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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory

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Introduction: Corporeal poetics and body management

a
May Joseph
a
Assistant professor of performance studies, New York University

Available online: 03 Jun 2008

To cite this article: May Joseph (1999): Introduction: Corporeal poetics and body management, Women & Performance: a
journal of feminist theory, 11:1, 9-14

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 INTRODUCTION:
CORPOREAL POETICS AND BODY MANAGEMENT
May Joseph
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T
he burning body of Roop Kanwar, the flayed skin of
Marsyas, the suspended body of Stellarc, the convulsing
body of Pierrot, the fascia of the rolfing body and the frugal
body of the Gandhian satyagrahi, are some of the sites brought into
dialogue in this collection suggestively titled Bodywork. Bodywork
plays with the concept of bodies being physically manipulated and
in the process of being worked upon, as well as on the kind of labour
put into the production and management of bodies. The physio-
logical reordering of the body through rolfing (Paul Zimmerman);
the gravity defying enactments of Stellarc (Aitor Baraibar); Orlan's
surgical reconstructions (Jill O'Bryan); and the somatic experiences
of chronic fatigue (Rebecca Hyman) are brought into conversation
with the aesthetic reworking of human movement through the vis-
ceral use of spit (Christof Migone); the poignant image of the tragic
mime (Allen Weiss); the fasting body through history (Gordon Tait),
the sporting body of tennis (Toby Miller et. al) and the transnational
urban traveller (Brian McGrath).
Bodywork throws into relief the expanding field of body studies,
a network of connections from different disciplinary and theoret-
ical persuasions. How might the corporeality of writing the body
and the sociology of body management be brought into conversa-
tion? What are some of the useful links between the anthropology
of embodiment and the poetics of corporeality? Between these
widely divergent categories and paradigms of body studies, this
volume draws perspectives on writing the body. It blends the poetic

Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Issue 21, 11:1

© 1999 Women & Performance Project, Inc.
 10 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE
with the institutional, in an interrogation of the elaborate regimes
that produce, reorganize and manage human movement and mental
life today.
Twentieth century histories of nation formation have generated
various epistemological concerns about the kinds of bodies recorded
by history and those that have fallen outside the purview of official
history. Decolonization and Civil Rights discourses accentuated the
complexities of the kinds of knowledges and frameworks through
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which the subjects of history could be addressed. At once general

and particular, the history of Twentieth century bodies is a history
of the changing relations between the geography of places, the
history of peoples and the kinds of experiences of modernity
encountered within specific local contexts (Soja 1998, 27). This dif-
fering and heterogenous history of the complex modern body is par-
ticularly striking when the archives of the western body, through its
medical, historical, archaelogical, national, and urban histories, is
set alongside the fragmented and overdetermined figure of the post-
colonial body, at once hypervisible as abject and invisible as suffi-
ciently civilized. With its overinscribed history of cataloguing, col-
lecting, exhibiting, codification, institutionalization, criminaliza-
tion, policing, managing, segregation, and repression, the colonized
body in its post-independence phase, struggles to articulate a history
of the free, embodied, national body rather than the ideologically
splintered, heterogenous constitution of the emergent postcolonial
state. The essays by Rosamund King, Ananya, Jean Rahier and
Nadine Rogers et al., gesture toward this intertwined history of
nation formation and the difficulties of reductionism, as the newly
invented state narrows the representations of its diverse con-
stituencies and their available histories in the interests of sovereignty.
In this narrative, the fractured, dispersed, multiply located, het-
erogenous bodies of the state are hard to find. Instead, we are pre-
sented with the coherent representation of national struggle — the
dominant ethnic majority as representation through the official
culture of the state. Conditions of pleasurability, the erotic, the
trivial and the playful become buried in the overwhelming need to
create a grave and authentic history of the state, and its national sub-
jects. Such projects, often focussed around the study of revolutions,
labour unrests, activism or nationalism, make the body available, but
more often in representational rather than in corporeal and tactile
 INTRODUCTION 11
ways. The fleshy, bellicose, vulnerable and amorphous body of the
citizen within the state is one that is yet to be fully articulated in its
variety and somatic diversity, as V. Geetha's piece on the nature of
gendered embodiment for women within the Gandhian non-coop-
eration movement points out.
The particular difficulty of making the body available as an
embodied, articulate, contemporary psychic subject, rather than just
a subject of colonial or national history, suggests the theoretical and
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methodological dilemmas implicit in the available categories of body

studies whether ethnographic, historical or sociological. This
dilemma is further elaborated by the penchance for the fictive, the
poetic, the performative and the mythological on the part of minor-
ity and postcolonial writers struggling to find a language of embod-
iment that is not saturated in tradition, history or the pre-modern.
This tension has produced provocative fissures of non-legitimated
knowledge such as the corporeal which permeate the realm of
instrumental reason in these contemporary inquiries into the nature
of the body. A distracted unreason propelled by the overpowering
memory of slavery, indentured servitude and colonization shapes
this imbricated history of modernity itself, which is posed as a
tension between first world and third world bodies in an ongoing
condition of globalization even while this dichotomy has been
blurred and mutated into more interwoven forms of experience and
being.
Bodywork underscores the idea that the categories "non-western"
and "third world" are no longer useful working concepts to describe
the inequities of modernity. The increasingly globalized nature of
everyday life has produced forms of mass consumption and self
invention that challenge easy theorization of the kinds of unequal
modernities experienced today — reiterated by Jean Rahier in his
analysis of Afro-Esmeraldan beauty contests. Homelessness in New
York (Nadine Rogers et al.) and urban life in Bangkok (Brian
McGrath), are instances of the increasingly interconnected though
ecologically different experiences of lifestyles that link the perfor-
mance of space and the management of bodies across geographi-
cally disparate locations. The metaphorical and physical experiences
of being technologically modern, such as Jill O'Bryan's exploration
of the reconstruction of the body in Orlan's performances, has
brought along with it a vulnerability of overexposure to rapid
 12 WOMEN & PERFORMANCE
change as Rebecca Hyman's discusssion of chronic fatigue and
Gordon Tait's historical analysis of fasting elaborate.
The recent nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan has
brought to the fore the fraught legacies of modernity embedded in
the access to nuclear power that has tainted the more innocent view
of modernity as an unequivocal right to technology. This deadly
encounter reiterates the uneasy association between the represen-
tations of the modern and the commodities of modernity such as
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nuclear technology, that continue to be contested for within differ-

ent national and regional contexts. Such commodities are often
viewed in corporeal terms, frequently endowed with the charisma
and names of national myths and made tangible through the
mythologial representations of the human body. This junction
between the mythological, the technological and the corporeal is an
explosive coagulation of what it means to be modern. While moder-
nity is a singular experience within which multiple forms of
space/time compressions splinter local realities producing specific
as well as general forms of space/time disruptions (Harvey 1989,
218), its layered experiences of reality demand more inflected
notions of modernity's selves as well as its embodied expressions.
Bodywork explores some of these layers of the sensuous and the
embodied through which forms of selfhood, selfinvention and self
inscription are exercised in the production of contemporary selves.
It offers a comparative framework for the conflictual ways in which
space, corporeality and the somatic affect everyday life. Bodywork
suggests that national histories such as those of Ecuador or India,
and regional histories such as that of Latin America or that of South
Asia, are not independent of larger globalizing forces, which
impinge upon the contemporary condition of modernity. These
writings demonstrate the interconnected regimes, laws, and social
practices that increasingly incorporate difference into an uneven,
but interdependent experience of modernity. Histories of corpore-
ality within the nation are impacted upon by the fluctuations and
shifts of global modernity, demanding an inflected, nuanced but
locally embedded framework for reading modern bodies. There is
no place outside the whale, which is why it is even more imperative
we take the care to puncture the seamless narrative of modernity
with the intertwined messiness of its flows and forces.
 INTRODUCTION 13
Works Cited
Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers.
Soja, Edward. 1989. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of
Space in Critical Social Theory. New York: Verso Press.
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Hilla Lulu Lin: Pure & Wild, 1997; Photograph by Gilad Korisky