ABSTRACT
“Militant bodies” turns to ethical parrhēsia as Foucault presents it in his 1984 Collège course, The Courage of Truth. The “militant” ethical parrhēsia of the Cynics upon which Foucault focuses entails cultivating a mode of embodied existence that overtly and aggressively challenges prevailing norms. Through its “bearing witness” to subversive truths, militant ethical parrhēsia generates possibilities for oppositionally transformative modes of constituting, understanding, and relating to oneself, others, and world. Significantly, militant self-transformation occurs through taking on humiliation in ways that turn it back against and therefore confront its source. The chapter analyzes two forms of feminist anti-sexual violence protest, SlutWalks and Emma Sulkowicz’s “Mattress Protest/Carry that Weight,” that reflect characteristics of militant Cynic ethical parrhēsia. Participants in these protests publicly display and thereby assert in its susceptibility to violation an embodied self-relation upon which sexual violence and humiliation have been inflicted. I conclude the chapter by discussing the importance of courage for the purposes of cultivating counter-normalization and counter-humiliation both within the self-relation and more broadly, and by asserting that not only courage but also militancy more generally open onto articulating alternative conceptualizations of solidarity.
