Performing Embodiment

Beschreibung

Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this book situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis, seeking to generate alternative configurations to mind–body dualism. Focused on language, literature, dance, affect, gender, sport, and disability, the contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. It is in doing that bodies produce knowledge and shared or contested social meaning. Such a relational process is best described through the notion of choreographies — patterns of movement which capture the embodied dynamic of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and which fittingly describe the modalities through which social norms discipline bodies, or are challenged by them.

Autor*in

Alberica Bazzoni
Alberica Bazzoni is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. She is the author of Il presente vivo. Temporalità del divenire e del trauma in Lispector, Ortese e Philip (2025) and Writing for Freedom: Body, Identity, and Power in Goliarda Sapienza’s Narrative (2018), and co-editor of ‘The Politics of Translation’, Comparative Critical Studies (2023); Gender and Authority (2020); and Goliarda Sapienza in Context (2016). Her current research explores textual performativity and feminist and decolonial literary imaginaries of trauma and resistance.

Themen in »Performing Embodiment«

embodiment phenomenology performativity mind-body dualism lived body relationality affect choreography embodied language situated knowledge

Stimmen zu »Performing Embodiment«

Performing Embodiment belongs to a growing tradition of philosophical inquiry that foregrounds embodiment as a heuristic strategy, affirming the epistemic value of first-person experience. Under the guidance of editors Alberica Bazzoni and Federica Buongiorno, seven women thinkers compellingly argue that literature, dance, and sports are not merely expressive forms but active performances of thought. At the heart of their exploration is the living body — both biological and cultural — which, when critically examined, reveals and challenges the very social and intellectual conventions that shape it. This collection of essays ultimately offers a transformative perspective on labour, understood as inherently cognitive and affective because it is fundamentally embodied. — Chiara Cappelletto, Full Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Milan
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Performing Embodiment offers a compelling demonstration that our corporeal condition is far from the ‘prison of the soul’ that Plato took it to be. Rather, our body emerges as a testing ground for explorative practices that reshape both personal and collective identities. Drawing on a series of case studies on the speaking body, the dancing body, and the social body, this volume advances a forceful account of corporeality not as a given, but as something to be enacted and performed. Instead of simply declaring, ‘this is my body; this is who I am,’ the contributions make a strong case why we should think of the body as something we do — and as something we are never done with. — Emmanuel Alloa, author of Resistance of the Sensible World
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