“Bodies in Transit / Cuerpos en tránsito” (refs. FFI2013-47789-C2-1-P)
“Bodies in Transit 2 / Cuerpos en tránsito 2” (FFI2013-47789-C2-2-P)
While Bodies in Transit 1 and 2 preceded “Trans-formations: Queer Practices of Use and Embodiment in post 9/11 Narratives in English” (Trans-use), PID2023-146450NB-I00, previous projects (“Sexualities and Gender Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Cultures” and “Globalized Cultural Markets: the Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference”) also back up our challenge at present.
“Bodies in Transit/ Cuerpos en Tránsito” (refs. FFI2013-47789-C2-1-P and FFI2013-47789-C2-2-P) added synergies from the previous projects “Sexualities and Gender Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Cultures” and “Globalized Cultural Markets: the Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference”, which shared common epistemological foundations.
Having analyzed the construction of gender and sexual identities in the project “Sexualities”, and their commodification in the global market –in intersection with other differential features of identity, such as ethnicity, class and nation– in the project “Globalized Cultural Markets”, Bodies in Transit 1 engaged in a deeper revision of our common critique to humanist concepts of identity from post-identitarian perspectives, a view that does not completely reject identity but rather envisions it as a contextual/relational political strategy.
“Bodies in Transit 1” focused on the effects that the neoliberal premises characteristic of the postmodern era and their globalization have on our conceptualization of bodies as repositories of difference. It conjointly studied the very processes that construct difference onto specific bodies, considering on the one hand the material experience of the body and, on the other, its representation in a diversity of cultural products circulated in globalized cultures.
“Bodies in Transit 2” consolidated the work started in the former coordinated project (2014-17) aimed at developing methods and practices of analysis of the body in contemporary cultures. Within that general field, we specifically address how bodies have been historically transformed through social relations, discourses, and technologies, and to that end, we draw from feminist, queer, postcolonial and posthumanist theories of the embodied self. The project assembles a strong team of scholars from Spanish universities and foreign institutions of higher learning (thirteen in Europe and three in North America) and has raised considerable support from international External Observers.
Previous general goals
1. To contribute to the theorization about subjectivity from a post-humanitarian and gender perspective with regard to globalization and its social transformations.
2. To examine the representation of systemic and subjective violence in contemporary cultural discourses on a range of cultural forms (literature, popular culture, media, etc.).
3. To relate such violence to the ideological and political discourses that shape the bodies on a global scale in a way that commercialize and make them go beyond the frontiers.
4. To identify literary and cultural proposals that defy neoliberal discourses about late capitalism and offer alternatives to the conceptualization of both the individual and community identity in such a way that overcome the traumatic effects of these discourses.