Bodily management practices and subjectivation processes in contemporary culture


Our current time reveals itself tendentially as a net-world that questions and actualizes in unseen ways the modern classificatory schemes and those traditional divisions that organized the different cultural and socio-economical spheres of modernity: closed spaces from open ones, the real from the virtual, public from private, the external norm form self control, discipline from flexibility, the sphere of production from consumption, work from leisure, masculine from feminine, lack from excess, among others.

A place where these movements and mutations make themselves ostensible is in the disputes for defining and legitimizing certain “bodies” and lifestyles, which worth to be noted reconfigure in a vertiginous temporality.

In this scenario we assist to the emergency and consolidation of devices that pretend to be hegemonic and that disseminate signifiers (success, performance, beauty, health, happiness, wellness, youth, etc.) through different communication artifacts and through bodily practices/ forms positively valued in the productive and cultural weaves of capitalists. And all the above tied to a promise of social integration (and other benefits) for the biological citizens that attach to such symbolical and material assemblies. On the other hand, some groups emerge and organize with the intention of negotiating and even subverting these idealized models of thinking, managing and inhabiting the body and life itself.

Our proposal calls for the problematization of diverse practices in which the categories of body and management articulate becoming a set of assemblies of specific technologies oriented to the regulation and government of conducts, according to specific parameters of economic optimization and subjective sedimentations.

Nevertheless, it is also our interest to refer to the drifts and effects that such machinery has on concrete subjects and groups. For that it is necessary also to look into the practices through which subjects negotiate and manage their bodies, their lives and their relationships, appropriating themselves of such technologies and resignifying their uses.

In this sense it is necessary to notice that the way we conceive management exceeds widely the specific area of the working world, articulating in such a concept a wide spectrum of social, cultural and bodily practices. Such a perspective allows us to understand the consolidation of a teleology of bodily regulation that operates through the combination of practices of subjective autonomy and heteronomy, that we identify as emblematic operations of the contemporary subjectivation processes. 

There for, the category bodily management speaks of the characteristic dimensions of new capitalism and at the same time allows to create analytical frames from which to inquire simultaneously specific processes of bodily and subjective regulation, but also practices of bodily negotiation and subversion that defy its capturing nets.

WE CALL for students, doctoral students, professors and researchers of different disciplines (anthropology, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, history, theatre, physical education, dance, etc.) to present their papers that address cultural practices and social ideals in which the body is object and subject of diverse managements and negotiations:

-          Actualizations in practices of bodily transformation: body piercings, tattoos, hair removal, esthetic surgeries -including ethnic surgeries-, diets.
-          The way in which certain signifiers like health, fitness, beauty, wellness are blended in different communication spheres as moral marks that privilege specific lifestyles.
-          The medicalization of society and the disproportionate growth of body interventions practiced by different corporate and profit organizations (and its effects).
-          The regulation of the body in labour practices -management- and its effects on the life of the workers.
-          The emergent sport industry and the optimization/ management of bodies that it makes and promotes.
-          The therapeutic cultures and the fitness and wellness cultures, and the practices of body care and management they promote.
-          The upswing of eating dis/orders and the image of the body as an effect of these devices.
-          The organization of groups that claim for specific bodily forms/sizes and lifestyles (for example: fat activists, movement Pro-Ana, etc.), among others.
Since the practices we refer dialogue with processes of cultural mundialization, we suggest in a methodological sense that the papers in their preparation consider the historical processes through which certain bodily ideals and practices where formed, their mutations and trajectories, and how specific practices resist change or emerge directly like places of resistance in social and cultural contexts where there is a coexistence of globalizing discourses and nationalist rhetoric.

Submission guidelines
  • The deadline for abstract submission is Monday, February 25, 2013.
  • They should not exceed 500 words in length.
  • They shall contain the problematic issues of the theme to develop.
  • The font is Times New Roman, size 12, line spacing 1.5.
  • Is allowed a maximum of two authors per abstract and paper.
  • Abstracts should be sent to the following e-mails: castroanalucia75@gmail.com and landa.mi@gmail.com

For more information please visit:
http://www.museoantropologia.unc.edu.ar/RAM/INDEX.htm http://www.facebook.com/events/131018347065925/?fref=ts




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