How does pregnancy transform our embodiment? This question will be explored with the help of phenomenology and Butoh dance. Although Butoh has not yet been able to fulfil its true potential for disclosing female embodiment and particularly pregnant embodiment, it will provide us with helpful clues. In pregnancy, objects are less ready-to-hand, more out of reach - world as we know it becomes removed. The habit body vanishes away. But pregnancy is not just a loss of the ordinary: (...) it also opens up new dimensions. One such dimension is that of being touched from within. A phenomenology of the pregnant body thus leads to a removal of world, but also reveals new dimensions of world, and it even comes to disclose the other as a new world within. It means to carry something alien, like the stone in Butoh play Child’s Breath, which can only be carried slowly, awkwardly. (shrink)

The article examines the impact of Georges Bataille’s philosophy on Hijikata Tatsumi’s butoh dance. Bataille’s understanding of dance as unproductive expenditure, the concepts of inner experience and communication are being reconsidered and incorporated in choreographic language of Hijikata, extending his technical and conceptual tooling. Bataille defines dance as an expenditure given in a form of sign. The butoh dance-experience is functioning as a metaphor of a speculation, created by a movement. It is experienced by dancers and spectators as (...) an execution. (shrink)

This paper raises the issue of governmentality in popular environmental understandings of the (human) body. Understood as object-subjects of environmental management, “ecological bodies politic” are increasingly produced and organized by disciplinary discourses that have the (ironic) effect of reifying, enclosing and surveilling corporeal experiences in the world, especially for bodies deemed unruly. This paper thus deploys queer theories of corporeal materialization (Butler), and queer histories of corporeal-ecological abjection, toward a political account of embodiment oriented to creative opening and transgression, rather (...) than the increasingly hysterical bodily managerialism of pollution discourses. This paper also performs, through the transgressive presence of body narratives from dance experiences generated as part of a workshop on Japanese Butoh traditions, the kind of practiced body awareness suggested in the political account. (shrink)

This paper raises the issue of governmentality in popular environmental understandings of the (human) body. Understood as object-subjects of environmental management, “ecological bodies politic” are increasingly produced and organized by disciplinary discourses that have the (ironic) effect of reifying, enclosing and surveilling corporeal experiences in the world, especially for bodies deemed unruly. This paper thus deploys queer theories of corporeal materialization (Butler), and queer histories of corporeal-ecological abjection, toward a political account of embodiment oriented to creative opening and transgression, rather (...) than the increasingly hysterical bodily managerialism of pollution discourses. This paper also performs, through the transgressive presence of body narratives from dance experiences generated as part of a workshop on Japanese Butoh traditions, the kind of practiced body awareness suggested in the political account. (shrink)

This paper raises the issue of governmentality in popular environmental understandings of the (human) body. Understood as object-subjects of environmental management, “ecological bodies politic” are increasingly produced and organized by disciplinary discourses that have the (ironic) effect of reifying, enclosing and surveilling corporeal experiences in the world, especially for bodies deemed unruly. This paper thus deploys queer theories of corporeal materialization (Butler), and queer histories of corporeal-ecological abjection, toward a political account of embodiment oriented to creative opening and transgression, rather (...) than the increasingly hysterical bodily managerialism of pollution discourses. This paper also performs, through the transgressive presence of body narratives from dance experiences generated as part of a workshop on Japanese Butoh traditions, the kind of practiced body awareness suggested in the political account. (shrink)

This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity ? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form (...) of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers). (shrink)