Feminist Theories Of Embodiment Research Articles

Tactile renegotiations in actor training: what the pandemic taught us about touch

This article draws from the practice-research project under the umbrella title ‘From Haptic Deprivation to Haptic Possibilities’. The project began as a response to the first COVID-19 lockdown in the UK in March 2020 and the necessary transition to online interactions. As a practitioner-researcher who has been critically investigating tactile possibilities through somatically inspired methods within and outside actor training, I identified a ‘gap’ in how we could still embody relational potentialities of touch either working remotely or while practising physical distancing. Modified physical contact in my practice research originates in my work with actors in training and widens in online sessions and in-person workshops with non-actors. This article focuses on tactile renegotiations in actor training and critical observations regarding what touch can be, challenging universal and unified perceptions. Advancing two published TDPT blog posts on the project, the discussion directs attention to how necessary physical distantiation during the pandemic expanded the use of touch in my training practice and how these tactile renegotiations can be applied post-pandemically within and beyond actor training. Inspired by phenomenological and feminist theories of embodiment, touch is proposed as an ethical renegotiation between self and other that necessitates differentiation and distantiation in nearness.

Somatic Ways of Knowing: Fina Miralles’ earliest practices of sensorial perception

This article investigates the sensorial and perceptual practices by Catalan artist Fina Miralles in her early performances (1972–3) as documented via photographs and Super-8 films. It analyses the works Paraules a l’arbre, Fenòmens atmosfèrics and Translacions by engaging with feminist theories of embodiment, agency and Noland’s elaboration of kinesthesia 1 (2009) as a central analytical tool. How were Fina Miralles’ artistic corporeal dynamics emancipatory and liberatory in the last years of Francoism? How does this kind of political action value the body senses and perceptions particularly as sites for a kind of learning? I argue that through their relation to the environment, Fina’s perception processes provide the key to a sensorial knowledge that allows for corporeal agency and feminist praxis in the face of the acute restrictions on feminine bodies under Franco dictatorship (1939–75). Body action, relations, motion and transposition of natural elements generate a gradual sensorial connection to Miralles’ self and to the world. This article examines how Fina created somatic spaces and experiences of increasing corporeal agency that led in later actions to a reconstitution of the body in both intimate and public spaces.

Between the Psychical and the Material: Body Language in Freud's Dora

ABSTRACT Feminist theories of embodiment, particularly those that have emerged from corporeal feminism, have been influenced by the psychoanalytic distinction between the hysterical body and the anatomical body [Wilson, Elizabeth. 2015. Gut Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press]. Following Freud and his concepts of the body ego and somatic compliance, psychoanalytic assertions that the way the body is lived is psychically informed have proven productive to feminist aims. Freud proposes the notion of somatic compliance as the explanatory rationale for hysterical symptomatology’s strange ability to express itself in a manner incommensurable with medical explanation. This article opens and extends those questions raised by the anatomical body that originally perplexed Freud in the case of Dora. In particular, it queries the notion of somatic compliance by asking: what is the character of anatomy such that it can defy and revise its own apparent limits? How can the hysterical body achieve feats that the non-hysterical body cannot? And lastly, what does it mean to comply somatically? In this way, the article responds to the anti-biologism that continues to feature in much feminist scholarship on corporeality.

Dona-Arbre [Mujer-Árbol] de Fina Miralles: Recolectando conocimiento corporal.

En este artículo sostengo que Dona-Arbre [Mujer-Árbol] de Fina Miralles, de la serie Traslacions, es parte de una secuencia de ejercicios y prácticas experimentadas durante las acciones realizadas en las que el cuerpo se percibe y experimenta cada vez más. Todas estas acciones son ejercicios para buscar el cuerpo en conexion con su entorno y con ella misma. Esta acción precede un trabajo que más adelante se centra en el cuerpo y que puede leerse como más abiertamente feminista. Mi argumento es que con Dona-Arbre comienza un método exploratorio del cuerpo y del entorno, y que este método es valioso para un feminismo basado en un autoconocimiento somático. Partiendo de metodologías encarnadas, investigación-creación y empatía kinestésica, utilizo teorías feministas encarnadas y de agencia, y tomo el concepto de kinestesia de Carrie Noland para describir las estrategias específicas en Dona-Arbre tales como el cuerpo inmóvil, kinestesia y micro-movimientos. Los interpreto como resistencias sutiles e instrumentos fundamentales para construir agencia corporal en el contexto de las restricciones políticas del cuerpo durante la dictadura franquista. In this article I claim that Dona-Arbre [Woman-Tree] by Fina Miralles from the series Traslacions, is part from a sequence of exercises and practices experienced during her performance work in which the body is increasingly perceived and experienced. All them are exercises in a search for the body in connection with its environment and with herself. It precedes her later focus on the body where there is a more overtly feminist political intervention. I argue that an exploratory method of the environment and the body starts with Dona-Arbre, and that this method is valuable to a feminist politics that begins from a somatic self-knowledge. Based on embodied methodologies, research-creation and kinestheticempathy, I engage with feminist theories of embodiment and agency, and take on Carrie Noland’s concept of kinesthesia to elaborate on the specific strategies in Dona-Arbre such as the still body, kinesthesia and micro-movements. I read them as a subtle resistance and pivotal instruments for building corporeal agency in the context of the acute restrictions on body politics during the Franco dictatorship.

Homo Includens: Surveying DiGRA�s Diversity

This article examines which bodies have access to participate in Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) events, and to DiGRA as an organization. It is based on a survey (N=174), among subscribers to the DiGRA 'Gamesnetwork' mailing list. The survey included questions on age, gender, location and career level to gain insight into who is included in the DiGRA community, with further questions on problems and challenges faced by those who have had trouble accessing DiGRA. This paper does not proceed solely by statistical methodology, but draws on feminist theories of embodiment and qualitative methods. Through this diverse methodological approach, the paper analyzes which bodies have difficulties accessing DiGRA�s academic communities and conferences, which practices cause these difficulties, and which policies might be introduced to address these. The survey indicates that young, early-career and women�s bodies are in particularly precarious positions. This situation is perpetuated through various practices of economic and social inaccessibility. Upon reflection, the paper proposes a set of policies to address these practices. We conclude that this survey and its analysis are only a first step to making DiGRA a more diversely inclusive organization.

An absent presence: Affective heritage at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum

The traumatic nature of the September 11th terror attacks shook most Americans to the core. The attacks contributed to overall sentiments of insecurity and paranoia, and a nostalgia for ‘safer times’ no longer discernable through the dust of the fallen buildings. Focusing on the emotional impact of the attacks on World Trade Center (WTC) redevelopment, this essay contributes ‘more-than-representational’ approaches to geographies of heritage by tracing the reverberation of this traumatic event through processes of cultural commemoration and the establishment of the National September 11th Memorial & Museum (NS11MM). Tracing visceral responses to more-than-representational experiences of place at the NS11MM, this essay asserts that the site's traumatic past is felt by memorial and museumgoers through affective encounters at the wounded site. As visitors are encouraged to feel absences and sense presences at the memorial and museum, the trauma of 9/11 is no longer confined to the space and time of the past; rather, it exists presently through newly unfolding emotional and material registries. Building upon feminist theories of embodiment and emotion, this essay critically engages the mind-body mechanism of feeling material and immaterial environments in order to map the geographies of trauma underpinning WTC redevelopment. To this end, I argue that “affective heritage” thwarts linear perceptions of time and place-bound notions of space, as traumatic pasts are re-membered presently by visitors, profoundly re-shaping physiological and psychological experiences of place, space, and time.

Self-tracking in the Digital Era

This article employs Foucauldian and feminist analytics to advance a critical approach to wearable digital health- and activity-tracking devices. Following Foucault’s insight that the growth of individual capabilities coincides with the intensification of power relations, I argue that digital self-tracking devices (DSTDs) expand individuals’ capacity for self-knowledge and self-care at the same time that they facilitate unprecedented levels of biometric surveillance, extend the regulatory mechanisms of both public health and fashion/beauty authorities, and enable increasingly rigorous body projects devoted to the attainment of normative femininity. These technologies of surveillance, normalization, and discipline thus function to augment, and facilitate the cooperation of, neoliberal-era biopower and post-feminist patriarchal power. My analysis of digital self-tracking devices’ instrumentality to biopower and patriarchy contributes to the emergent field of critical digital health studies and builds new connections between political, social, and feminist theories of embodiment; biopower studies; fat studies; and trans-disciplinary body studies.

Reply: Trauma, citizenship and ethnographic responsibility

The traumatic nature of the September 11th terror attacks shook most Americans to the core. The attacks contributed to overall sentiments of insecurity and paranoia, and a nostalgia for ‘safer times’ no longer discernable through the dust of the fallen buildings. Focusing on the emotional impact of the attacks on World Trade Center (WTC) redevelopment, this essay contributes ‘more-than-representational’ approaches to geographies of heritage by tracing the reverberation of this traumatic event through processes of cultural commemoration and the establishment of the National September 11th Memorial & Museum (NS11MM). Tracing visceral responses to more-than-representational experiences of place at the NS11MM, this essay asserts that the site's traumatic past is felt by memorial and museumgoers through affective encounters at the wounded site. As visitors are encouraged to feel absences and sense presences at the memorial and museum, the trauma of 9/11 is no longer confined to the space and time of the past; rather, it exists presently through newly unfolding emotional and material registries. Building upon feminist theories of embodiment and emotion, this essay critically engages the mind-body mechanism of feeling material and immaterial environments in order to map the geographies of trauma underpinning WTC redevelopment. To this end, I argue that “affective heritage” thwarts linear perceptions of time and place-bound notions of space, as traumatic pasts are re-membered presently by visitors, profoundly re-shaping physiological and psychological experiences of place, space, and time.

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men. It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument. The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago. Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland. The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the grotesque or abjected maternal.

Anima and animus embodied: Jungian gender and Laban Movement Analysis

This article hypothesises that the binary framework of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) can be correlated with Jung's descriptions of ‘anima’ and ‘animus’, with the intention to demonstrate polarities in movement quality operating as expressions of power. Jung's theory of contrasexuality is also considered within psychoanalytic and feminist theories of embodiment, with the caveat that movement behaviours have had little examination within them. Like Jung's descriptions of Anima and Animus theory, LMA is a binary model which relies on qualitatively oppositional descriptions to indicate functional and expressive aspects of the lived body, lived world phenomenon. Laban also referred to some movement as ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, although LMA's fluctuating, interdependent binary system can (and should) serve as a movement palette for either gender. Jung's original theories of anima/animus were purportedly living in the unconscious of psychological men and women, respectively. They are here further transported to a Laban-based movement duality that can be expressed by either sex.

Feminist anthropology: past, present, and future

Foreword. Taking stock--the transformation of feminist theorizing in anthropologyIntroduction. Feminist anthropology: perspectives on our past, present, and future1. The future of gender or the end of a brilliant career?2. Feminist theories of embodiment and anthropological imagination: making bodies matter3. Gender, genes, and the evolution of human birth4. Marriage, matrifocality, and missing men5. Archaeologists, feminists, and queers: sexual politics in the construction of the past6. In the midst of the moving waters: material, metaphor, and feminist archaeology7. Materiality and social change in the practice of feminist anthropology.8. Feminist perspectives and the teaching of archaeology: implications from the inadvertent ethnography of the classroom9. Toward a (more) feminist pedagogy in biological anthropology: ethnographic reflections and classroom strategies10. The professional is politicalAfterword: on waves