CORPOREAL BECOMINGS, HISTORY AND CULTURE: BETWEEN MALLEABILITY AND PERFORMATIVITY
Contemporary corporealities are no longer understood solely as a biological reality; we now know that they also result from their historicity and from the discourses of culture; that they are not fixed entities but malleable ones, subject to mechanisms of representation, regulation and modification, where embodied subjects are constituted amid relations, practices and affects. They are historical and open to new configurations—that is, they reflect corporeal malleability insofar as they are becomings that cultural discourses, technological practices and gender norms attempt to pre-establish through the definition of stable identities and split subjectivities. In this way, corporealities become images, representations, data and objects of technological optimization, whose historicity also explains the importance of difference as a constitutive element of embodied subjects.
In this symposium we propose to analyze corporeal becomings at different historical moments, as processes in continuous transformation traversed by cultural discourses and performative practices in which biomedicine, technology, politics, social technologies and corporeal practices produce embodied—and particularly gendered—subjectivities.
The symposium aims to contribute to the discussion on processes of corpo-subjectivation, on corporeal experiences, subjectivity, identity, gender and the production of new figurations, in the manner of Rosi Braidotti. We refer to disabled bodies, to motherhood and biomedical knowledge, to bodies of sexual diversity and of corporeal beauty as a historical product, as well as to the creation of artificial life arising from technology and artificial intelligence.
We will consider ongoing research situated at the intersection of Anthropology, History, Cultural Studies and Body Studies, with a gender perspective, adopting a view from biopolitics, the disciplining and control of corporealities, performativity, and the relations between body, technology and subjectivity.
