Vulnerable Bodies and Gender

Beschreibung

The vulnerability of the body is one of the very few transhistorical consistencies. The pandemic situation, the consequences of the climate and oil crises, war and global threats of famine brings this to the forefront. Vulnerability, however, is largely tabooed and socially manifested in the form of discriminatory and objectifying structures. At the same time, the principle of the vulnerable body is projected onto and objectified by minorities, especially women, people with disabilities, and the elderly. As a universal strategy to overcome the association with incompleteness and need for repair, “Bodily vulnerability not to understand[able] outside of the conception
of its constitutive relations to other humans, inorganic conditions and vehicles for living” (Butler 2014: 103). Bodies are principally and inevitably open, relationally connected and “exposed to the possibility of being attacked or harmed” (Soanes 2006 and Pistrol 2016: 233–272). “Change of positions” is one strategy of balancing other human-and animal-thing relationships on stage and beyond. Furthermore, decolonial thought postulates the recognition of different performance cultures and epistemologies. The curated, temporary assembly of bodies in space, whether on stage or in public space, benefits from the experience of forming ensembles and thinking of bodies in the plural and has the potential to physically intervene in social and political spheres, as Florian Malzacher emphasizes (Malzacher 2020). Three aspects of thinking about vulnerability seem to be crucial: (1) the geo- and socio-politically unequal distribution of vulnerability, which produces gendered violence. (2) complex relations within in the gender matrix and (3) the relationality of corporeality and gender. In our workshop we want to focus on the vulnerable body according to these aspects on stage and in public space. Therefore, we try to draw our attention to the senses of the body and our multisensorial interconnected existences. Working on vulnerability interests us in a political ethical and aesthetical way: therefore, we understand our collective work as somatic activism, contributing to social justice and gender equality.

Zeitraum	1 Dez. 2023
Veranstaltungstyp	Workshop
Ort	Salzburg, ÖsterreichAuf Karte anzeigen
Bekanntheitsgrad	Lokal