Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations
Lauren B. Wilcox
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: December 2014
Epigraph
1 Bodies, Subjects, and Violence in International Relations
2 Dying Is Not Permitted
3 Explosive Bodies
4 Crossing Borders, Securing Bodies
5 Body Counts
6 Vulnerable Bodies and the "Responsibility to Protect"
(p.190) Conclusion
Bodies of Violence
The Conclusion brings together the arguments and interventions of this work, addressing them to the theorizing of practices of violence in relation to embodied subjects. The author has argued that a conception of the subject as embodied is necessary for understanding the dynamics of contemporary practices of international security and international political violence. Feminist theory and the work of Judith Butler in particular provide a way of theorizing the embodied subject as ontologically precarious: a "posthuman" body with no clear line between the natural and cultural: a body as produced by politics as well as possessing the capacities to generate politics itself. The Conclusion highlights the threads of this argument as discussed in each of the chapters, and ends with a discussion of how theorizing the subject as precariously embodied reveals violence as a force for the making and remaking of embodied subjects, forming both bodies and worlds.
Keywords: bodies, embodiment, violence, feminism, posthuman