Embodied Activisms: Performative Expressions of Political and Social Action

(Hardback)

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Embodied Activisms explores how activists use their bodies to resist social norms, engage with institutions, and promote change. This book spans historical perspectives, current contexts, and the most current scholarly literature to interrogate how embodied activisms are read, performed, understood, and actualized. The studies in this volume address current, critical issues such as police accountability activism, the climate crisis, environmental concerns, and protests of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chapters analyze a wide range of nonviolent mobilization tactics, including silent protests, embodied witnessing, leisure spectacle demonstrations, performance art and other forms of creative practice, and rallies. Analyses engage with aspects of intersectionality in activism and critique diverse modes of embodied resistance in locations including East Central Europe, the Americas, and the Mediterranean region.

Reviews

This pioneering publication proposes a provocative, profound reconceptualization of the bodys role in activism from an instrument that performs activism to a constitutive site of resistance and generative source of embodied activism opposing oppression grounded in bodily differences. Using original, contemporary case studies of bodily actions (from protesting to witnessing) challenging gender, racial, and ethnic oppression, contributors explicate the tenets, explanatory power, and significance of Newsom and Lengels Theory of Embodied Activism. Their research reveals important contributions the theory makes to the study of activism, such as the documented transformative experience of participatory, body-based action showing the need to expand the dominant focus on the effects of activism on social change.

Author Bio

Victoria A. Newsom is professor of communication studies and affiliate faculty in social justice and diversity at Olympic College.

Lara Martin Lengel is professor in the School of Media and Communication and affiliate faculty in women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Bowling Green State University.