Body Politic Research Articles

(En)gendering Development: Mapping Spatial Contours of Urban Inequality in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

Extending feminist geographic endeavours in the present geopolitical conjuncture, this critical intervention calls into question the everyday gendered geographies of Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE) in their contextual heterogeneity. In the epoch of conspicuous consumption, women-dominated shopping malls in the Gulf space can be read as material-discursive sites in and through which gendered belonging is (re)constructed. Paradoxically, frenetic economic development is marked by deeply entrenched logics of segregation, unearthing conditions of unbelonging. In particular, urbanity is predicated upon the abjection of ‘bachelors’ (low-wage immigrant men of South Asian descent) from the Emirati body politic. I then employ intersectional frameworks to counter-map the affective contours of Dubai’s urban sexscape, where spatially and temporally provisional moments of queer existence (re)surface at nighttime. Similarly, intersectional feminist geographies of sex work grapple with existing and emergent strands of spatial inequality in ways a single-axis framework cannot hope to exhaust. Whilst sexed/gendered/racialised bodies are hierarchically stratified in Emirati moral economies of transactional sex, sex worker subjectivities at once refuse rigidly boxed categories by being continually reworked at the local, national and global levels.

Human Aging and Entropy

In this paper I argue that the contemporary pathologizing of old age is directly tied to the notion of uselessness, understood entropically as that which cannot contribute energy for useful work. The elderly are configured as socially useless and thus threaten the health of the body politic. As a result, they are marginalized, ignored, and treated as waste to be jettisoned from the system. Because understanding bodies as machines able or unable to perform work accords with the second law of thermodynamics, the first half of this paper discusses entropy as both scientific law and philosophical concept. The second section explores the lived experience of aging and the pathologized position of social uselessness through Simone Beauvoir’s analysis of old age. As she herself ages, the place of senescence comes to play a more pronounced role in her philosophical inquiry. Writing about the lived experience of aging adds a vital dimension to the scientific and philosophical perspectives, insofar as it foregrounds the various ways that entropy is felt: slowing, dissipating, and ultimately dying. While these should be viewed as part of the normal life cycle, they become markers of abjection which are judged harshly against the standard of social utility.

Establishment and development of the legislation of the Western Ukrainian People's Republic

The article examines the historical and legal aspects of the formation and development of the legislation of the ZUNR, in particular, it is stated that the beginning of a new stage in the development of state-building processes in the western Ukrainian lands was their inclusion in the Austrian Empire at the end of the 18th century. It was found that during the First World War, political life in the western Ukrainian lands became more active in the context of imperial policy and the national movement aimed at the formation of a national state. It has been found that the intensification of legislative activity in the western Ukrainian lands is connected with the events of November 1, 1918, in particular with the declaration of an independent Ukrainian state in the western Ukrainian lands, with the center in Lviv. The Ukrainian National Council became the main political body responsible for the development of the national state in the western Ukrainian lands. On November 13, 1918, the UN Rada adopted the «Temporary Basic Law on the State Independence of the Ukrainian Lands of the Former Austro-Hungarian Monarchy», which completed the process of constitutionalization of the newly created state. Formation of legal norms that regulated the main spheres of social life. In addition, a number of legislative acts were developed and adopted, which were supposed to regulate a complex of issues related to economic relations, the financial sphere and property obligations, as well as certain aspects of civil and criminal law. It was established that the «Act of Detachment» between the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Ukrainian People's Republic of Ukraine, adopted on January 22, 1919, was an important document, because it has significant legal, political and historical significance for the Ukrainian present, as it becomes a consolidating factor of public consciousness. The author of the article emphasizes that the characteristic features of national legislation in the Western Ukrainian People's Republic at the time were brevity and the introduction of a system of administrative responsibility for violations of legal norms, as well as the issuance of various by-laws in the form of orders.

»Zavedajmo se pri vsaki naši akciji, da tekmujemo!« Narodno tekmovanje, Tekmovanje zmage in druga

In the summer and autumn of 1944, the leadership of the resistance movement in Slovenia held two competitions among its political bodies and military units. Based on primary sources, the article analyses the idea, implementation, and results of these competitions, which, in terms of their content, represented a synergy between the resistance movement’s motivational and propaganda approaches and its needs for additional material resources and the expansion of its personnel. The competitions in gathering the material and political support for the resistance organisation spurred the further activation of its political bodies at all levels and encouraged a better definition of their political tasks. Obtaining additional material and human resources directly from the population was vital for the functioning and survival of the resistance organisation under the conditions of significant deficit. However, such actions could only be carried out in the areas where the resistance was sufficiently organised and which were not entirely controlled by the occupying forces and their collaborators.

Women, Film and Politics in the Islamic Republic of Iran 1979-2005; A Perspective from Learning from Experience and Performance Theory

Images in popular culture provide essential information about the socio-political situation and the self-realisation of gender roles in society. The transformation of women characters in Iranian films after the 1980s has occupied a certain space in scholarship, however everyday self-experiences in the streets and its relation to self realization and women figures are barely included into the analysis. Based on learning from experience, affect and performance theory, this paper focesses on two prominent female stars of Iranian cinema: Niki Karimi and Hediye Tehrani as image transformers in a period of cultural evolution and the smile of women that fades away from the streets. The analysis begins with a general examination of the interaction between politics and culture through the main currents in Iranian cinema. In this part, a periodization of the post-revolution era in Iran is presented through cultural products, especially Iranian films such as the religious era, the war and post-war era, the pastoral era, and the critical era. The last part compares two famous women's images, Niki Karimi and Hediye Tehrani, and shows how this periodization helps to understand the changes in women’s self realization and body politics in everyday life after the revolution.

The Inertia of All Flesh

This article builds on Eric Santner’s reflections on The Weight of All Flesh and in particular his interpretation of the king’s two bodies (Royal Remains). Within the context of Protestant theology, the theopolitical consequences of the democratization of the political body described by Santner are of particular interest. In this respect, I argue for two theses: first, this process of democratization finds its parallel in the Protestant critique of the representational function of the church – and perhaps even a crucial precondition. Second, in terms of a theological critique of ideology, this observation allows us insights into some accompanying symptoms of this process. From a theological perspective the weight of all flesh can then be precisely analyzed as the inertia of the flesh – and of all flesh at that.

Esther Gabara. Review of "The Political Body : Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America" by Jane Brodie and Andrea Giunta.

Esther Gabara. Review of "The Political Body : Stories on Art, Feminism, and Emancipation in Latin America" by Jane Brodie and Andrea Giunta.

Figures and Grounds: Art and the Body Politic in Ali Smith’s Winter

Abstract The essay reads Winter (2017), the second volume of Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet,” as a novel that engages with Brexit by revitalizing the metaphor of the body politic. Focusing on the role of landscape, the novel’s use of art objects and its intertextual conversation with Shakespeare’s late romance Cymbeline (ca. 1610), the essay also addresses the ways in which the reimagining of the body politic is entangled with Smith’s poetic strategies, arguing that matters of form and aesthetics are indistinguishable from the novel’s ethical and political concerns. Exploring parallels with post-’45 British landscape painting and art, especially Barbara Hepworth’s works, the analysis is concerned with two striking intrusions of the irrational in the novel: a hallucinated lump of landscape hovering above the characters and a child’s head floating in the air; both are crucial to the revitalization of the metaphor of the body politic as well as in the conversation the novel conducts with British art and with Cymbeline, a play that is an exploration of the idea of the body politic and of sovereignty in the context of the end of Britain’s relations with Europe. (TB)

Savarkar's Miscegenous Hindu Race

This article establishes racial thinking as central to V. D. Savarkar's (1883–1966) founding theory of Hindutva. Savarkar's issue with the Muslims was not that they were irreducibly “other,” a foreign race polluting Hindu “blood.” Jettisoning racial and caste purity, Savarkar instead grounded Hindutva's myth of a single Hindu race in all-round biological admixture. “Miscegenation,” as it was conceptualized by Nazis and white supremacists at the time, buttressed Hindutva's tremendous violence against Muslims, whose annihilation would come through gendered incorporation. Savarkar redefined the caste system as the crucible of the Hindu race, its endless proliferation testimony to a history of intermarriage expired in the present age. To reestablish the broken bonds of the Hindu race, Savarkar championed intercaste marriage. He offered the same solution to the “Muslim problem.” Muslims, who had carved themselves out of the Hindu race, needed to be reclaimed through conversion coupled with (forced) marriage, sex, and reproduction with a Hindu. Yet only Muslim women could be appropriated in this way, as paternity imparted race; Muslim men would be crushed in their potentiality for sovereignty and decimated in war with the Hindus. Savarkar, this article concludes, based the Hindu body politic on kinship and a vision of gendered incorporation modeled on war.

Reembodying Utopia: The Politics of Nature in Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet”

Abstract Ali Smith’s “Seasonal Quartet” chooses to inscribe Smith’s reading of Brexit in a long history of social and ideological fractures dating back to the 1980s. Transmuting the genre of “the condition of England” novel, she brings it into conjunction with the language of utopia and art. Her previous exploration of the politics of metamorphosis (see, for instance, “The Beholder,” Public Library and Other Stories [2015]) is here harnessed to a reflection on the experience of collective crisis and of historical belonging. Exploring the affective politics of nature, and harnessing artists like Barbara Hepworth and Tacita Dean to a form of re-affected utopia, she elaborates a poetics of transmutation harboring the promise of collective redemption. Turning to the concept of hospitality as analyzed by Derrida, as well as the series’ critical intermediality, this paper reflects on the poetics of affect crafted by Smith and the way her vision of a re-aestheticized body politic, fueled by the rhythms of nature, fashions a re-affected national community. (CB)

Corporeal Conflict: Unmaking and Making the Self in Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman

The classical canons of literature create and consider the construction of women as objects of beauty and desire, who are motivated by no concern for themselves, inherently weak and impoverished. This study seeks an alternative narrative structure to such cultural constructions by exploring how Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman (1969) portrays and represents the female body in connection with female agency and power by writing against classical representations. Accordingly, this study employs recent theorists who blend feminist perspectives with theories based on the body including Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo and Kim Chernin along with feminist literary critics including Simone de Beauvoir and Linda Hutcheon. By incorporating feminist theory and body politics together with literary criticism, this study presents a discourse of resistance and the potentiality of a new meeting point for shared experience and a common knowledge. In this regard, Atwood’s The Edible Woman suggests that there is agency and power to be attained through the knowledge of our bodies. As a counter-narrative, The Edible Woman promotes a resistance to dominant cultural and social constructions that proceed to objectify and undervalue the female body. Atwood’s novel attempts to bring a credibility and a value to knowledge to which we gain through our corporeal experience. What emerges from this perception is that corporeal knowledge appears to be essential to be able to acquire an understanding of our existence as well as to be read as a means to resistance.

Violencia de Obregón desde los lentes revisionistas de los estudios del género

Violencia (1962) by Alejandro Obregón is a milestone in the history of art in Colombia. It is regarded as an artwork that found a way to symbolize the violence suffered throughout Colombia’s territory and history through modernist tropes. The fusion of body-woman with territory-mountain has been analyzed as a formal strategy to solve the need for a non-literal image of war, but this iconic work has not yet been problematized from the perspective of gender studies. Body politics, studies on the male gaze, and ecofeminism provide the theoretical apparatus that will allow me to argue that Obregón’s painting poses a simultaneous process of territorialization of the body and feminization of the territory, where both body-woman and territory-nature are represented with analogous passive traits.

Beyond Initial Removal: Lasting Impacts of Discriminatory Content Moderation to Marginalized Creators on Instagram

Recent work has demonstrated how content moderation practices on social media may unfairly affect marginalized individuals, for example by censoring women's bodies and misidentifying reclaimed terms as hate speech. This study documents and explores the direct experiences of marginalized creators who have been impacted by discriminatory content moderation on Instagram. Collaborating with our participants for over a year, we contribute five co-constructed narratives of discriminatory content moderation from advocates in trauma-informed care, LGBTQ+ sex education, anti-racism education, and beauty and body politics. In sharing these detailed personal accounts, not only do we shed light on their experiences with being blocked, banned, or deleted unfairly, but we delve deeper into the lasting impacts of these experiences to their livelihoods and mental health. Reflecting on their stories, we observe that content moderation on social media is deeply entangled with the situated experiences of offline discrimination. As such, we document how each participant experiences moderation through the lens of their often intersectional identities. Using participatory research methods, we collectively strategize ways to learn from these individual accounts and resist discriminatory content moderation, as well as imagine possibilities for repair and accountability.

Identifying factors affecting a healthy lifestyle in the post-COVID-19 era.

A healthy lifestyle is one of the important global concepts in the post-COVID-19 era, which can lead to maintaining and improving the health of societies. This study aimed to identify the factors affecting a healthy lifestyle in the post-COVID-19 era. The current research is a qualitative study that was conducted in the field by theoretical sampling method. The qualitative method used in the current research was Strauss-Corbin's method. The data collection tool in the current research was a semi-structured interview. The researcher reached theoretical saturation by the end of the 13th interview, and for more certainty, the interviews continued until the 15th interview. The statistical population of the research was all professors and experts with specialized doctorate degrees in Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, and finally, 15 people were selected according to the entry and exit criteria for the study. Data analysis was done by summarizing and coding and analyzing the hidden content from expert interviews using MAXQDA software. The factors affecting a healthy lifestyle in the post-COVID-19 era (cultural norms, social norms, biological norms, technological factors, and economic factors) emerged from the intuitive opinions of experts. Providing and maintaining health is not a simple task, as it involves biological, individual, familial, cultural, societal, economic, political, and health factors. Promotion of healthy lifestyles is not merely the responsibility of health-related organizations and bodies; rather, they necessitate extensive coordination and empathy among educational, health, cultural, service, and even political institutions and bodies.

“What Force Could Trample This Body?”: Transformations of the Concept of Body Politic in the Works of French Intellectuals of XV Century

“What Force Could Trample This Body?”: Transformations of the Concept of Body Politic in the Works of French Intellectuals of XV Century

Cooptation, hijacking, or normalization? The discursive concession of body politics on Douyin

The short-video platform TikTok/Douyin becomes a space not only for individuals to express and articulate their interests, but also for the authorities to negotiate with the public on various ideological boundaries. This article specifically examines a Douyin campaign in which the platform attempts to prescribe a standard of body exposure that falls within the tolerance level of the authorities and, meanwhile, favours users’ interests to gain support. To conceptualize such discursive negotiations and the relevant tactics, we propose the term ‘discursive concession’ to describe the process of compromise by temporarily challenging, obscuring, and rearticulating the discursive boundary, eventually legitimizing the subordinated discourse by aligning it with the dominant ideological logic. By analysing discourses of representative short videos and comments, we identified three tactics of discursive concession: cooptation, hijacking, and normalization. They respectively describe how dominant, subordinated, and middle powers leverage each other to push the discursive boundary forward.

Ciné-martyrographies. Media techniques of witnessing in Iranian cinema

ABSTRACT The article explores the ‘making of martyrs’ at the intersection of media (especially cinema), propaganda, and body politics in Iran. Martyrs are not only highly contested bodies, but also surrounded by diverse media techniques which compete for the right to re-make these bodies and organize the visual economy of witnessing. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, the cultural industry called Cinema of Sacred Defence sought to monopolize the right to make martyrs after the 1979 Revolution, pursuing a strategy of ascribing different qualities of witnessing to different media. Along films such as Ebrahim Hatamikia’s Damascus Time (2018) and Mohammad Hossein Mahdavian’s Standing in the Dust (2016), the article examines the new ciné-martyrographies of the Sacred Defence and demonstrates how the Islamic Republic's visual propaganda machinery uses old and new digital media as 'messages’ – in terms of boundary building as well as the ability to generate genuine Islamic witnessing. In contrast, counter-martyrographies – such as Shahram Mokri’s Fish and Cat (2013) and Careless Crime (2020)— are explored that challenge the state’s iconology of the martyr and its monopoly on (blood) testimony by depicting media techniques of witnessing that remember those who have no right to be remembered as martyrs by the state.

Violence and Power of the Modern British Monarch

Violence and Power of the Modern British Monarch

Consolidating political leadership in healthcare: a mediating institution for priority-setting as a political strategy in a local health system.

The allocation of resources is a crucial part of political decision-making in healthcare, but explicit priorities are rarely set when resources are distributed. Two areas that have received some attention in research about legitimacy and priority-setting decisions in healthcare are the role of technical expert agencies as mediating institutions and the role of elected politicians. This paper investigates a political priority-setting advisory committee within a regional authority in Sweden. The aim is to explore how a political body can serve as a mediating institution for priority-setting in healthcare by disentangling the arrangements of its work in terms of what role it performs in the organisation and what it should do. The findings illustrate that promoting the notion of explicit priority-setting and the political aspects inherent in priority-setting in political healthcare management can contribute to consolidating political governance and leadership. There is, however, a complex tension between stability and conflicting values which has implications for the role of politicians as citizens' democratic representatives. This paper enhances our understanding of the role of mediating institutions and political properties of healthcare priority-setting, as well as our understanding of political and democratic healthcare governance in local self-government.

The Ethics of Population Policy for the Two Worlds of Population Conditions.

Population policy has taken two divergent trajectories. In the developing part of the world, controlling population growth has been a major tune of the debate more than a half-century ago. In the more developed part of the world, an inverse pattern results in the discussion over the facilitation of population growth. The ethical debates on population policy have primarily focused on the former and ignored the latter. This paper proposes a more comprehensive account that justifies states' population policy interventions. We first consider the reasons that support pro-natalist policies to enhance fertility rates and argue that these policies are ethically problematic. We then establish an ethics of population policy grounded on account of self-sustaining the body politic, which consists of four criteria: survival, replacement, accountability, and solidarity. We discuss the implications of this account regarding birth-control and pro-natalist policies, as well as non-procreative policies such as immigration, adoption, and unintended baby-saving strategies.