Theme: 8. Negotiating Margins: Representations, Resistances, Agencies

Un/speakable Bodies. Representations, Reflections, and Resistances Of, Via, and Through ‘The Body’

Panel Convenor(s)

• MM

  Mara Matta

  Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
• CK

  Crystal Kwok

  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Panel Chair(s)

• MM

  Mara Matta

  Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
• CK

  Crystal Kwok

  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Presenter(s)

• CK

  Crystal Kwok

  University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
• ZR

  Zakir Hossain Raju

  Independent University Bangladesh, Bangladesh
• MM

  Mara Matta

  Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy
• MK

  Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil

  Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India

In the last decade, scholarship on body has engaged with intersectionalities around contemporary social and political constructs like caste, ethnicity, migration, class, region, citizenship, language, gender and sexuality. The body's materiality, as represented in media, visual and performing arts, films, narratives, sports, etc., is particularly relevant in marginalized or oppressed communities, environments that are exposed to degradation, and situations of war and conflict.  

Minoritized, genderized, or dis/abled bodies offer a space to renegotiate the limits imposed by physical boundaries and cultural margins. The body can be seen as a territory of contested belongings, represented as a site of resistance, conceptualised as a threshold and/or a limit. In all its expressions, the body offers thought-provoking ways for challenging dominant paradigms and assumptions about norms and normativity, and about the concept of ‘the body’ itself, seen as agentive and active as well as unbodied and invisibilized.

What is 'a body'? Who is 'a body'? What is not 'a body'? What are the margins of (and the limits imposed on) bodies? Can a body 'speak' and is a body speakable/representable/translatable/transformable? 

Bringing into focus the importance of looking beyond the physicality of the body, without ignoring the importance of its materiality, the panel opens a space for reflecting on the body as a complex site of multiple meanings that are never fixed but constantly subjected to scrutiny, impositions, surveillance and law. This transdisciplinary and border-crossing panel aims to explore the themes of representation, agency and resistance through the contested concepts of ‘the body’, considered in its corporeality and performativity. 

 

Presentations:

• 16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)

  Distortion of Desire: Sex and the Desiring Female Body in Hong Kong.
  

  Presenter: Crystal Kwok – University of Hong Kong
• 16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)

  Voicing Silence, Embodying Absence. Forcefully Disappearing Bodies in Bangladesh.
  

  Presenter: Mara Matta – Sapienza Università di Roma
• 16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)

  Whose Time? The Malleable Body and the Temporary Migrants.
  

  Presenter: Mohamed Shafeeq Karinkurayil – Manipal Academy of Higher Education
• 16:15 – 18:00 (GMT+7)

  Cinematic Representation of Female Bodies in Bangladesh: From Sacred to Wicked?
  

  Presenter: Zakir Hossain Raju – Independent University Bangladesh