Bodies and racialization

The body, by becoming an object, a knowable entity, has attracted multiple disciplines for its study. Which body is being discussed depends on the question being asked and how it is objectified. The process of objectifying the body has gone through different stages; each culture and era proposes distinct approaches, and if we consider the long term, we cannot speak of a single human body. Hence, we refer more to corporealities, that is, the different, distinct, and controversial ways of being in the body, of becoming a body, of representing it, studying it, naming it, dissecting it—in short, the multiple disciplinary, artistic, and ecstatic approaches to the body.

The process of racialization established by colonial capitalist modernity has centered on the body. In the societies of metropolitan empires, an ideal of the aesthetic, the beautiful, the normal was established, and the diversity of others was objectified, even deformed, monstrous, and established as just another resource to be exploited. Thus, slavery and domination, as processes intrinsic to capitalist expansion, were naturalized as universal or universalized as natural. By being objectified, they were captured in multiple ways through science, the arts, economics, and politics. This racial classificatory order remains in force even though it is denied. And yet, it is precisely from the body that resistance arises, from collective and creative configurations where corporeality expresses and manifests strategies of liberation. 

This seminar will present various historical and current approaches that will allow the topic to be revisited from different perspectives.