scholarly journals Methods that Move: A Physical Performative Pedagogy of Subjectivity

2013 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Francombe
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Projects ◽  
Body Work ◽  
Moving Body ◽  
Performative Pedagogy ◽  
A Site

Driven by a desire to interrogate and articulate the role and place of the body in the study of sport, this paper encourages those who are incited by a richer understanding of the physical to expand and elaborate upon the fleshy figuration that guides the research projects and practices/strategies of the present. This call for papers is an opportunity to unpack the methodological impetus of “body work” (Giardina & Newman, 2011a) and to locate it within the nexus of dialogues that expressly seek to reengage an eclectic body politic at precisely the time when the body is a site of continuous scrutinizing and scientific confession. As researchers we grapple with and problematize method(ologies) in light of the conjunctural demands placed upon our scholarship and so I reflect on a recently conducted project and the methodological moments that it brought to light. Conceptualized in terms of a physical performative pedagogy of subjectivity, I tentatively forward a discussion of what moving methods might look and feel like and thus I question why, when we research into physical, sporting, (in)active experiences, do we refrain from putting the body to work? Why do we not theorize the body through the moving body?

scholarly journals “Body Work” in Home‐Based Substance Abuse Care

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 256-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsi Günther
Keyword(s):  
Substance Abuse ◽  
Home Visit ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The Body ◽  
Care Work ◽  
Body Work ◽  
Home Based ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
A Site

This study examines “body work” in the context of home‐based substance abuse care in Finland, which is provided to adults with intoxicant problems and needing short‐ and long‐term support in their everyday lives. This article is concerned specifically with body work, which can be defined as care work focusing directly on the bodies of others. Through a twofold analysis of 13 audio‐recorded home visits and ethnographic field notes, it examines what body work is in home‐based substance abuse care, how close body work is and how workers and clients negotiate about it. The study shows that home as a site of care has an impact on substance abuse care. The worker’s home visit settles into a tension relation between private and public even if the care is a part of weekly routine. Body work is holistic care work necessitating slight, medium, and extreme bodily intimacy in taking care of and supporting client’s well‐being. During the home visit, worker and client negotiate the body work and its content. Worker and client communicate verbally and non‐verbally by gaze and body movements. Often the workers have to balance between disciplinary, participatory, and caring approaches to support the client living in the best possible way.

Blake, Duncan, and the Politics of Writing from Myth

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Freedman
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
American Foreign Policy ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Ethical Responsibility ◽  
Democratic Participation ◽  
Romantic Poet ◽  
A Site

Robert Duncan saw Blake’s images of ‘fire and blood’ alive in contemporary America. Like many of his generation, he was appalled by the war in Vietnam, believing it to be symptomatic of a deeper spiritual sickness in America. He wanted poetry to provide an alternative form of democratic participation which would recover the meaning of freedom from the toxic lexicon of American foreign policy. Duncan, like Blake, imagined the body, and the body politic, as a site of alterity and ethical responsibility, charged with repression and desire. His reading of Blake sought to preserve the place of the Romantic poet in the modern world but, ironically, helped expose its fragility.

scholarly journals A Virtual Body Politic on #Gaza: The Mobilization of Information Patterns

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laila Shereen Sakr
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Dziga Vertov ◽  
Information Patterns ◽  
A Site ◽  
Material Bodies ◽  
Data Visualizations ◽  
New Strategies ◽  
Virtual Body

 From Walter Benjamin and Dziga Vertov to Instagram and machine vision: new strategies of seeing and representation in modern and software societies constantly emerge and reshape our field of phenomenological, affective, and discursive vision. Social media’s use of images and representations of the body, within the highly securitized and militarized networks and landscapes that we traverse, focuses attention on the body as a site of contested political control and capitalist consumerism. This study of a virtual body politic provides a close reading of two data visualizations from Twitter conversations on Egypt in 2011 and Gaza in 2014 in order to analyze the mobilization of information patterns over time. These visualizations of Internet data are not about claims about material bodies or the intentions of communicators, but traces of an embodied moment of intentional use of digital media. Every data point has an embodied analogue at some moment. And tweets have a very particular (historically specific, geo-specific) moment of origin that is exceedingly tangled with materials bodies. My aim here is to determine what the emerging patterns tell us about a virtual body politic. 

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

The Space of Difference in Law: Inquests into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

Somatechnics ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherene H. Razack
Keyword(s):  
Aboriginal People ◽  
The Body ◽  
Police Brutality ◽  
Canadian Society ◽  
Aboriginal Community ◽  
Police Custody ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
A Site ◽  
Deaths In Custody

Paul Alphonse, a 67 year-old Aboriginal died in hospital while in police custody. A significant contributing factor to his death was that he was stomped on so hard that there was a boot print on his chest and several ribs were broken. His family alleged police brutality. The inquest into the death of Paul Alphonse offers an opportunity to explore the contemporary relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society and, significantly, how law operates as a site for managing that relationship. I suggest that we consider the boot print on Alphonse's chest and its significance at the inquest in these two different ways. First, although it cannot be traced to the boot of the arresting officer, we can examine the boot print as an event around which swirls Aboriginal/police relations in Williams Lake, both the specific relation between the arresting officer and Alphonse, and the wider relations between the Aboriginal community and the police. Second, the response to the boot print at the inquest sheds light on how law is a site for obscuring the violence in Aboriginal people's lives. A boot print on the chest of an Aboriginal man, a clear sign of violence, comes to mean little because Aboriginal bodies are considered violable – both prone to violence, and bodies that can be violated with impunity. Law, in this instance in the form of an inquest, stages Aboriginal abjection, installing Aboriginal bodies as too damaged to be helped and, simultaneously to harm. In this sense, the Aboriginal body is homo sacer, the body that maybe killed but not murdered. I propose that the construction of the Aboriginal body as inherently violable is required in order for settlers to become owners of the land.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

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