ABSTRACT
In the preceding two chapters, on flesh and bone respectively, I have outlined an approach to the embodied, geopolitical body that does not thereby presume an individuated corporeality. There is a diversity of content and capacity apparent here that, at the broad scale, underlines the potentialities of the matter in hand and which, more specifically, opens out the not only the physio-biological capacities that help comprise the subject of a classical geopolitics, but also the making of gendered knowledges pertaining to these. Yet, as Rosi Braidotti (2002) points out, there is a diversity within diversity – a singling out amidst a universal matter-ing, one might say – that must be accounted for, insofar as within particular contexts it is precisely this gendering that matters. In this chapter, I want to take on board this attentiveness to singularity and context, and address particular corporealities that, because of their specific biologies – the twists and whirls of flesh and bone, the textures and pigments of hair and skin, the presence and absence of bodily symmetries and so on – and the visceral as well as interpretive apprehension of these, have become pivotal to a geopolitics driven by abhorrence. That is, I want to dwell on how these whirls and textures, presences and absences, are apprehended as significant in the context of larger ensembles such as a corporeal body, but also of a social body such as a population, and a Natural order pertaining to the world as we know it. Indeed, what is interesting about these fleshy/boney features is how they become configured as synecdoches – that is, representative of and indicating – wider disorderings, which in turn, reveal by their very ‘wrongness’ what the world should look like. Though such a conjuring of ‘wrongness’ can, of course, be conveyed through words and imagery, and can engender a suite of ‘felt’ emotions, there is also a profound aesthetic dimension to such engagements that speaks to all manner of learned, embodied responses that, though they may be rationalised, are neither subsumed nor represented by reason.
