Embodied Activisms explores activists’ use of their bodies to resist hegemonic power and promote justice. This book spans historical perspectives, current contexts including police accountability activism and Black Lives Matter, and the most recent scholarship to interrogate activist engagement from the Americas to the Mediterranean.

Embodied Activisms explores how activists use their bodies to resist social norms, engage with institutions, and promote change. This book spans historical perspectives, current contexts, and the most current scholarly literature to interrogate how embodied activisms are read, performed, understood, and actualized. The studies in this volume address current, critical issues such as police accountability activism, the climate crisis, environmental concerns, and protests of Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Chapters analyze a wide range of nonviolent mobilization tactics, including silent protests, embodied witnessing, leisure spectacle demonstrations, performance art and other forms of creative practice, and rallies. Analyses engage with aspects of intersectionality in activism and critique diverse modes of embodied resistance in locations including East Central Europe, the Americas, and the Mediterranean region.

Table of Contents

Ouverture: Embodied Activisms

Victoria A. Newsom & Lara Martin Lengel

Section I: Theorizing Embodied Activisms

Chapter 1: Centuries of In/Visibility: Origins of Embodied Activism as Theory and Practice Victoria A. Newsom, Lara Martin Lengel, and Desiree A. Montenegro

Chapter 2: Police Accountability Activism as Feminist Ethics: Theorizing Non-Violent Embodied Witnessing
Mary Angela Bock

Chapter 3: Visual Disruptions as Embodied Activism: Leisure Spectacle Demonstration Casey R. Schmitt

Chapter 4: The [De]meaning of Incorruptible Flesh: Marginalized Bodies and the Performance of Desire

Billy Huff & Margaret Cavin Hambrick

Chapter 5: Lay Down Your 'Body Burdens' and Write: (Re)Forming Environmental Science

Through Narratives of Toxicity and Healing

Arlene Plevin

Section II: Witnessing, Remembering

Chapter 6: Palestinian Dedications, Commitments, and Persistence: Decolonial Memory-work During the Seventieth Anniversary of the Nabka

Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik

Chapter 7: Embodied Witnessing and the Struggle for Memory in Budapest’s Szabadságszínpad Protests

Natalie Bennie

Chapter 8: An Actor-Network Approach: The Role of Art in Public Spaces in the Gezi Protests

Nora Suren

Section III: Silence and In/Visibility

Chapter 9: A Handmaid’s Tale of Protest: Analyzing Intersectionality in Silence-Body-Image

Jordin Clark

Chapter 10: Embodied (L)Activism: Mothering and/as Embodied Nourishing

Molly Wiant Cummins

Chapter 11: Subversive Silence: Productive Discomfort as Embodied Activism

Sakina Jangbar

Chapter 12: Emerging Activisms: Responding to Current and Future Crises

Desiree A. Montenegro, Victoria A. Newsom, and Lara Martin Lengel