Bodies in Space: On the Ends of Vulnerability

The last quarter of the twentieth century marked the
emergence of ‘the body’ as a key heuristic in much poststructuralist
and post-foundationalist cultural theory
and philosophy. More recently, the terminology of ‘bodies’
has moved to the foreground in academic debates, but
also gained traction in activist discourses and everyday
forms of cultural speech. This is a terminology, primarily
Anglophone, that speaks of bodies as subjects (‘we
are/there are bodies’) rather than as objects (‘we/they
have bodies’). ‘Bodies’ as the basic unit that enumerates
humans in (a) space assumes the status of a convention
by means of a prior or ongoing shift to a consensus that
invoking ‘bodies’ as such is to name them as the locus of
socio-political agency in preference to or in distinction
from terms such as ‘person/s’, ‘people’, ‘individuals’ or
‘subjects’.