Multiplicity Of Bodies Research Articles

Emotion and Islamic Hagiology: A Post-taxonomic Approach

Abstract The study of emotion in Islamic hagiology remains largely uninterrogated, as visible in elliptical descriptions that classify particular texts, bodily gestures, or utterances as “emotive.” I advocate for a shift from taxonomic approaches to emotion to a focus on function in narrative hagiographies. I argue that emotion provides a rich analytic category for understanding the dynamic relationship between texts and bodies in the hagiographical process, as well as the multiplicity of bodies that are involved or implicated. To illustrate this framework, I provide readings of narratives in the sīra (biographies of Muḥammad) which depict bodily manifestations of awe when in Muḥammad’s presence. Endorsing the position that the hagiographical process is constantly under negotiation, these analyses reveal that emotional practices are crucial to understanding the relationality between exemplary persons, biographers, characters, and readers.

Review: Voice Becomes a Field of Study

“Master of Voice” is a temporary program of Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam) that united artists of different backgrounds who shared voice-based practices. Often considered as a medium in art history, the (non)human voice has been identified as a discipline in its own right. The book Master of Voice (Coburn, T. et alt., 2020) presents the artworks and reflections arisen during a two-year-long period of research based on collective learning and experimentation. The human voice is mainly approached through gender and technology, gushing from a multiplicity of bodies, freed from Western social norms. Editor Lisette Smits shares a vivid reflection about the role of contemporary artists and the range of their voices in our post-industrial society. The book emphasizes the agency of the voice and accordingly, its potential as a political and social tool.

Reimagining Royal Domesticity

Abstract This article explores the social composition of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court, variously referred to as his harem or andarun, during his reign (1848–96). The article offers a brief sketch of the complex structure of this institution and some of the key figures who made up its residents, at various points estimated to be between seven hundred and two thousand wives and female relatives, as well as different classes of employees. While this institution was at once highly elite and hierarchically organized, the kinds of social, affective, and political power that circulated in it, and the multiplicity of bodies that came into contact inside its physical boundaries, mark it as a historically specific and unique social place—one that stood in a liminal temporal and physical space—at the crux of Iran’s engagements with modernization and in the very city center of Tehran.

Introduction

Introduction Sarah McCarroll (bio) Theatre is inescapably about bodies. By definition, the form requires the live bodies of performers in the same space and at the same time as the live bodies of an audience. And yet, it's hard to talk about bodies. We talk about characters, we talk about actors, we talk about costume and movement, but we often approach these as identities or processes layered onto bodies, rather than as inescapably entwined with them. It's hard to talk about bodies. Although they are capable of great grace and beauty, they also do awkward, funny, grotesque, physical things. And recent scholarship in both the sciences and the humanities notwithstanding, the Cartesian separation of mind-body is a deeply engrained concept: "I think therefore I am," where identity, being, one's very existence are located in the process of thinking via a disembodied intellect. The opposite of "I think therefore I am" is "I do not think, therefore I am not," and there has been a historical tendency to elide the body as an unthinking not. This decentralization of the body has important consequences, however, in that it reduces the body to an object, something that is not involved in the processes that make up our existence, create our humanity. Further, an object is available—for possession, for conquest, as a blank page subject to authorship by another. This is obviously a matter of urgent importance in the world at large, but it is also the subject of growing concern and attention in the theatrical world. What stories are bodies onstage telling, both as they relate to the given circumstances of text and character, and separately from those constructs? How is meaning made onstage simply and profoundly via the presence of the human form? What does it do, for example, to the American conversation to have the musical Hamilton present black, Asian, and Hispanic bodies in the space occupied by the founding fathers?1 [End Page 5] Bodies on the theatrical stage are liminal; therein resides their great power. They hold the power of transformation, of being always both/and. They have the potential to become other, while at the same time they are also always what they are, the body of the actor: African American actor Daveed Diggs both/and the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Hamilton, to continue the example. This is both the exciting possibility contained within theatre, as it makes the unimagined/unimaginable real for a time, and the thing that we as theatre practitioners, scholars, and educators must trouble as we think about what bodies go where onstage, what stories we allow which bodies to tell, and how those bodies help to create the meanings of stories on stage. Many of the essays in this volume touch on ideas of labor, whether explicitly or implicitly. We talk about the work bodies do, where "work" is a critical term of art, but there is a sense in which bodies become fully realized in the moment that they engage in literal work of one kind or another. If bodies are about work, then they are also about economics, class, race, and gender and sexuality (among other attributes), and which jobs classed, racialized, gendered, et al. bodies can take on. This has particular resonance for us in the theatre as we think about creating spaces/theatres in which women, people of color, those without incomes, or people on a broad scope of gender and sexual identities or physical abilities can attend the theatre, or work in positions of power and decision making.2 It also, of course, has application to questions of what bodies can do what work onstage, both within and separate from, the given circumstances of a particular text. What bodies are we willing to put in what roles? A black Hamlet? A female King Lear? A size-22 actress as Juliet, or a paraplegic Beatrice? How might our inclusion of such "nontraditional" bodies blow open the doors of meaning for texts we thought we thoroughly understood? How, too, are we structuring the repertoire to provide roles intended for, not just cast with, a multiplicity of bodies? Theatre Symposium is...

Meta-morphic punk

Abstract The article takes a renewed interest in the artistic practices of the 1980s in Slovenia, aiming to build bridges between individual actors of the 1980s alternative scene in Ljubljana and to account for certain actors, who have been up to now lacking in interpretations of this period, and related phenomena ought nevertheless to be included in this narrative. By analysing new cultural phenomena, the article shows that one of the crucial vectors is a revision of the conception, perception and use of the public. Punk, as a catalyst for new social, cultural and artistic phenomena, is here understood as an ideological rather than aesthetic position. The contribution thus analyses the spectrum of tactics and strategies that enabled a specific cultural interregnum to inhabit the dissolving context of late-Yugoslav socialism. The conceptual framework given here perverts the traditional theatrical dichotomy between performers and audience, as performance suddenly includes everyone: urban space is transformed into performative materiality and theatrical semiotics. Space understood in this way, in which a multiplication of bodies can be perceived, can be thought of as a space of a different type of politics and can be sensitivized anew. To actualize punk’s starting points within the horizon of a new policy, what is needed is a spectrum of differences, i.e. regimes of corporeality, with which choreographic and dance practices are manifested as a proactive partner in an opening up of the public.

‘The body remembers’: narrating embodied reconciliations of eating disorder and recovery

ABSTRACTAfter severe illness, there are stories: narrative strands to suture discontinuities of identities, practices, and lives. But within these narratives of illness and recovery, the body's discontinuities stand apart, striking in the materiality of change, in the tangible multiplicity of bodies – healthy, ill, recovering, recovered – that a person can call one's own. Based on longitudinal research interviews with Israeli women who identified as recovered from long-term eating disorders (fieldwork conducted in 2005–2006 and in 2011), this paper explores how these bodily discontinuities are expressed, drawing particular attention to the narrative role of embodied memory in linking past and present-tense bodies and selves. Embodied memory, as narrated by the participants, is deeply, sometimes surprisingly, embedded in lived experience, imbuing recovered bodies with moments of sensory continuity, the past coming into presence through forms of sensation and perception learned at the height of disorder. Examining narrative moments of sensory remembrance, this paper analyses how participants narrate embodied memory as a mode of reflection, self-protection, and dynamic integration, wherein the experience of disorder informs practices of recovery, and the body becomes a site for the reconciliation of past and present.

The pharmacy gaze: bodies in pharmacy practice.

The body is a central feature of pharmacy practice. Despite this and the increased sociological focus on bodies in health and social care practice, the nature of the body and the work undertaken upon it in pharmacy have not been explored. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with hospital and community pharmacists, this article explores the ways in which bodies are constructed and managed in these two practice contexts. It is argued that pharmacists see patients' bodies in particular ways given their expertise in medicines, which is conceptualised here as the pharmacy gaze. The notion of complexity, as a way of constructing the body, and the generation of algorithmic bodies, as a way of managing this complexity, are shown to be central to the pharmacy gaze in both hospital and community contexts. In hospitals, complexity was located in a singular body, that is, increasingly rationalised to reduce costs and toxicity. In community practice, complexity arose from the multiplicity of bodies with which pharmacists interact in their multifaceted role as retailers, dispensers and public health practitioners. The article concludes by reflecting on the ways in which current UK health policy may broaden the body work that English pharmacists undertake.

The Politics of Burlesque: A Dialogue Among Dancers

Everyone’s got something to say about the politics of burlesque. For this slideshow, Editorial Assistant Adriana Disman wanted to hear from the performers themselves, and she invited dancers from across Canada to write a little about what “the politics of burlesque” mean for them. Some describe socially engaged acts, some talk about the reasons behind their decision to perform, and still others express a dedication to carving out specifically politicized space for themselves within the burlesque scene. While this slideshow strives to represent performers from different burlesque communities, it is important to point out that it not comprehensive, and more work needs to be done to represent the multiplicity of bodies and identities that appear in this genre (such as Indigenous, trans, and disabled performers).