ABSTRACT
Despite being undertheorized in IR for decades, recent work by critical theorists in IR suggests that bodies and embodiment are no longer entirely ‘absent presences’ in IR. Critical theorists since the mid twentieth century in particular have theorized the body as increasingly the target of discipline and other forms of management and control. However, crucial to various critical projects has been the recognition that subjects also experience the world in and through their embodiment. As such bodies are also the site of many forms of politics of resistance and reconfigurations of relations of power. In this piece, I argue that critical work on bodies and embodiment should refuse to draw distinctions between the physical and the social bodies, and seek instead to analyze the ways in which bodies are materialized and the ways in which such a materialization of the body is or can be resisted. I discuss the pitfalls of approaches that take the body as the grounds for the subject or an object to be investigated. I also defend the importance of a relational model of embodiment that foregrounds how bodies are embedded within networks of social and political relations with other bodies as well as ecological and affective environments and infrastructures that may or may not sustain them.
