ABSTRACT
This chapter considers 'embodiment and reflexive body politics' as related to the broader physical cultural studies (PCS) project. To begin, the physical cultural studies turn to the body resulted in research studies that reduced the body to textual patterns, media representations, semiotic systems, and/or grand corporeal narratives, or erased the researcher's own body, politics, and praxical dimensions from empirical field studies. Physicality is the state or quality of being physical, with an allusion to the corporeal body as an expression of, and articulation to, its mental, social, and spiritual capacities. Post-Derridian theories of (inter)subjectivity and biopolitics have been taken up in physical cultural studies to articulate embodied couplings to broader formations of capital, state sovereignty and geopolitical orders, patriarchy, colonialism, sexism, and ability. In the realm of cultural politics, and following Hobbes, PCS scholars have taken up the portmanteau 'body politics' as more than a metaphor for the body politic and its many members.
