CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2019
| Author | Heredia Pineda, Angela Patricia |
|---|---|
| Title | Porous Bodies: Rewriting The Historicity Of The Body From A Posthumanist And Decolonial Perspective |
| Summary | This thesis explores the need to rethink the way in which the historical temporality of the body has been articulated as a transition from an animal/prehistoric embodiment to a human/historical one, using as a point of departure a dialogue between feminist posthuman and decolonial thought. Current trends of the historiography of the body tend to consider the body as constituted by human culture or as determined by biological and natural structures, giving to each perspective different temporalities and chronological frames. Through a genealogical exercise focused in narratives from the sixteenth century (Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés Sepúlveda) and the nineteenth century (Daniel Wilson), I argue that each of these perspectives is anchored in an iterative citationality of a colonial/modern understanding of the temporality of the body with two stages defined by colonial classifications: In one, the materiality of the human body is porous to external forces that bring it closer to the body of the animal and make its temporality much slower. In the other one, Man exceeds this animal materiality and is porous to his autonomous internal forces bringing a progression towards his full humanity. This shows that rethinking the historicity of the body beyond the bodies of Man requires recognizing that anthropocentric differentiations are sustained by colonial classifications in the current modern/colonial system, which invites to look at the posthuman through decolonial eyes, as well as opening decolonial thought to the innovative conceptualizations of the feminist posthumanities. To develop this, I cross-fertilize the thought of Elizabeth Grosz and Sylvia Wynter, with the purpose of searching theoretical paths that unsettle this prefiguration of modern/colonial bodies. First, their thought proposes a dynamic and undetermined relation between biology and culture and matter and meaning. Second, they open the temporality of history to the future and the virtual, which challenges the narrative of progress towards Man through accumulation. Furthermore, for them history is not about the reproduction of the past, but about opening spaces for remembering different embodied futures. |
| Supervisor | Yoon, Hyaesin; Timár, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2019/heredia_angela.pdf |
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