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This paper reports the findings of a mixed-methods study which investigates the socio-cultural impacts of UK gendered school sport uniform and the role uniform plays in shaping female school sport experiences. Drawing on an extensive analytical survey with over 400 women of all-ages and 8 interviews with women aged 18–24, it explores how school sport uniform directly impacts female sporting experiences and participation in physical activity, and how uniform policy could be changed to promote greater female sport participation. Gendered school sport uniform continues to operate as a socio-spatial mechanism that names, frames and positions young people in heteronormative school sport spaces. This paper assesses how gendered school sport uniform contributes to the disciplining of the 'ideal feminine body' in schoolgirls and the construction of behavioural gender binaries in sport. The data reveal gendered sport uniform influences the development of a 'fear of masculinisation' in sport and common athletic-feminine identity tensions in teenage girls. The research finds gendered school sport uniform plays a major role in the high drop-out rates of teenage girls in school sport and offers practical insight into how policy could be changed to promote inclusivity, comfort and greater female sport participation. This paper proposes redesigning traditional gendered school sport policy to focus on 'enabling' participation has huge potential to transform female embodied and psychological experiences of school sport and increase school sport participation and enjoyment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on Merleau-Ponty's perspective on intercorporeality to inquire into the role of the body in virtual collaboration. Merleau-Ponty redefines the human body beyond pure physicality, as material-semiotic processes between self and other. From this perspective, meaningful engagements are based on the intertwinement of bodily activities including gestures and displays. Drawing on a rich case of an exclusively virtual collaboration, this paper illuminates how bodily expressivity is rematerialised through digital technology. The findings show how distributed bodies pattern an intercorporeal armature constituted of processes of co-presencing, co-orienting, and co-investing. The paper problematises claims of virtual disembodiment and advances current understanding of how body and technology merge to make virtual collaboration possible. The rich empirical insights are synthesised into four main theoretical propositions that constitute a novel perspective on virtual intercorporeality. This perspective advances our understanding of virtual embodiment and elaborates the role of technology and language in the process of mutual attunement between bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores what is understood by the phrase ‘spontaneous movement’. We discern five different understandings of spontaneity in the usage of the phrase: 1) spontaneous movement as automatic machine-like mechanistic, 2) spontaneous movement as free, 3) spontaneous movement as primal animateness of the body, 4) spontaneous movement as embodied responsive dealing in the world, 5) spontaneous movement as a force of nature. The first two understandings are rooted in a dualistic view, with the dichotomies of voluntary/involuntary and mind/body in the Western philosophical tradition. The next two arise from a phenomenological reflection on the body, drawn from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, while the last comes from a holistic Eastern view of the body, human beings and nature. We argue that the latter three understandings of spontaneity demonstrate three aspects of a more comprehensive picture of the spontaneity of human movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the memoirs of two Bengali revolutionary women, Bina Das’ Srinkhal Jhankar published in 1948, translated as Bina Das: A Memoir, and Kamala Dasgupta’s Rakter Akshare (Written in Blood) in 1954 to argue how their subjective desire and experience dismantle the gendered rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal. The accounts of Bina and Kamala present their involvement in militant activism and subsequent imprisonment. Notably, there is an inherent urge in their writings to sacrifice life for the nation and a determination not to retreat from the torturous conditions of the colonial prison. The paper contends that the rhetoric of nationalism in colonial Bengal is embedded in hegemonic masculinity that initially confined women to the spiritual and domestic realm and later allowed them to be educated and modern without acknowledging their subjectivity. Activities of these political women thus destabilise the gender discourse prevalent in the private and public sphere of colonial society, which calls for a revision of the nationalist historiography. So, this essay will examine how tropes of the body, self-sacrifice, and penal experience, as produced in these memoirs, negotiate the nationalist ideology, subvert the binary of masculine and feminine, and establish their political subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physicality has been, and still is, an important part of the embodied identity of many physical education (PE) teachers. PE teachers' understanding and representation of their bodies influence both their teaching and act as role models for their students. PE is therefore an important site for exploring how ideals of the body shape both understandings and practices within this school subject. In this study we employed participatory visual methodologies in the form of participant-produced drawings to explore primary school children's experiences of PE teacher bodies and subjectivities. By drawing on poststructural and Foucauldian understandings of the body, we in this paper explore the construction and embodiment of PE teacher bodies as inextricably linked to students' understandings and experiences of this school subject. The findings demonstrate how dominant discourses of fitness, health, sport and even consumerism shape expectations around PE teacher bodies. They also draw attention to how those bodies enable and restrict certain educational purposes and practices. We argue that the ongoing reproduction and perpetuation of idealized PE teacher bodies is responsible for (re)producing meanings around the normal versus the abnormal PE teacher body with significant impact on students' bodily understandings and experiences in PE. We conclude by reasserting the need to challenge how dominant discourses of PE teacher bodies has the cumulative effect of restricting the possibilities for a multiplicity of bodies and physicalities to co-exist in PE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scrutinising Santner's comments on his own method in his recent book Untying Things Together, the paper argues that at the heart of Santner's theoretical endeavour lies something that might be called "the flesh of all words." To elaborate this thesis, I begin, following a corresponding hint by Santner himself, with a description of Freud's peculiar "way of working with concepts" in his The Interpretation of Dreams. From there I move on to the analysis of an author who has been one of Santner's main points of reference at least since his Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Franz Rosenzweig. The paper outlines Rosenzweig's self-interpretation in his essay "'The New Thinking'" and compares the specific methodology explained and developed in this text with the main work of Ferdinand Ebner, whose closeness to his own work Rosenzweig himself emphasised. Finally, against the background of these theoretical conceptions, I will borrow one of Santner's own neologisms and use it to describe his work as the "encystance" on/of this flesh of all words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRecently, the concept of mobile labour has garnered increasing attention among mobilities scholars. Yet, the preponderance of research has emphasised workers’ movements that are fairly large-scale and routes-based. This paper proposes another kind of mobility that is of equal significance—that of micro-mobilities by labour, or more accurately by their bodies. Using original research conducted through semi-structured interviews with 40 customer service agents working in an international airport in Asia, the paper examines three kinds of aesthetic labour that these workers perform alongside passengers. Enacted through various bodily motions intended to speed up aeromobile processes and augment productivity, I argue that these performances produce a (tenuous) aesthetics of assuring presence, orderly movement, and passing time. As more and more work tasks are redistributed across the airport between staff and passengers, ‘new’ automation presents an opportunity to reflect on the mobile practices being invented as self-service technologies infiltrate customer service and other work where human relations and decision-making skills are required. More broadly, it also uncovers the gendered politics of bodily comport, gaits, gestures and other micro-movements in labour (re)production in a wider age of technological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People have different ways of developing knowledge about their 'selves', what has come to be called 'technologies'. Apart from technologies of production, of sign systems, and of power, the 'technology of the self' enables individuals to effect certain operations on their bodies, thoughts, behaviour, feelings and other ways of being. Such technologies involve the application of certain modes of training by individuals not only for the sake of acquiring skills but also for effecting change in their values, attitudes and beliefs. This paper argues that applied theatre practice involves not only the technology of the self but also of the other. Using the case study of a practice based project that was carried out among disabled students at the University of Zimbabwe, the paper examines how disabled students not only subverted ableist discourses of hopelessness but also acted upon their own bodies to assert their own agency, power and authority. Thus the focus will be specifically on the politics of the disabled body as a site of ableist perceptions that construct the disabled body in terms of lack, incapacity, pathology, deformity and deficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not all heroin users that enter the prison estate continue to use heroin or access opiate maintenance or detoxification treatment programmes. Some prisoners decide to self-detoxify. The literature on self-detoxification is thin and focuses on the decisions and practices of self-detoxification in community settings. Less attention has been given to the role of the body and the lived experience of self-detoxification in prison settings. The aim of this paper therefore is to examine the process of self-detoxification in prison, with a particular focus on the role of the body, embodiment and prisoner social relations. This paper draws on Drew Leder's (1990) absent body theoretical framework and the literature on prison masculinity to analyse qualitative interviews with recently released prisoners. It shows how the decision to self-detoxify can be understood as part of the masculine performance of keeping a low profile. Keeping a low profile helped the participants minimise the risks of victimisation. The self-detoxification techniques the participants used were underpinned by an awareness of the body as poisoned by heroin, suffering because of its presence, rather than its absence. This study has implications for prisoners' access to opiate maintenance and detoxification treatment programmes and harm reduction services upon release. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on original ethnographic research in Australia focussing on the handling, management, and conceptualisation of death and the dead human body in 2020–2021. Analysis produced themes of secrecy and (in)visibility regarding both death and the collection of data. Key findings discussed are the withdrawal of information and off-the-record comments from participants, controlling of public access to information, and the (in)visibility of death and the body in the context of the mortuary, viewings and identifications, and the presentation of the body in virtual spaces. The paper argues that those who work with death and the dead in this particular context have power to shield their work, the body, and their processes from the public. Future research exploring the attitudes held by the general public towards death and the body and whether they align or challenge the death industry is proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper provides a comparative reading of the female protagonists in two Sri Lankan films, focusing on how the female body becomes a contentious site of gendered violence, subject to state and male surveillance and containment. Through a close analysis of Prasanna Jayakody's 28 (2014) and Asoka Handagama's Asandhimitta (2019), this paper attempts to reveal how Sri Lankan cinema violently reconfigures the female body as a site of negotiation for articulation of victimhood and desire and becomes a potential space for the inscription of feminist issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1966 the photographer Martine Franck was commissioned by Life International to document the experiences of children in a new library in Paris. The visual essay she produced illuminated the materiality, the design and the children's use of the space. In Birmingham, a recent unconnected research project, 'Libraries in Women's Lives', captured women's childhood memories of libraries. The women's 'spatial stories' (de Certeau, 1984) offer reflections on libraries in different times and places. Strikingly though, their accounts resonate with Franck's images of the library in Paris. This paper brings image and narrative into conversation with spatial theory to make sense of these similarities, and to explore responses to library space. This paper is a comment on the materiality of the library. It reveals the haptic and visual pleasures of these sites. Through this attention to memory, the research suggests a different starting point for debates around the future of libraries. It argues that looking to the past might be a good way of thinking about the libraries of the future. Further, and by virtue of attending to the visual alongside writing on spatial theory, this research comments on the relationship between representations of space in image and in text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the natural death and home deathcare movements are gaining traction both in the UK and elsewhere, this article details an exploratory project on the barriers to and potential for caring for deceased people at home in England. A two-phase study, the paper uses data from a discourse analysis and interviews with deathcare professionals to show that there is limited information online on keeping the deceased person at home, and that participants felt that a lack of awareness was a significant barrier to families being able to make an informed choices about home deathcare. Including poor information provision, the paper identifies five reasons as to why there is a low uptake of home deathcare in England and makes recommendations for how each of these barriers may be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the connection between politics and public space at a time when photography and the new media have put the classical distinction between the public and the private into question. My focus is on the body which, according to Hannah Arendt and the classical philosophers, is the most private thing there is. Drawing on the work of Weimar photojournalist Erich Salomon -- who was among the first to infiltrate the spaces where political talks were held and decisions taken -- I argue for an understanding of the body as an aesthetic object and a site where public and private criss-cross and intersect. The body in photography leads me to the final part of the paper where I trace the figuring of the body in the texts of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics, and argue that far from being a recent phenomenon, the aestheticisation of politics is already at work in the tradition that celebrates deliberation and the public use of reason. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourses about technological transformation tend to focus on technology, as if its introduction was neutral regarding local variabilities, and the men and women that make it effective. This paper focuses on the technical act. The body is where the technical acts are inscribed and it is through the body that they are exteriorised. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the operative modes associated with the technical acts, from a gender perspective, in the context of the technological transformation in cork industry. The analysis of the work activity performed by men (punching operators) and women (choosers) was supported by observations, collective interviews, and group sessions to validate the results. The findings show male- and female-specific body techniques; how the efficacy of the technical acts contributes to the debate about the limits of technology; and how body techniques and effects on health tend to remain in silence due to automation. Practitioner summary: The reconfiguration of the human-machine relationships hardly leaves room for the analysis of how the body techniques evolve. This paper shows how the efficacy of men and women body techniques contributes to the debate about the limits of technology, even if these uses of one's body entail health costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the proliferation of high-quality recorded live pop concerts in today's digitalized world, the demand for live pop performances remains strong. Through a case study of Mayday, a popular Chinese- Taiwanese band, this paper conducted qualitative research and collected multiple sources of data through netnography, participant-observation, semi-structured interviews and secondary data to reveal the embodied experience of young participants travelling across China to attend live pop concerts to be 'right here, right now'. From the perspective of embodied experiences, this study finds that the allure of live pop lies in providing space for participants to be immersed in the body that lets go, to be present, be in unison, and forget. In this way, participants can gain aesthetic pleasure, sense of authenticity, tacit understanding and immersion, which are embodied experiences that cannot be replicated by other musical experiences and digitalization. The paper also provides theoretical and practical considerations for tourism practitioners to improve the experience for both live concert audiences and armchair audiences watching the recorded live concerts at home or in cinemas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractWhy are the objects we place on our bodies not considered art? In this paper, I argue that distance between an object and the body is a criterion for a craft object to become an art object. Art objects are kept at a distance from most bodies. The distance is tightly maintained by the art world and used within the art world to control art and access to it. In the process, this distance defines an object as art. I present the case of jewelry – objects that do not transition from craft to art and are generally not accepted as art by the art world. I argue that this is because jewelry necessarily requires closeness between the body and the object, a violation of the rules of art. The argument I present here is relevant to questions of fashion and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author presents the issue of the development of internal space, as a function of the relationship of intimacy and synchrony with the caregiver, with the purpose of rendering more tolerable the experience of space outside the body. This paper argues that if this relationship does not stabilise by the end of the first year of life, an absence of representation of an internal space in the unidimensional realm might ensue. The psychoanalytic treatment of autistic children offers windows to certain developmental challenges associated with the representation of both internal and external spaces, the consequent development of dimensionality and its deviations. The case of a young autistic child in the first year of her four-session-a-week analysis is described as an illustration of the child's struggle to overcome precipitation anxiety around the experience of falling by using her movements in the external space. The child's autistic defences and deficits at first functioned to keep her in a liquid state, and later denied gravity by means of repetitive movements of her body while exploring the space of the analyst's room. Her mouth was experienced as a hole to be completely blocked with either food or a pacifier, preventing exchanges with the analyst. Her subsequent compulsive use of strings in activities revealed at the same time the search for links, and her difficulty connecting and establishing communication. At the end, the analyst realised an archaic equivalence between their room and body, as a 'concrete transference', revealing the child's attachment and motivation to explore it, which could be interpreted as an affective link between the analyst and patient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead 'out of place', I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual 'separation'. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic 'total war', which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2022, the dynamic zero-COVID control policy came to an end, marking the conclusion of a three-year pandemic that affected 1.4 billion Chinese people. The pandemic and related policies created a unique, temporary, and historic social ecosystem where walking became more crucial than ever before. The pandemic not only severely restricted people's movement in public spaces but also exposed the longstanding contradictions between human bodies, modern mobility, and urban space. Over the three years of the pandemic, walking became an aesthetic survival attempt by Chinese people to cope with their limited freedoms under the pandemic. As the pandemic stagnated and worsened over time, walking-dominant activities gradually became a widespread social phenomenon that encouraged urban residents to participate in rebuilding society across various fields such as politics, art, nature, etc. The development of walking as an artistic form during this period represents a new aesthetic strategy and political awakening while reflecting humans' need to reconnect with land, social space, and their own bodies. This paper reviews how walking art has evolved historically through three periods – before, during, and after the pandemic – aiming to highlight both the public value of walking art and challenges within China's social ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Antonio Altarriba's presentation of his deceased mother's life-story in the graphic novel El ala rota (2016) claiming that the author's personal trauma of mourning reveals the collective trauma of non-politically-engaged Spanish women throughout Spain's 20th century. El ala rota contributes to the recovery of a new kind of memory by paying homage to a woman who was relegated to the private sphere and who herself believed her stories were not worth telling – a woman who was in the back room of history and lacked the means and mechanism to chronicle her life. The paper demonstrates that, not only does the content of El ala rota give voice to those who did not have one, thus philosophically paralleling the aims of the Recovery of Historical Memory and the exhumations of mass graves in Spain, but also, that its specific form of comics calls attention to the way society engages with the recovery of historical and collective memory specifically with regard to gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

José Bleger’s paper on the setting (encuadre) is integral to his 1967 book Symbiosis and Ambiguity. Relevant concepts from the book are summarised before examining his view of the setting as a “non-process” consisting of “constants”, complementing the “variables” of the analytic process. Process and setting are related as figure and ground in Gestalt psychology. The ideally maintained setting is studied as a thought experiment, uniting the categories of institution, personality, body schema, and body. Deposited in the setting, the psychotic part of the personality, or “agglutinated nucleus”, is a remnant of early symbiosis with the mother. Bleger distinguishes two settings: the analyst’s and the patient’s. The latter can only be analysed by strictly maintaining the former. Ritualisation of the setting denies temporal reality. De-symbiotisation is not always possible. A concept of “internal” setting is suggested, but Bleger nowhere mentions this and the concept is problematic, leaving open the question of how to listen to the silence of the setting. Bleger’s concept of encuadre can be applied to constants (invariants) in the wider world, the psychotic part of the personality being deposited in everything that is familiar and felt to be constant, including technology, which creates a “platform” for human activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Editorial presents the papers of the Special Issue "Intersecting the Body", providing a dialogue between them and previous literature on the body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From early Greek philosophers to Descartes' machinic metaphors of humans-as-machines, to the emergence of physical machine-like humans, the intersections of the human body with machines circle back through hundreds of years of debates on human-technology relationships. We live in an age when robots are becoming increasingly human-like with artificial intelligence that mimics and sometimes exceeds our own. At the same time, we humans are adopting cyborg-like modifications to improve ourselves through biological, mechanical, and computer technologies. This conceptual paper presents a historical overview of the human-machine merger as both a metaphor and material reality. We show that the body has no intrinsic meaning for its distinct social constructions in technophilic and bioconservativist perspectives. This leads to a critical need for discussions about the issues related to dehumanization and personhood. These two topics must inform future research efforts to explore a future when current concepts of humanness may not hold anymore. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an analysis of an ethnographic study on motivation in ultra-endurance sports. The study was conducted in Leon, Spain, between 2018 and 2019 on a sample of 36 athletes involved in several ultra-endurance sports, such as the marathon, ultra-distance racing and mountain activities. Regarding the method, it includes participant observation, an open questionnaire was administered, and in-depth interviews were conducted, providing valuable descriptive data. Categories, patterns, and propositions emerged from the coding process of the data and were permanently called into question. The results indicated that these activities constitute a new form of leisure, with mass participation that is felt as an obligation, with different motivations for leisure and sport that are more intimate and personal than sporting in nature, reinterpreting the wishes, hopes or fears of the participants as offerings, self-blame and other redemptive attitudes, towards life, without great variations between men and women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores activity tracking as a postdigital phenomenon and provides a detailed account of the embodied pedagogy of its practices. Drawing on a case-based, ethnographically inspired, participatory research project with German university students and following a praxeologic approach of transformative Bildung, an empirically grounded heuristic framework is presented that helps to understand how embodied entanglements of person and wearable develop over time and how dynamics of irritation and routinisation that characterise these developments open up processes of learning or Bildung. We discuss how this contributes to researching vital pedagogical questions about self-tracking, and more broadly about yet uncertain futures of postdigital physical culture and society, such as how we constitute ourselves as embodied subjects and continuously develop relations to ourselves and to the world through entangling with digital technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calling on several disciplines from cultural history to media studies and gender studies, this paper analyses the representation of race, gender and culture in Japanese sports manga Kuroko no Basuke: Extra Game. First, it deconstructs the politics of sports manga and its representation of foreign athletes, as it allows Japanese mangakas to portray Japan as a rising cultural and athletic superpower. Then, it focuses on Kuroko no Basuke: Extra Game, in order to study the visual and textual representation of both American and Japanese athletes through the prism of race, gender and culture. Indeed, it draws a sharp contrast between American and Japanese masculinities. Also, it relays a deeply-stereotyped version of the myth of the Black Athlete. Last, this study focuses on the (soft) power of this cultural artefact, the duel of ethos which is relayed through it, and the signifying representation of bodies and emotions. In a nutshell, this work deconstructs Japanese sports mangas and their political dimension to assess the part played by these global cultural artefacts in shaping collective imaginations from Japan to France, via the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the author's work with three transgender and/or gender expansive patients. The treatments took place at various times over the past twenty years and are presented chronologically. The author, a cisgender analyst, shows how her thinking and her interactions with her patients have changed. In a sense, the analyst is also transitioning as her thoughts and feelings about her gender expansive patients shift. The importance of moving outside of traditional ways of thinking about gender is emphasized, as is the danger of seeking linear, formulaic answers to why a gender-variant patient does not feel at home in their body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1989) promoted an ideology of the individual body, dismantling all social and collective matrices. The various artistic expressions discussed in the following text can be seen as practices of situated memory, that link the violence of that period to the exercise of a necessary intersubjectivity between different spaces of intervention and bodies. In doing this, and by taking as a starting point collective and the notion of alienated space, the aim is to reconstitute a conscious corporeality of memory and collectivity. This paper seeks to revise interpretations of these performative and photographic exercises and to ask how meaning can be produced without subjecting memory to a process of reification or immobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reflect on the concept of the setting in psychoanalysis, and how it has been radically reconsidered given the impact of the SARS-CoV-19 pandemic on human interactions and moving from face-to-face to online sessions. The rapidity of going from seeking interaction to a fear of possible contagion led some professionals to adopt a sudden change of setting. Although the concept of setting seems to come from the classical Freudian method, Freud never spoke about it explicitly, although it was subsequently developed from his writings. Only in the 1960s and 70s was the setting perceived as the very object of psychoanalytic exploration. Since the psyche in psychoanalysis is conceived as a spatially extended entity, this paper discusses the concepts of space and time (external setting) and the mental state of both the patient and analyst (internal setting). We investigate how these aspects have changed as a result of the use of technology. What changes have taken place at the perceptual level in the patient and analyst? What differences are there with respect to the presence/absence of the other's body? We use our own reflections of our personal experiences of undergoing face-to-face and online sessions to reveal the differences between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narrow understandings about fatness and health continue to prevail in the West. However, we have witnessed emerging trends and movements against these dominant discourses. Examples of these counter discourses are the fat acceptance and body positivity movements. Social media is a space where confrontation and discrepancies between these different discourses are common, particularly in relation to nonnormative bodies. This paper explores how Instagram users reinforce or challenge underlying assumptions regarding the 'Operación Feria' advertising campaign, which focuses on promoting physical exercise to fight obesity and fatness. A total of 1,930 comments posted on Instagram were analysed using a discourse analysis approach. Two main narratives were constructed from the data. On the one hand, there is a dominant position that challenges societal norms regarding bodies, which confronts fat-phobia and stereotypes. On the other hand, there is a reinforcement of the campaign with a discourse based on humour, victimhood and medical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from fieldwork on frontline health workers in villages in the state of Odisha, India, this paper critically interrogates the complex ways in which frontline health workers negotiate between their intersecting gender and caste identities and their roles as modern professionals at the village level. It argues that the embodied identities of these frontline health workers become crucial in shaping other villagers' views on their labour. Frontline health workers from caste Hindu communities often claim that the spatial demarcation between public and private becomes a way out in resolving the conflicting demands posed by their professional roles and kinship obligations regarding caste practices. However, contrary to this claim, this article argues that such a neat demarcation of space remains unsettled in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we advance the conversation about management education by outlining a future scenario of management teaching in which art is employed as a method, learning goal, and methodology. The scenario is informed by our personal experiences of teaching management and art expressed in terms of three design principles for management education: the principles of body, mind, and soul; and it is presented as an ethnography from the future. This future is envisioned to be characterized by four assumptions: that students are co-creators of knowledge; that the role of teachers is to facilitate the students' learning processes; that Artificial Intelligence is an integral part of learning processes; and that the primary learning objective for the students is to develop their relations to the world and contribute with feasible future solutions to wicked problems and global challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the introduction to the author's PhD thesis titled, Interfashionality: Body-oriented Parametric Design and Parametric Thinkign 2.0 for 3 D-printed Fashion and Textiles. The paper firstly introduces the author's research motivation, which is followed by theoretical discussions around and design examples of fashion and textile digitalization, as well as 3 D-printed fashion and textiles. The author then introduces the important implication of parametric design for creating 3 D-printed fashion and textiles. In this section, through analyzing the self-organized conference, Digital Fashion-3D Printing for Designer, and through intensive discussions of the origin of parametric design and its adoption in fashion, the author then summarizes the scope of the research. This paves the way for a concrete research question, five research aims, research structure (model of the research) and thesis structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written about the disagreement and even radical opposition between Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conceptualizations and those of Jacques Lacan: for example, about desire, psychotherapy, the subject and the radically opposed political consequences that result from their approaches. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate from a Lacanian perspective that in the case of a central concept such as the body, there are rather more similarities than differences. Its main thesis is that Deleuze’s and Guattari’s body without organs is very close to Lacan’s notion of the Other jouissance and that with slightly different strategies they both provide arguments to fight the same enemy: that is, the control and repression of singularity under capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Besides the symbolic unconscious, psychoanalysis today investigates unconscious structures that are dissociated from mental functioning (Lombardi 2017) and encoded in bodily inscriptions. These bodily configurations often stay outside of the psychoanalytical attention and technique of treatment. Two concepts – encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration – provide a theoretical and technical proposition for the bodily encoded unconscious. Within this frame, the paper focuses on new aspects. It is outlined that the encapsulated body engrams result from a traumatic disorganization of the primal relation to the caregiver leading to an impossibility of a separation from the mother's body. Separation is now feared as a deadly fall into an endless abyss. However, this element is no longer viewed as an unconscious phantasy that can be interpreted but as the perception of a disorganized bodily syndrome that must be worked through with a considerable reverberation-time (Birksted-Breen 2009) in a body-to-body dialogue. Somatic narration encourages the patient to describe his painful bodily perception and invites the body-self to show up during the analytical encounter. Working this way allows the patients disorganized body-self to slowly develop into a container to harbor, organize and symbolize emotions. Four clinical examples illustrate this manner of working. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning with the observation that a good integration of soma and psyche is often missing in our work with severely disturbed analysands, two concepts are discussed that focus constellations of bodily encoded unconscious material, which needs a specific form of working-through. The concept of encapsulated body engrams referring to defence structures revolving around the inhibition or disorganization of an affective bodily impulse is outlined. The imbalance arising this way is perceived as a foreign body within the body-self. These engrams are repetitive and are not susceptible to symbolic transformation. Parallels between the encapsulated body engram, the autistic objects (Tustin, F. 1980. "Autistic Objects." International Review of Psycho-Analysis 27: 27–39) and Freud's theory of inhibition (Freud, S. 1926. "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety." SE 20: 77–175) are discussed. To unblock encapsulated engrams, body feelings emerging in the chain of associations are understood as attempts to communicate. In a process called somatic narration these perceptions are contextualized with other bodily sensations. The working-through of this material in transference and countertransference is described in the light of Lombardi's concepts (Lombardi, R. 2017. Body- Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis – Development after Bion. New York: Routledge). Two case reports precede the theoretical discussion. The paper begins with the observation that a good integration of the soma and psyche is often missing in our work with severely disturbed analysands; two concepts are then discussed that focus on constellations of bodily encoded unconscious material which need a specific form of working through. The author proposes the concept of encapsulated body engrams to refer to the defense structures revolving around the inhibition or disorganization of an affected bodily impulse. The dysfunctional imbalance that arises this way is often perceived as a foreign body within the body-self. These engrams are highly repetitive and are not susceptible to symbolic transformation. Parallels between the encapsulated body engram, the autistic objects (Tustin, 1980) and Freuds theory of inhibition (Freud, 1926) are discussed. The paper argues that body feelings emerging in the chain of associations are attempts to communicate and to unblock encapsulated engrams. In a process called somatic narration, these perceptions are then contextualized with other bodily sensations. The unfolding and working through of this material in the transference and countertransference is described in light of Lombardi's concepts (2017). Two case reports are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many great cultures of the world have recognised the impossibility of teaching. Governments in various colonial countries continue to spend huge sums of money on 'closing the gap' in Indigenous education, yet national assessment figures would support the claim that teaching is indeed an impossibility. This paper draws on some of Biesta's recent theorisation to highlight the double impossibility of teaching in Indigenous education. While representation and miscommunication surely make teaching an impossible profession, I nevertheless return to the question, what is possible in education? I apply the more recent work of Butler to highlight how vulnerability can allow us to hear the story of others. Vulnerability allows us into the lives of others, and to recognise that they are already implicated in ours, noting that certain bonds are actually shaped through the reversibility of the story. I examine a presentation to teacher education students on the Stolen Generations as a means of understanding how the role of power in constituting body vulnerability can be leveraged in the curriculum beyond the discourse of independent and self-motivated learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human body is central to the existence of dress in all its forms in cultures and societies and situated in space and time. While the main purpose of fashion is the continuous iteration, revision, and reinvention of the dress, the centrality of the body in fashion and dress practices is problematic, particularly because bodies and garments relate not only as material entities but also through intangible and immanent agencies. Although this centrality has been questioned by some scholars, the articulation of new paradigms of the dressed body within the nature-culture continuum remains underexplored. Here I am referring to a reconsideration of the body in the larger ecosystem of natural entities and phenomena within which it exists. Such a reconsideration offers a broader field of possibilities to articulate bodies, dress and ways in which they relate and come together. Informed by natural sciences, this paper investigates the notion of symbiosis, which is a way of living together of different organisms, to construct a new paradigm for understanding how the body and the dress interact and form each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author describes the evolution of the psychotherapy of a psychotic adolescent in the period when the pandemic induced their national authorities to impose lockdown. The difficulty of coming to terms with an ever-present reality that proved to be distressing for both the patient and the analyst, as well as with the violence and rapidity with which the external situation developed, leading to a change in the therapy setting, are at the heart of the reflections in this paper. The "choice" of whether to continue the sessions over the phone determined the emergence of some distinctive issues related to discontinuity and to the impossibility of relying on visual perception. However, to the analyst's surprise, it also favoured the possibility of working through the meaning of some autistic mental areas which, up to that moment, had never really been accessible to verbalization. Questioning the meaning of these changes, the author develops a broader reflection about the way that, for analysts and patients, modifications in the frames of our daily lives and clinical practice have enabled the deployment of undifferentiated parts of the personality which had previously been secretly deposited in the "body" of the setting and therefore were inaccessible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the historical development of protein-enhanced foods in Great Britain and how they were marketed by food manufacturers to convince consumers that protein was essential to maintaining a healthy lifestyle. It focuses particularly on Plasmon and Emprote – the two biggest brands of the early twentieth century – and uses multimodal critical discourse analysis to identify how semiotic resources are used to embed products in scientific rationality, promote health discourses and develop concepts of masculinity in accordance with the two strands of the physical culture movement. It argues that, just as today, food manufacturers capitalized upon the growing middle-class interest in functional foods and presented protein as an "elixir" that consumers should take to safeguard their health, the health of their families and the state of the nation. Overall, this study demonstrates that, even with today's strict legislation on food packaging and advertising, protein food manufacturers still use similar techniques to sell their products. In gaining a better understanding of the historical use of semiotic resources in food advertising, we can assess the legitimacy of current food regulations and ensure that people make informed choices when shopping. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a reading of Gulaab Gang and Dil Se, the paper examines how underrepresentedwomen from the margins of the post-independent Indian society understand genderedviolence and intercept the mainstream political and nationalistic events. The two filmsrevolve around females that occupy marginal positions in ethnic, caste, and ideologicalterms. They are juxtaposed for understanding how they differently consider the questions 35of bodily love and violence, agency of the oppressed female body or its lack thereof, andthe position of the female antagonist in a counter-authoritarian space. The study looksinto the ideas of death desire and retribution through suicide and killings and the ways inwhich they shape "me-too" responses for women in both the films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on older migrants' digital media use has primarily focused on understanding issues related to the 'digital divide', 'transnational capital', and '(im)mobility'. Few studies have investigated how these issues interplay and how they affect older migrants' construction of selfhood, which informs their modalities of digital engagement. This article will address this gap, by drawing on the concept of 'geographical scale', to examine older Chinese migrants' digital media use and their sense of self and belonging during COVID-19 lockdowns in Melbourne Australia. To achieve this, I analysed 31 interviews, which were collected from two sequential studies conducted in 2020 and 2021. The interview data revealed that older Chinese migrants' diverse media practices and imaginaries are embedded in and informed by multiple sets of scales of the physical body, the family and domestic realm, the community sphere, and transnational network. It is found that digital media allow participants to navigate, negotiate with and even reconfigure these scales to cope with the challenges of ageing, migration and a global pandemic. However, digital media also produce new scales that differentiate older migrants from the rest of the population to sustain the structural inequality and social unevenness in Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What part do food practices have in gender identification processes? How do they reveal wider reconfigurations of masculinity models? This article is based on findings from a sociological qualitative research on men (40–63 years old) living in France and Italy. This paper examines how men regard their food practices as a core activity to prevent or cure illness and delaying the aging process. In adopting healthy food practices regarded by the interviewees as "alternative" or "dissident" (e.g., fasting, vegetarianism, veganism) men viewed their masculinity as being challenged – especially by other men. Thus, they seek new strategies to assert dominant profiles in gender hierarchies by negotiating new forms of masculinities through monitoring their health and wellbeing. Interestingly, the findings show that, by doing this, men both adhere to eating habits that themselves may define as feminine and use these supposedly feminine food practices as a tool for shaping dominant masculinities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role of the mirror in the act of getting dressed. It argues that in daily practices of dress/ing the predominance of the sense of sight in defining the experience of both dress and our self is materialized and enhanced by the omnipresence of an object: the mirror. Despite being mostly ignored in analyses of dressed body, the mirror performs a crucial role in defining both dress and the self in visual terms. By considering how the mirror is implicated in processes of subjectification, we analyze how this affects the relationship people have with clothes as signifiers of their selves. We maintain that in order to escape the gaze and its solidifying effect, we need to look away from the mirror and think of the body not as a subject, but as a fluid composition of forces. By drawing insights from phenomenology and then adhering to the Spinozian philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, we interrogate the body as something that affectively transforms in the encounter with clothes to then explore it as a site of becoming with and through clothes. It is our aim to offer an experimentation in thinking that might lead to different ways of experiencing our clothes in the everyday as well as of theorizing about their relationship with the human body and the wearers' (supposed) identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates how yoga practitioners seek to attain mental balance by the constant discipline of being aware of their thoughts and actions, learning to react to emotions and desires. It focuses on the efforts it takes to achieve this mental state and the meanings attributed to the cessation of practitioners' 'most natural' way of thinking and feeling. By acknowledging the adherence to norms and values of the learned yoga traditions, this article presents the tensions involved in their identity construction, for this adherence points to a contradiction at a time when it is important to 'find oneself' and to live according to one's own parameters. Therefore, the article concludes that the embodiment of a life of yoga does not consist solely in the performance of certain attitudes and behaviours. While there is an attempt to attain integration of body and mind, practitioners of yoga and meditation strive to become aware of habitual social roles and, when conscious of the processes of building a self-image, they make use of these practices as a means to relativise this construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the key concepts in modern science is force (F). In present studies on the history of dynamics, Patricius is either completely omitted or only cursorily mentioned. The aim of this text is to show that Patricius's concept of the soul, as he developed it in his Nova de universis philosophia from 1591, comes close to the modern (i.e. Newtonian) understanding of force. This should support the more general position that one of the most intriguing aspects of Patricius's philosophy is his contribution to the emergence of modern science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article subjects the varied meanings that Bengalis gave to their imaginations of Japan during the Swadeshi Movement (1905–11) to close scrutiny. It does so by contextualising it within the attempts made by Hindus and Muslims to use religion as a way of travelling globally. I use social hierarchy and embodiment as analytical perspectives to frame the ways in which invoking Japan provided opportunities to forge broader spiritual linkages and, in doing so, negotiate their histories as separate from colonial modernity. Further, this article problematises the categories of local/global and indigenous/foreign that are used to isolate these mobile acts of thinking, reading, negotiating and aspiring that were simultaneously located both beyond and within the nation. In turn, it suggests 'imaginations' and 'invocations' as a fruitful site of studying such fluid histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transgender bodies very effectively undermine social norms of gender binaries. We use a case study of transgender people in the twin cities of Rawalpindi/Islamabad in Pakistan to understand how social violence, middle class morality and relations to the state are embodied in transgender bodies. While in pre-colonial times the transgender people in South Asia were mandarins of the empire, during colonial and post-colonial times they have been reduced to the role of mendicants. We find that the research participants' notions of a transgender identity are contradictory, in that they draw upon the idea of a feminine soul in a male body, but simultaneously they also consider it a constant process of becoming through deed. In urban Pakistan, it is through violent encounters with transgender bodies that toxic masculinities are relationally enacted. We argue, however, that transgender bodies also hold an emancipatory promise to bodies imprisoned in toxic masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this article is to establish dialogue between psychoanalysis, social sciences (philosophy, anthropology, sociology) and politics to analyse the way in which current migratory policies, impact on the bodies exiled peoples who seek to establish themselves in safe territories. This article will look at the ways in which the body of the exiled person is affected by the political, and how they embody the place of a subjective suffering. Different figures of the migrant subject's body will be discussed. The data comes from varied ethnographic research conducted in France ('Calais Jungle', accommodation centres and administrative detention centers). Our interpretations will demonstrate how this body in the process of transit, which swings between extremes of mobility and immobility, appears damaged, wounded, or even at risk of becoming 'human-refuse'. We will also see that it can be instrumentalised, measured, evaluated, by the institutions that receive it. This body in a state of exile wavers continuously between fragility, vulnerability and destructivity; but it can also, on occasion, show itself to be powerful and life-saving. Indeed, it harbours a surprising strength, and is capable of crossing borders and territories to which it has been forbidden entrance. Thus, it bears witness to the intensity of the human drive to live, even when put to the test of segregational migratory policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]