Description
This paper seeks to re-think embodied dissent in relation to agonistic peace, as well as the role of the body/embodiment in theorizing the agonistic subject in the context of conflict and war. It examines the performative body and its emotional, spatial, and visual manifestation in the context of embodied protests and dissent, beginning with the idea that the performative body can be viewed as a potential site of resistance. The paper defines agonistic confrontation/struggle as a performative and epistemically disruptive politics that creates political spaces for the emergence of new subjectivities by using agonism, peace, and embodiment as prisms to understand and deconstruct the embodied experiences of people living the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on a daily basis. The paper draws on insights from feminist, ethnographic fieldwork in Israel/Palestine in 2022 to shed light on questions such as: In what ways does political, epistemic struggle allow for agonistic peace, and in what ways are spaces for agonistic interactions and relations made available? In what ways do performances, bodies and embodied experiences render a space more or less agonistic? And, how do these embodied practices potentially transform different subjectivities agonistically?
