Call for Papers: Queering the Soma
According to Richard Shusterman, “the body is both shaped by power and employed as an instrument to maintain it—how bodily norms of health, skill, and beauty, and even our categories of sex and gender, are constructed to reflect and sustain social forces” (Shusterman 2020, 247). In this issue of the Journal of Somaesthetics, we consider somatic identities and behaviors that subvert somatic normativity, with a special focus on gender and sexuality. Although there has been somaesthetic work devoted to mostly heteronormative identities, behaviors, and histories, there has been little devoted to queer somaesthetics. Beginning with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definition of queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (Sedgwick 1993, 8), this issue is dedicated to intersections between queerness and somaesthetics, broadly construed.
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