The way of the flesh: life, geopolitics and the weight of the future

Abstract

How can a feminist materialism problematise the knowledges and practices of geopolitics, and locate new objects for critical analysis? Building on a substantial body of work on bodies and embodiment, I draw out how flesh has traditionally been deemed problematic in geopolitics, before briefly turning to how an accounting for flesh as a socio-spatial material has helped to animate a critical approach to this field. My concern is to caution against the devolving of the flesh into an ideologically saturated matter, and to reclaim its excessive, lively character. I thus outline how the geo-in geopolitics can be understood as an 'earthiness' that is concerned, at the broadest level, with differential orderings of and access to life, and especially the matters of sex, sexuality and reproduction; and, more specifically, with a concern for differential renderings of a corporeal vulnerability and obduracy; and, the articulation of these alongside the building of a practice-based ethics. Using the example of stem cells, I demonstrate how an emphasis upon flesh as an object of analysis does not eschew the socio-spatialities (whether topographic or topological) that help comprise one of geopolitics' traditional foci -borders -but provides for an ontology of materials and forces that provokes these.

The tactile topologies of Contagion

“…, 211–12). Placing touch – along with the other senses – into this non‐subject‐centred ontology will require close attention to the ‘differential orderings of and access to life’ and more specifically to ‘the differential renderings of a corporeal vulnerability and obduracy’ (Dixon , 139). Whether and how this might help reconfigure topological spaces is an open question, but prior to knowing the contours of an answer, we must know something about the differential materialities and forces that might produce them.…”

Imagining the future from the margins: cyborg labor in Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer

“…The fictional Sleep Dealer factories closely resemble actual maquila factories that emerged fifty years ago in an export processing zone (EPZ) stretching 2000 miles along the line and penetrating only 12 miles into Mexico (Cravey 1998). Bustling urban EPZ location shots in Rivera's film (e.g., outdoor markets, streets clogged with public buses, dark alleyways, tiny green spaces that serve as parks, and dingy, unlighted, extensive squatter settlements) also seem to mirror the reality of Mexico's border cities; all along the line these urban places exploded rapidly and haphazardly during the last five decades as migrants came seeking jobs in the expanding, state-of-the-art, industrial parks with their clusters of apparel, automotive, and electronics maquilas (Cravey 2011 Capital accumulation proceeds apace without workers being physically present (Dixon 2014). The Tijuana setting and its proximity to the United States, reveal two intertwined, yet counter-posed, images of violence.…”

“…First, the film proposes the future as embodied: an (uneven) field of carnal and virtual experimentation that emerges from a network of material exchanges, between centers and margins, powerful and vulnerable, and which opens opportunities for creating an ethical, meaningful life. As scholars have demonstrated, an emphasis on embodiment of the future opens up a space for ethical questions of geopolitical obligations and responsibilities (Dixon 2014;Muñoz 2009;Enloe 2013;McKittrick 2007;Haraway 1988;Bowden 1998). Sleep Dealer brings this analytic of embodiment to specific networks of commodity production: construction sites, agricultural harvests, literary production, and security/military operations.…”

Affective geopolitics: Anxiety, pain, and ethics in the encounter with Syrian refugees in Turkey

“…Rather than an exclusive focus on states and political leaders as the main geopolitical actors, feminist geopolitics has turned to ordinary people and everyday life to understand how a multiplicity of actors and practices produce and materialize geopolitical strategy. As Deborah Dixon (2014: 139) writes, in the wake of feminist and other critical interventions,geopolitics has arguably become a matter of inquiring into socio-spatial relations between corporeal bodies and other complex objects in the form of encounters, conjunctions, engagements, negotiations, resonances and congruencies, as they help not only to produce, but also to problematise borders, boundaries, territories, terrains and volumes.We contribute to feminist geopolitics by deepening an understanding of how political territorializations emerge and are transformed in and through the practices of bodies that encounter other bodies, objects, and spaces (Smith et al., 2015). Our contributions underline that geopolitical imaginations come into being and differences between self and other, “us” and “them” materialize through emplaced, embodied, and affective encounters between subjects and objects.…”

“…This idea brings us closer to understanding how, rather than arising from a pre-established interior/exterior dichotomy, affect actively produces the effect of such divisions, lending a sense of reality to the dualism of inside and outside. Thus, if “geopolitics” creates global maps of friends and enemies, spatially arraying enclosures of “us” and “them,” a critical psychoanalytical attention to the workings of affect opens these cartographies to a topological dynamism, to the entanglement of here and there, of ourselves and others (Carter and McCormack, 2006; Dixon, 2014; Hubbard, 2002; Müller, 2013; Pain, 2009; Puar, 2009). In Ahmed’s (2004: 10) words, emotions “create the very effect of the surfaces and boundaries that enable us to distinguish an inside and an outside in the first place.”…”