Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations
Rather than taking the body as an apolitical body as often seen in IR, Wilcox argues that "we can theorize the body as an effect of practices of IR" and that the body is not only acted upon by violence but is "constituted in and through violence" (p. 6.). Her key arguements are that bodies are not just key to understanding the practices of violence, but that bodies are political and constituted in relation to "historical political conditions" (p.3). Bodies also act upon the world. She critically places her views in contrast to both IR realist assumptions about sovereigns protecting bodies and liberal assumptions about human rights as freedom from bodily violence and populated by rational and autonomous individuals sovereign over their own bodies. She also contrasts her views with a Wendtian constructivism that places the body as a "brute fact" in a mind-world dualist position that serves as an analogy for the state as an individual body. (Although she does not engage with Onuf, I am curious how she finds his use of the three bodily senses in his elaborate system of three's, even though they seem to share a similar mind-world monist position.).
To support her view that bodies are produced by and productive of political relations, she explores four key cases: torture, hunger-strikes, and force feeding in Guantanamo Bay, Suicide Bombings, Airport Security and "bodies of information," and drone warfare and other forms of technologically enhanced invulnerable bodies targeting weak human bodies. I am curious how we might describe her methods in this book, whether as discourse analysis, theoretical reading of current events, or something else? Clearly represented in her book are deep engagements with the works of Judith Butler and Foucault, including disagreements she notes, as well as a clear affinity with critical theory. It would be helpful for me for us to explicitly specify this a bit more, especially as it relates to her findings.
Her rethought notions help her reconsider the neoliberal discourse of "Responsibility to Protect." She re conceptualizes this important doctrine to a view that as bodies, "we are mutually entangled with each other such that we cannot seperate" and "our bodies themselves do not precede social entanglements, and thus we cannot consider an ethics of violence differently from existing frameworks that separate bodily existence from power" (p.189). This page of the text outlining a clear ethic has interesting echoes of our book on "IR and the Problem of Difference," our discussion of Ubuntu as either an ontology or ethic, and the IR constitution of less than human explored in White World Order: Black Power politics - connections that might be useful for us to explore together. It is interesting to notice how interwoven an ethical sensibility is throughout the whole book, and I suspect the "empirical" chapters would make little sense without that ethnic sensibility.
Before tackling that larger question however, we might want to unpack some key terms:
1. Biopower as contrasted with Sovereign Power (pages 17 and 52 for example - tied to Foucault)
2. Ontology of vulnerability (pages 15, 167, tied to Butler)
3. "bare life" homo sacer, homines sacri (p. 23, and 42 - Ziarek)
4. her frequent uses of the words "constituted," "embodied/disembodied," "embodied subject", "feminized category." (i.e. "the male body of the soldier has been feminized, p.40, force-feeding as a gendering form of violence with "trapped bare life" as feminized category p.75).
Her explanation of body also might be useful to comment on: "bodies must be understood as both material and cultural, both produced by practices of International Relations and productive themselves. Bodies are thus not fixed entities, but always unstable and in the process of becoming. They are ontologically precarious, existing only in virture of certain material/political conditions that allow them to be intelligible to others."
(On a final selfish note I was happy to note that her four chapters fell nicely along the four categories I recently proposed for researching eventually in my dissertation, specifically traditional violent conflict (Ch 5 on body counts), suicide protest (Ch 2. on hunger strikers), suicide bombers (Ch 3), and nonviolent action (Ch 4. on the fleshmob nonviolent disrobing in protest of body scanners). Although I conceive of these four as a two-by-two table separated by harming self/not harming self, and harming other, not harming other, I wonder if she would strongly object based on her ideas of mutual entanglement between self and other as well as not being able to understand the bodily self outside of a historically situated political moment. Help me fix my eventual dissertation prospectus and lets discuss this friends.
-Brandon
To support her view that bodies are produced by and productive of political relations, she explores four key cases: torture, hunger-strikes, and force feeding in Guantanamo Bay, Suicide Bombings, Airport Security and "bodies of information," and drone warfare and other forms of technologically enhanced invulnerable bodies targeting weak human bodies. I am curious how we might describe her methods in this book, whether as discourse analysis, theoretical reading of current events, or something else? Clearly represented in her book are deep engagements with the works of Judith Butler and Foucault, including disagreements she notes, as well as a clear affinity with critical theory. It would be helpful for me for us to explicitly specify this a bit more, especially as it relates to her findings.
Her rethought notions help her reconsider the neoliberal discourse of "Responsibility to Protect." She re conceptualizes this important doctrine to a view that as bodies, "we are mutually entangled with each other such that we cannot seperate" and "our bodies themselves do not precede social entanglements, and thus we cannot consider an ethics of violence differently from existing frameworks that separate bodily existence from power" (p.189). This page of the text outlining a clear ethic has interesting echoes of our book on "IR and the Problem of Difference," our discussion of Ubuntu as either an ontology or ethic, and the IR constitution of less than human explored in White World Order: Black Power politics - connections that might be useful for us to explore together. It is interesting to notice how interwoven an ethical sensibility is throughout the whole book, and I suspect the "empirical" chapters would make little sense without that ethnic sensibility.
Before tackling that larger question however, we might want to unpack some key terms:
1. Biopower as contrasted with Sovereign Power (pages 17 and 52 for example - tied to Foucault)
2. Ontology of vulnerability (pages 15, 167, tied to Butler)
3. "bare life" homo sacer, homines sacri (p. 23, and 42 - Ziarek)
4. her frequent uses of the words "constituted," "embodied/disembodied," "embodied subject", "feminized category." (i.e. "the male body of the soldier has been feminized, p.40, force-feeding as a gendering form of violence with "trapped bare life" as feminized category p.75).
Her explanation of body also might be useful to comment on: "bodies must be understood as both material and cultural, both produced by practices of International Relations and productive themselves. Bodies are thus not fixed entities, but always unstable and in the process of becoming. They are ontologically precarious, existing only in virture of certain material/political conditions that allow them to be intelligible to others."
(On a final selfish note I was happy to note that her four chapters fell nicely along the four categories I recently proposed for researching eventually in my dissertation, specifically traditional violent conflict (Ch 5 on body counts), suicide protest (Ch 2. on hunger strikers), suicide bombers (Ch 3), and nonviolent action (Ch 4. on the fleshmob nonviolent disrobing in protest of body scanners). Although I conceive of these four as a two-by-two table separated by harming self/not harming self, and harming other, not harming other, I wonder if she would strongly object based on her ideas of mutual entanglement between self and other as well as not being able to understand the bodily self outside of a historically situated political moment. Help me fix my eventual dissertation prospectus and lets discuss this friends.
-Brandon
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