Performing bio-agency: Commentaries about counter-hegemonic bodily practices

GUSTAVO ANDRÉS LUDUEÑA

St. John's, Canadá

Workshop; Graduate Seminar; 2002

This talk deals with the relation between body and power. In particular, I am interested in how bodies are affected by different kinds of control, discipline and so forth. Thus, some lectures during the course and thoughts about how these relations between bodies and power are carried out in practice took me to see, contrarily, how power can be affected by bodies. By paraphrasing Clifford Geertz (1973), I would denominate this relation as the ?deep play of power.? In this brief lecture I will give you some examples about how power and bodies become involved in different situations: Begoña Aretxaga with the women?s ?dirty protest? in Northern Ireland (1997); Lisa Rofel with women workers at a factory in China (1997, 1999); and, David Scott with the ruud bwai dancing in Jamaica (1999). Of course, these are only a few examples and we can easily think of in other ones. Before starting our discussion let my show you some events that might be associated with this discussion. Weeks before coming Canada, some unfortunate events took place in Argentina: three retired men committed suicide as a protest for very poor pensions they earned after have worked for thirty to forty years; in Buenos Aires, secondary students cut avenues and streets by sitting on the floor as a protest for government?s economical measures; in different point of the country, unemployed men and women of every age cut highways and avenues by facing cars and trucks as a claim for jobs and food; in the north region of the country where are located the poorest provinces, members of the Wichi aboriginal communities were symbolically crucified by lacing their legs and hands to the extremes of cruces as a protest for inhuman conditions of life of their communities; prisoners from different correctional institutions started a fasting as a protest for the hardly conditions of prisons; primary teachers re-established the ?white carp? on the congress? square by living within a large carp for days and, sometimes, doing fasting as well, as a claim for the impoverishment in the general educational conditions. Unfortunately, the list follows? These ones and other strategies of protest began lately to appear in the public arena showing a strong linkage between bodies and politics. Temporally, let me call these particular social reactions as ?bio-agency,? understood as an especial kind of social praxis where the body becomes a truly active element, and actor?s options are the reflexive emergent of certain conditions of existence/experience. Bio-agencies are not outside but inside of the universe of agencies, which means that between both might be a clear overlapping, simultaneity and, also, as usually occurs, a large collaboration.