Corporeality

Before the last two days are up, I’d like to add to the call to think about corporeality, subjectivity and the visceral as some of the bloggers have done. I’ve been inspired most recently by feminist theorists Elizabeth Grosz (2005) and Elspeth Probyn (2005) who, at least in these texts, are not writing about food but instead about embodied difference. Grosz is particularly interested in the debt representation owes to ontology and spends several chapters resituating nature and culture. My forthcoming paper on feminist corporeal theory, race and the farmers’ market attempts to talk about what raced bodies do there and how race is a corporeal relationship to food practices (growing, selling, buying food) as well as emergent in the frisson of contact. Bodies are not just inscribed by food practices but are materially produced through what people buy and sell. I used Ann Laura Stoler (2006) to consider intimacy as both revealing of structures of dominance (racial divisions at the Market) but also as holding the promise of ‘something else’. The question that is most compelling for me is what (anti-racist) politics would follow when bodies, formations in which they act and bodily practices are foregrounded?

The posts on this blog have been really wonderful to read.

Grosz, E. (2005) Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press.
Probyn, E., 2005. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Stoler, A. L. (2006) Intimidations of empire: predicaments of the tactile and unseen, in Stoler, A. L. (ed) Haunted by empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History. Duke University Press, Durham, pp. 1-22.


best,

Rachel Slocum