Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.
Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Bogaziçi University.
Leticia Sabsay is Assistant Professor in the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Vulnerable Corporealities and Precarious Belongings in Mona Hatoum’s Art
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Published:October 2016
This chapter engages Mona Hatoum’s art of vulnerable corporealities to ask what kinds of bodies are formed and deformed in times of loss, displacement, and occupation; how these bodies come to embody and witness what is lost; and how they come to relate to other bodies. Hatoum’s feminist aesthetics brings forth a bodily representation of vulnerability, highlighting both the disembodiment induced by mass political violence and the embodied potential for resistance and self-determination. The body in Hatoum’s work, in regrounding itself in new diasporic intimacies, opens up to the possibilities of vulnerability. Thus, belonging becomes a matter of intimate and precarious embodied relationality. Hatoum enacts belonging not as a static site of comfort and territorial being or being-together, but as a discomforting embodied performativity through which borders and bodies are constantly displaced, re-collected, and reembodied. Her art addresses the ways homely and unhomely corporealities are brought forward in living enactments of displacement and containment.
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