Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

In this article, the authors engage with three emerging debates germane to contemporary biopolitics: (a) How do we advance the critical interrogation of the biopolitics of human movement? (b) How and in what ways might we “move” about (and ideally against) regimes and systems of biopolitical subjectivity? and (c) How might “moving” methods of writing, representation, and performance bring light to contemporary biopolitical struggles, contestations, and power relations?

Taking up the critical theorization of death as an important, though ambivalent, popular hermeneutic, this article attempts to expand upon existing arguments by examining death in the popular framings of an ever-growing U.S. militaristic biocitizenship (Mbembe, Giroux, Butler, Murray, Arendt). By understanding death as posing an existential crisis to collective and individual (social) life—as it is constructed through formations of moving embodiment—we argue that certain forms of death are required to be both knowable and of meaning to define the boundaries of a living body politic and the defense thereof. Whereas death within late modern society has become both increasingly knowable (through advances in medical knowledge) and anomalous (through the biopolitical attribution of most deaths to faulty cells, tissues, or organs, failures that are theoretically preventable), death that is relegated to zones of war and achieved in the service of nationalist ideals is theorized here as particularly certain and non-ambivalent. To understand this complex configuration of life, we interrogate three military deaths: that of the soldier who dies in battle, the living-death of the veteran, and the death of soldier who commits suicide. We argue that such deaths are both necessary and productive features of the protracting military State; soldiers who return from combat—bringing with them the trauma of dismemberment and the re-memberment of their deathly encounters—carry the potential to reproduce, and challenge, the hegemony of a contextually specific militaristic biocitizenship.

Traitorous cowards or courageous heroes? Military resisters elicit fervent responses not simply because they polarize perspectives on war, nation, and citizenship, but because they encounter and embody a moral quandary which marks all conflict: The fear of harming another when one’s own life, and sense of self, is endangered. With recourse to Judith Butler’s meditations on the precarity of life and the finitude of liberal humanist ontologies, this article contemplates the ethical imperative of eschewing both the valorization and demonization of individual resisters who found perpetrating war too much to bear. My focus lies in 21st-century U.S. military resisters who journey to Canada in search of refuge, residency, and “peace of mind.” While their experiences are imbued with ethical promise for amplifying oppositional political perspectives on war, this promise is inhibited by the legal and political apparatuses in which they are constituted, through which they are individuated, and to which they remain bound.

The “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign was and is a performance of security. It is a campaign that attempts to shape what commuters see and respond to. It is a campaign that attempts to shape ideas concerning security; but, more importantly, it is a campaign which requires bodies to perform the notions of security that it is attempting to define, redefine, and/or, in a Foucaultian sense, normalize. Based on my research, this article will explore this particular performance of security as a site of biopolitics. In the logic of security that this campaign performs, how do bodies respond to it? How do they incorporate that logic into their own movement? How do they challenge it? What does the movement of this campaign and the bodies that move along with it suggest for current debates within biopolitics regarding security? These are the questions that this article will seek to explore.

From Bergson’s “spatialization of time” to Deleuze’s concept of the “time-image,” it seems clear that time is central to any theory of movement. But what happens to our ability to “move” chronologically through time in the era of preemptive governance and the statistical management of populations? This chapter looks critically and evocatively at what is happening to time in the era of catastrophic risk and how subjects adjust to their own “dividual-ization” in the biopolitical assemblage of preemptive temporality, drawing on the work of Sarah Lochlann Jain. In her studies of the cancer patient’s body in time and risk, Jain argues that “living in prognosis” is a way of moving, albeit one that problematizes attempts to move through linear time. Unable to either anticipate or/and preempt future risk with certainty or mourn a clear and inevitable death, prognosis places the body in the in-between of statistical calculation, ever vulnerable to the emergence of new threats unforeseen, marking a shift in subjectivity and a sense of “the end before the beginning” for bodies sensing their own suspension between life and death as calculated. What happens to memory in such an assemblage of time? This piece offers a critical glimpse into a new and emerging turn in approaches to the governance of traumatic memory, now visible in neuroscience research and humanitarian psychiatric outreach following disasters—preemptively modifying the brain or environment in advance of a potentially traumatic future event. But preemptive approaches fail to eradicate memory in its nonlinearity, instead burning into memory the very trace of preemption itself, the insecurity Massumi argues is produced in the seeking of preemptive securitization, future haunting effect. Memory gets caught in the same temporal contradictions of prognosis time.

Our aim in this article is to throw light on the complexity of the presence of the researcher’s body in the context of conducting research on and within biopolitical governance. To do so, we present author body-narratives derived from two separatestudies, both of which explore biopolitics and draw on an embodied methodology. These narratives point toward the corporeal contradictions of being located within a culture of reading and critiquing bodies while realizing the presence of our own physicality. We argue that methodological reflection on the connections between bodies within the research field ought to rest high among the list of things shaping the future of work related to biopolitics or we risk the effacement of the body. We articulate this in two key ways. First, we examine the emplacement of the fleshy bodies of researchers and the individuals we encounter. We offer reflections on the complexities of the emplacement of our researcher bodies in time, space, and place, and advance a politics of reflexivity that sheds light on how we experience, make claims, and speak about embodiment and physical culture. Second, as scholars who seek to disrupt biopolitical forces and attempt to transcend political and disciplinary boundaries, we consider the presence of the body in a process of border crossing. Rather than simply considering border crossing as an exchange of ideas, knowledge, and practices; we explore the ways in which the presence of our sometimes “normative” bodies can seemingly complicate and contradict our political agenda.

In this article, I aim to examine the possibilities for transcending neo-liberal individuality and the fixed construction of the feminine identity by engaging the force of the active, moving body. While poststructuralist theory has been helpful in terms of illuminating the problems with current attempts to initiate change, accounting for the body requires an added engagement with the materiality of the body and the mechanics of movement. Drawing from theoretical insights by Foucault, Deleuze, and Latour, I discuss my attempt to develop a movement practice informed both by social theory and the principles of anatomical and biomechanical analysis. Using my experiences as a fitness instructor, I explore if it is possible to practice movement differently beyond the biopolitics of neo-liberalism.

In this article, I perform and discuss two interrelated embodied tensions brought on by my experiences with the people of one urban-based nonprofit organization: my uneasiness with charity and voluntarism, and my conflicted relationship with the practice of running. This is also about the people of Back on My Feet (2010), a nonprofit organization that partners with addiction and homelessness recovery centers to empower those recovering through the practice of running. I detail, in particular, how these tensions problematize the desire to help others, challenge my sense of self, and challenge my own politics, all while trying not to undercut the positive effects of the organization, the people, and its practices. Piecing together stories from my experience, memory, and notes, I write to learn and make known my own hesitancies, hypocrisies, and uncertainties expressed through my body in search of urban social justice and to work toward decolonizing my inquiry.

This article explores the intersecting vectors of power, surveillance, and identity relating to technologies of material culture as located within the so-called “skort” or running skirt. It presents a cultural history of the skort, situating it within historical debates over femininity and sport, and contemporary arguments over the commercial branding of the feminine ideal. The author also presents and discusses the findings of her participant-observation that she performed in a group fitness studio on multiple occasions dressed in three different exercise outfits: a running skirt, a pair of shorts, and a sweat suit. With a focus on the skort experience, the concept of skorting materiality emerged in relation to the matrices of power acting on the body and highlights the results of this ethnographic experience, which uses “the researcher’s body to understand how power operates.” This analysis of skorting materiality focuses on the historically produced present and the current function of the skort in physical culture; its garment’s utility, function, meanings, and messages articulated concocting a rich display of culture and moving biopolitics.

In this autoethnography, I negotiate my middle-class Whiteness in attempting to come to terms with my own (mis)understanding of, and role in, familial, socio-economic, and cultural hegemony. Through a series of vignettes, I seek to question my relationship with my father’s shadow—a relationship founded upon an invented “daddy” co-created by a collection of coaches, friends, cousins, teachers, researchers, my father, his father, and the present-day media. Specifically, I reflexively evaluate my privilege as a middle-class White male struggling to deal with the expectations of those around me, especially in childhood. By connecting stories of my Thanksgivings as child, undergraduate student, outsider, and married man, I provide a critical perspective into and interrogation of my at-times messy maturation into a particular gendered and classed subject position.