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’