Forgotten Body Research Articles

Forgotten Bodies or Silenced Voices? Recasting Women’s Voices at the Bantu Square Massacre of East London, 1952

Narratives of political and community struggles often privilege the role of men, painting them as the faces of the struggle. Yet, women have been (and continue to be) active participants who have fought against systems of oppression through active mobilisation and resistance. This article focuses on events on 9 November 1952 at Bantu Square in Duncan Village, East London, when police broke up a meeting and shot and killed hundreds of people, while angry mobs killed two white people in retaliation. ‘Local historians’ point to the crucial role of women in mobilising support for the meeting that day. Women not only attended in their hundreds and died in untold numbers, but have left a lasting impression on the generations that have followed, inspiring activism and the retelling of what they call the Bantu Square massacre. The article draws on life histories, interviews, secondary material (including a film and memoir) and theories about the silencing of black women in the apartheid archive (Bridger and Hazan) and marginalised women generally (Crenshaw), and about the fragmented narratives that are produced when the silenced eventually speak (Markham).

Bloodstained

Teresa Margolles subverts the epistemic hierarchy of the archive. Her work privileges and affirms embodied memory and material meaning as essential modes for knowing, understanding, and documenting social violence. Margolles invests her concern for societal injustice through her use of bodily fluids derived from actual human corpses. Specifically, in the textile, Sutura—a work arising out of Margolles’s research at the Venezuelan-Colombian border during the migration crisis—the artist and her collaborators commemorate the life of a murdered migrant in material and method. Embroidery is utilized as a historically coded artistic form that resembles suturing and links the project with the reparative action of sewing. Using the stark and minimal representation of a straight line, embroidery is a metaphor for the narrative lines of millions of Venezuelans who have fled the country in the last decade. Similarly, the bodily material integrated into the bloodstained cloth functions to conflate textile, skin, and landscape to explore the confluence of substance, body, and place. I argue that Margolles configures a solution to the hegemony of the archive and the approach to bodily violence in Latin America more broadly. Her archival alternative and use of corpses and bodily fluids may be gruesome and ethically questionable, but the works are also reminders of the perpetual acts of violence inflicted on forgotten bodies.

Hypermnesia and Amnesia: Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict Memorials and Architectures

The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.

The forgotten body: history of sport and physical education for people with physical disabilities in Taiwan, 1945–1971

The history of sport and physical education (PE) for people with physical disabilities is dominated by an ideological discourse that, through the process of omission, argues that the developments in the field are Western in origin. In this article, we examine how Taiwan independently developed a new medium of sport and PE for individuals disabled by the epidemics of poliomyelitis during the mid-twentieth century. We first studied the period of Taiwanese history from the end of the Japanese occupation of Taiwan in 1945 until 1971. To explore this transformation, we engaged with Foucauldian genealogy to study the epidemics between the 1940s and the 1960s in Taiwan, when the number of children having physical paralysis increased dramatically. The high number of people infected with poliomyelitis turned it into a significant social problem that warranted being addressed by the government. Some of the children with physical disabilities were placed in institutions, and sport and PE were a part of their daily routine. Physical rehabilitation was extensively conducted through sport and PE and was administered on people with physical disabilities in institutions. By encouraging sport and PE for the disabled, the rehabilitative movement’s ultimate goal was to restore the functions of impaired bodies and efface the disabled in the society.

Race and the Epigenetics of Memory

In my brief response to Terence Keel’s essay “Race on Both Sides of the Razor,” I focus on something as pertinent as alleles and social construction: how we write history and how we memorialize the past. Current DNA analysis promises to remap our past and interrogate certainties that we have taken for granted. For the purposes of this commentary I call this displacing of known histories the epigenetics of memory. Just as environmental stimuli rouse epigenetic mechanisms to produce lasting change in behavior and neural function, the unearthing of forgotten bodies, forgotten lives, has a measurable effect on how we act and think and what we believe. The act of writing history, memorializing the lives of others, is a stimulus that reshapes who and what we are. We cannot disentangle the discussion about the social construction of race and biological determinism from the ways in which we have written—and must write going forward—about race. To the debate about social construction and biological variation we must add the heft of historical context, which allows us to place these two ideas in dialogue with each other. Consequently, before addressing the themes in Keel’s provocative opening essay and John Hartigan’s response, I speak about dead bodies—specifically, cemeteries for Black bodies. Three examples—one each from Atlanta, Georgia; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Mexico—illustrate how dead bodies must enter our current debates about race, science, and social constructions.

Forgotten bodies – an examination of physical education from the perspective of ableism

Contemporary social interpretations of the body are multifaceted, and in some cases paradoxical. Looking at the field of sport, there exists a global trend for (normalized) physical self-optimization on the one hand, and the struggle to achieve acceptance of (bodily) diversity triggered by the societal claims for inclusion on the other hand. Thus, this theoretical paper seeks to subject social practices in the area of sport (with a main focus on Physical Education in schools in Germany) to critical reflection especially in the light of inclusive ideals, using the perspective of ableism. The meaning of the body in Physical Education in Germany is examined in an explorative and hermeneutic manner. The observations make clear that there are numerous barriers facing the project of inclusion at all levels. In addition to obvious problematic implications in sport, the examinations reveal that conceptual and curricular approaches also imply exclusionary potentials that increasingly shift the focus onto the individual and his or her self-determined and self-reflected movements in the world.

The language of teeth: the tooth as a physical embodiment of identity in literature

ABSTRACTThe physical or scientific state and cultural symbolism of the tooth can be used to creatively interrogate personal and collective identities. This research seeks to foreground the tooth and progress the ways in which it is used as a physical embodiment of identity in literature, as the tooth is the often forgotten body part of literary scholarship concerning identity and the body, despite its frequent presence in literature as an exploration of identity from the Greek myth of Cadmus to contemporary creative writing. Understanding the tooth as a physical embodiment of identity is a result of interdisciplinary research into contrasting spaces: scientific evidence, cultural traditions, and the poetry of Katherine Stansfield and Paul Farley. Through the foregrounding of the tooth in these contrasting spaces, the tooth as a physical embodiment of identity becomes a multifaceted location, or heterotopia, both physically and conceptually. In my poetry the tooth's heterotopia is performed through a more explicit and experimental use of language and white space, as a physical embodiment of the tooth's identity. The language of teeth provides access to new ways of further negotiating and progressing representations of identities within the field of creative writing.

Forgotten bodies too?

Malformed: Forgotten brains of the Texas State Mental Hospital (2014) is a visually gripping, intellectually engaging and disturbing book. Stunning photographs and captions by Adam Voorhes and text by Alex Hannaford record an—until now—obscure collection of ∼100 brains that were harvested from patients of the Austin State Hospital (known as the Texas State Lunatic Asylum until 1925) and preserved in jars of formalin. The brains were collected from 1952 to 1983 by pathologist Dr Coleman de Chenar, and were gifted to the University of Texas at Austin within 2 years of his death in 1985. Some jars hold multiple brains or pieces of many brains, and a few contain additional organs. The book is lavishly illustrated with photographs of brains in unconventional orientations or floating in jars, sections of brains, and labels that are affixed to jars to indicate the disease or condition associated with their contents (Fig. 1A). These include: Alzheimer’s disease; haemorrhage; meningitis/encephalitis; various kinds of scleroses; cortical atrophy; lissencephaly; macrencephaly; macrogyria; micrencephaly; oedema; Down’s syndrome; cysts; hydrocephaly; and severe developmental anomaly. Some specimens are so malformed that it is difficult to identify their specific parts (Fig. 1B). MALFORMED: FORGOTTEN BRAINS OF THE TEXAS STATE MENTAL HOSPITAL Adam Voorhes and Alex Hannaford 2014. Brooklyn: Powerhouse books Price: US$39.95/£28.99 ISBN: 978-1-57687-708-1 Figure 1 Forgotten brains. ( A ) Most jars had red dots or red and green dots affixed to them, but without medical records the authors could not determine their meaning. (The reviewer suspects the dots might be related to periodic topping off of fluid in the jars); ( B ) this mysterious half section of brain sat alone, misshapen and unexplained. The book contains four sections: Discovery, History, The Collection and The Future. The authors begin by discussing their discovery of the rare assembly of brains that had been languishing ‘in …

L’infirmière en Samsah, un accompagnement vers le soin

The nurse's main mission in a medical-social support centre for disabled adults is to promote the health of the mentally disabled person, offering them a care approach which respects the framework of their life project. To do that, it is essential to support the person in a global care approach, the pillars of which are regained awareness of the forgotten body and a positioning as a player in their own health.

Merleau-Ponty's Conception of the Unconscious

In an attempt to fill the gap left by the widespread rejection of Freud's quasi-physiological metapsychology, the unconsciousness which Freud encountered is rearticulated in existential-phenomenological terms. It is argued that psychoanalysis and phenomenology converge in their attempt to understand the latent but operative meanings that structure human life. The unconscious is situated as an ambiguous, lived consciousness within the structure of perception, founded on the forgotten body's world-relations. Repression is discussed in terms of temporality and ambivalence. An incident in psychotherapy is presented in order to highlight these themes. Implications are drawn regarding the ambiguity of psychotherapy, transference, interpretation, and the language of psychology.