ABSTRACT
This chapter takes on the question of how an affirmative practice of embodied vulnerability might take shape in the context of transcultural feminist activism. Discussing works by Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum and Iranian artist Morehshin Allahyari, I argue that these practices expand Judith Butler’s concept of ‘corporeal vulnerability’ by performing what I call ‘intensional activism’. Rather than appealing to institutionally surveilled categories of representation, these practices communicate the tension between embodiment and disembodiment, visibility and opacity, presence and absence. By mingling the experience of the othered and vulnerable body with other scales of reference, both virtual and material, the borders between individual, intimate and collective experience are disrupted. The artists avoid reproducing neoliberal demands of access, exposure and identification associated with public ‘performance’. Instead, they invite embodied solidarity through interpersonal animations that redistribute the unequal pressures of contemporary life. The visual becomes a passage for transcultural reorientations, reimaginations and affiliations.
