Performing Bodies: Contemporary Aesthetics Between Everyday and the Arts

31-01-2026

Edited by

Elena Romagnoli (elena.romagnoli@unipi.it)

Matteo Cherubini (matteo.cherubini@phd.unipi.it)

Since the first half of the twentieth century, the body has occupied a relevant position in a wide range of philosophical inquiries, spanning phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 1945, Dufrenne 1953), philosophical anthropology (Buber 1923, Scheler 1928) and pragmatism (Dewey 1934). In recent decades, this interest has intensified and has become a crucial concern within contemporary cultural debates, including analytic philosophy (Walton 1990, Montero 2006), gender studies (Irigaray 1985, Butler 1990) and performative aesthetics (Fischer-Lichte 2004), as well as social movements related to body positivity and body neutrality. Those elements led ultimately to the definition of a new branch of aesthetics, somaesthetics, devoted to the inquiry of body as an aesthetic dimension per se (Shusterman 2006). Despite the breadth of existing scholarship, numerous theoretical questions surrounding corporeality remain insufficiently explored and call for further conceptual clarification.

This special issue aims to investigate those possibilities by engaging with some of the most innovative currents in contemporary aesthetics. The guiding assumption of the issue is that aesthetics offers a privileged standpoint from which to address corporeality in its multiple dimensions. Throughout the twentieth century – and even more markedly in current debates – aesthetics has progressively distanced itself from an exclusive focus on the idealized and harmonious body, traditionally exemplified by classical Greek statuary. Aesthetics has consequently opened itself to a plurality of bodily configurations shaped by finitude, vulnerability, and imperfection. Within this framework, the body emerges as a primary source of human experience: not merely a passive medium, but a dynamic site in which meanings and experiences are continuously produced, negotiated, and transformed.

The issue seeks to explore some of the fundamental aesthetic questions underlying philosophical reflection on the body, particularly by conceiving it as a living and moving body—an active agent of action and interaction within the sphere of aesthetic experience. Such a perspective emphasizes the body’s embeddedness in practices and gestures that inform both artistic creation and everyday life. Special attention will also be devoted to the performative dimension of corporeality, understood as a domain in which meanings are not only expressed but actively constituted through movement, ritual, and collective practices. One challenge may be to show how even philosophical currents traditionally considered distant from reflection on and through the body – such as hermeneutics – can instead contribute fruitfully to the debate on the subject.

 

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

  • the role of the body in everyday aesthetics, with particular emphasis on the revaluation of sensory modalities traditionally regarded as “minor,” such as touch, smell, and taste;
  • the place and operations of the body within the performative aesthetics, addressing bodily presence in performative arts as well as in literary and visual practices;
  • critical engagement with the notion of soma in somaesthetics, aimed at overcoming mind–body dualism and foregrounding embodied perception;
  • analyses of the relationship between body, habit, and aesthetic experience, in dialogue with pragmatist and hermeneutic traditions;
  • conceptualizations and reflections of practitioners on their aesthetic embodied practices;
  • the living and experiencing body as the limits of philosophical aesthetics.

Schedule

  • Abstract Submission Deadline: 1 April
  • Notification of Acceptance: 15 April
  • Full Paper Submission Deadline: 1 September
  • Review back to authors: 1. November 
  • Final Paper submission deadline: 1. December

 

Guidelines

The Journal of Somaesthetics is a peer-reviewed, online, academic journal devoted to research that advances the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics, understood as the critical study and meliorative cultivation of the experience and performance of the living body (or soma) as a site of sensory appreciation (aesthesis), practice, and realization. The term somaesthetics designates an interdisciplinary framework rather than a philosophical position. It deals, on the one hand, with the aesthetic experience of the body as a practice proper and, on the other hand, with the academic conceptualization of the experiencing body and the body experienced; it approaches the body as the mediating centre between sensory experiences and cognitive realization. Somaesthetics describes an integrative field of research where aesthetic experiences meet theories about the body and its biological structures and functions, its phenomenological and epistemological functions, and its position and significances in culture and societies. The Journal of Somaesthetics invites proposals of academic papers, essays, and video articles from different fields of somatic practices, empirical research, art, and philosophy. 

For more information about the journal, see http://journals.aau.dk/index.php/JOS

Abstracts should be between 250 and 500 words.

Papers should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words and prepared for blind review, according to the journal’s style guidelines as indicated on the journal’s website:

https://somaesthetics.aau.dk/index.php/JOS/about/submissions

Complete articles should be submitted through the link above. Authors should submit a separate cover page indicating the author’s name, institutional affiliation, paper title and abstract, word count, keywords, contact information and ORCID number.

Any question