BODIES: BETWEEN AND BEYOND

Living in the world of lockdown and quarantined spaces, where bodies and bodily functions are dissolved into ‘symbolic’ forms and acts of virtuality, it becomes essential more than ever to understand and discuss questions around Bodies, Identities and Representations. Bodies have always been a contested terrain; social and cultural theorists draw attention to the ambiguity of bodies as conceptualized through positivist notions of anatomy and biology. As Cream points out, “we should not be accepting our body as given, as natural, as pre-discursive or prior to culture” (Cream 1994). The body is continuously constructed through existing discourses of gender, race, caste, ability and disability, and intersecting cultures.

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Recent scholarship has pointed out the way the body has been polarized: the body is either constructed through discourse or is an a priori or biological reality; what needs to be kept in mind is that there is no teleological way of thinking of bodies: “the body is not a beginning. It is not a starting point” (Cream 1994). Closely tied to the modes by which bodies are conceptualized is the question of representation: who has the right to self-represent, who has the right to represent others, and whose experiences of the body are brought to the forefront?

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Deleuze’s idea that “every relationship of forces constitutes a body — whether it is chemical, biological, social, or political'' (1983) is useful to understand the production of bodies in the contemporary political system through clichéd metaphors of the English language.These include ‘the head of state’, ‘long arm of the law’, ‘organ’ (of a party), ‘sclerosis or tumour’ (of the body politic), among others. However, it is not limited to the English language; Indian languages also conform to this phenomena. Disability metaphors have been used to criticise the insensitive regime. An instance in Hindi would be: yah sarkar andhi aur gungi hai (this government is blind and deaf). Similarly, there are

phrases in Hindi such as haat kataanaa (cutting off a hand) which signifies giving up or losing property rights. Or Bumrah ne apni ghatak gendbazi se England ki ballebazi ki kamar tod di (Bumrah broke the backbone of England’s

batting line up).

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Historically, the victims of the Holocaust were remarked as ‘an infectious illness’; ‘a deadly parasite’; ‘agents of disease’ for the German national body’s health (Musolff 2010) which currently resonates on a larger global scale with highly mobile and contagious bodies amidst this pandemic-ridden world. The act of

disablement or unhealthy bodies and their socio-political and historico-cultural meanings help us understand the ways in which they could inform our conceptions of what bodies are.

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Beyond this, it is important to understand how imperative the body is with the technological deterministic turn our times have taken. Is technology derived from the body, or does it lie beyond it? Or as Heidegger (1954) questioned, if a new prism is required to understand bodies in relation to the techne and technicity?

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​There is a need to produce truths about bodies that are heterogeneous, and those that are not limited to the mind-body dualism. This seminar aims to explore the different ways of looking, seeing, locating, and understanding the interplay between bodies, identities, and representations. This multidisciplinary seminar invites academic papers as well as creative work across literary, performative and audio-visual formats such as short films, creative writing, etc. that comment on the ways we talk and write about the body.

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