of power, influences the body politic of communal identity. Black women tend to lean on their faith to embody strength, yet patriarchy also encumbers the gendered body politic in religious spheres. As a womanist scholar, my analysis considers the intricate roles that patriarchy holds in the cultural production of a genteel, pretty woman image, wherein the aura of Whiteness grounds a body politic that deems Blackness as other. Despite the influences of prevailing macrosystems, I propose a theoethic of self-love to push against negatively biased identity boundaries by affirming ways to embrace Black beauty with a subversive imperative to love oneself regardless.

The Female Body and the Body Politic in Sex Scenes of Lou Ye’s Film: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of <i>Summer Palace</i>

This article discusses the body politic of Yu Hong in the postsocialist Chinese film–Summer Palace (2006). Director Lou Ye places Yu Hong’s body in the sex scenes that metaphorically expresses a traumatic and sensitive political event, the “June Fourth Incident.” The portrayal of sexual intercourse, nudity, and this historical event is the unspeakable “secret” in mainland Chinese media. Therefore, the authors raise the question that, when sexual intercourse and the female body enter political discourse, how do we deal with the complex and dynamic power structures behind bodily attributes and the “anachronistic” historical objects that do not fit into the mainstream narrative and epistemological spaces? Drawing on body politic theory, feminist film theory, and a semiotic framework, we adopt multimodal critical discourse analysis to assess power relations and ideologies behind Yu’s body attributes in the sex scenes. The findings indicate that Lou constructs a complex communication system, using her body as a carrier of communication to express self-consciousness, constructing female subjectivity through the writing of feminine discourse, with the political purpose of seeking the freedom of the written word. Sexual liberation is sought by establishing a transgressive body that is not accepted by the mainstream and opposes the inherent power of government. Yu’s bodily pleasure is set up as an expression of narcissistic individualism through love, producing a vision of political ecstasy. Her melancholy body metaphor for the discomfort and confusion that preceded the student movement and the post-traumatic ambivalence. Using the female body as a site of political discourse and sexual liberation offers a new reading strategy for analysing the representation of the female body in film and other forms of media. In making the argument, the study contributes valuable scholarship to the film studies focused on sexual, gender, and political marginalised discourse.

Measuring the use of financial information by politicians in local government

IMPACT This article presents a tool to assess levels of financial information (FI) use by politicians—the FIU Index. The index provides a multidimensional perspective, whereby items of information used are combined with the main types of meetings where FI is discussed (annual budgets and accounts), and also with members of political bodies (local council, parliament, executive, government, political committee, etc.) in which FI is used. Entities may be ranked as below or above the average of those considered for the analysis each year. The FIU Index evidences the need for improvement, so that politicians can make the best use of FI to improve decision-making and dialogue with various stakeholders.

Character is Destiny: The Political Implications of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars

The absence of moral didacticism in the Lives of the Caesars is one of the most notable features of Suetonius’ biographies. If Suetonius believes that an emperor who acts virtuously secures himself and the body politic, why does he not actively encourage the imitation of virtue? Suetonius does not offer moral exhortation because his account of the role an emperor’s character or nature plays in their political and private actions suggests that the potential for moral instruction and improvement is severely circumscribed. Therefore, this article explores the political implications of Suetonius’ account of the relationship between an emperor’s character and their political fate to illustrate the potential limitations of the mirror-for-princes genre.

ПОЛИТИЧЕСКИЙ НАДЗОР ЗА ВЛАДИВОСТОКСКОЙ КРЕПОСТЬЮИ СИБИРСКОЙ ФЛОТИЛИЕЙ (1905–1917 гг.)

The article describes the implementation of political surveillance over the Russian Imperial Army and Navy in the period from 1905 to 1917 using the case of the largest operational units in the Amur Military District – the Vladivostok Fortress and the Siberian Flotilla. Their military personnel were the main force of the revolutionary uprisings of 1905–1907 in the region, which made clear the need to control them. The author examines the issue of the making of political surveillance consistently – from the establishment of political investigation body in Primorye in 1906 to its abolition in 1917, highlighting two stages in thisprocess.

Hamlet and Inoculation

ABSTRACT This article surveys Shakespeare’s biopolitical thought, with a focus on the semantic feature of “inoculat[ion]” in Hamlet. Today, the word “inoculation” means a way to produce artificial immunity by inserting a pathogenic material taken from an external entity through a small incision. This medical procedure, widely practiced in the eighteenth century, is called inoculation because it was like grafting—mixing one body with another. By using “inoculat[ion]” as a rhetorical device, Hamlet explores the politics of immunity before the dawn of modern immunology. Shakespeare’s work negotiates legal and medical thoughts on immunity: in particular, Hamlet is an intriguing text because it balances two different features of immunity, signifying at once juridical exception (as a signature of sovereign authority) and the negative protection of a body (through the metaphor of corpus politicum). Like the metaphor of inoculation (i.e. grafting), a practice that needs the other’s body, Hamlet shows that the body politic can be secured only when the realm elects the same invading foreign entity. In Shakespeare’s early modern imagination, immunity is not a strict boundary between self and non-self; rather, it is a much more negotiable boundary open to alterity and creaturely existences.

Contentious press freedom: Media law and the Supreme Court in the Philippines

The legal environment particularly the body of laws that regulate media operations are telling, yet underexplored, indicators of press freedom. Using the analytical concept of episodes of contention based on a reading of contentious politics, the article examines the ambivalent state of press freedom in the Philippines. The argument is that the protracted issues of media access and libel serve as two episodes of contention that identify extant and emerging sets of actors, mechanisms, and claims that collectively characterize the role of media law in the body politic. Drawing from interviews with journalists and review of the Supreme Court rulings about media access and libel, the hope is to underscore the potential and limits of the Court as an ally of the media in advancing press freedom. The decision of the Court does not at all times favor a liberal interpretation of press freedom but it deploys ways including dissenting opinions that can balance, if not outrightly oppose, the occasional negative view of the Court toward media-related cases.

Reimagining, Repositioning, Rebordering: Intersections of the Biopolitical and Geopolitical in the UK's Post-Brexit Migration Regime (and Why It Matters for Migration Research)

This article examines the emergence of a new immigration regime in the United Kingdom, following its exit from the European Union, to uncover the entanglements and intersections of biopolitics, geopolitics and ideology in migration and migration governance. It draws a clear line between Brexit as a political and geopolitical rupture, the ideological project of “Global Britain” that emerged from it, and the forms of migrant and citizen subjectivity that these paired projects produced as the body politic was re-modelled in this image. It demonstrates this through a critical analysis of recent immigration data and trends that consider who is coming to the UK, through what routes and under what conditions, and of recently introduced changes to the immigration system, including the curtailment of asylum and the emergence of new humanitarian routes. Building on scholarship that has shown the impact of migration on the outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum, our analysis of migration and migration governance after Brexit offers unique insights into how migration continues to play a central role in the ideological reimagining and geopolitical repositioning of the UK on the global stage and develops the concept of rebordering to capture the nexus between ideological and geopolitical transformations and the making — through migration and migration governance — of a new body politic and its “others” that embody and can serve their purposes.

Rebel Body against the Caste System in Ahuti's "Gahungoro Africa"

Applying body politics, this research paper attempts to explore the rebel body against the caste system in Ahuti's "Gahungoro Africa". First published in Mulyankan monthly magazine in 2051, the poem "Gahungoro Africa" satirically airs its voice against those oppressors who exploit Dalit laborers in different ways. The poet raises the issue of Dalits considering them touched or untouched during the caste system. The researcher makes a strong argument that the so-called low-caste Dalit people should be given the right to justice and freedom at any cost by abolishing caste discrimination entirely. The speaker of this poem is a leading figure, the rebel body as well as the voice of downtrodden, underprivileged, and working-class Dalit laborers against the so-called high caste. The paper shows the conflict between the so-called high caste; the exploiter, landlords, and touchable Vedic body, and the so-called low caste; the exploited, slaves, and untouchable non-Vedic body, especially the Dalit bodies who are declared 'untouchable' by the socially construct Hindu caste system. The poem carries out a very sarcastic, challenging, and angry tone toward the so-called high caste and its agents.

The Information Isolation Trope: Isolation, Infection, and Information Silos in Early American Literature

Many early American novels feature at least one character who becomes physically isolated, is restricted access to communication, becomes ill, spreads their sickness, and then either dies or becomes permanently disabled. This repeated pattern of isolation, infection, information, and death/disability underscores just how concerned early Americans were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos. The concern with information siloing, at first glance, seems anachronistic to early America. Eli Pariser popularized the concept of a “filter bubble” in 2011 when lamenting the many ways that algorithms create echo chambers and political fragmentation. While this essay concurs that content-recommendation bubbles are exacerbated by new media technologies, early American novels suggest that people have been worrying about the regulation and isolation of information since the dawn of the new republic. Early American novels—particularly those published between 1789 and 1815—are often read as seduction narratives, didactic narratives, or both; this article argues that attending to this pattern offers a new way of reading early American fiction that underscores just how concerned readers and writers were with the potentially harmful effects of information silos and the regulation of information on the body, the body politic, and public health.