The Body as a Site for Politics: Practices of Contemporary Slavery

Abstract

The panel provides a focus for an emerging field of study. It investigates and reassesses the key case study of practices of contemporary slavery in the light of a reconceptualisation of the body as a site for politics, as a means of tackling afresh the 'what it is to be human' and 'what it is to be a political being' questions, regarded as crucially linked. The key insight the panel explores is that the body and the self are not pre-political. Acknowledging the role of the body as a site for politics represents a shift in the unit of analysis, from the abstract individual (whose body is conceived principally as a container) to embodied intersubjective selves with agency. The mind/body logic which regards bodies as primarily passive and/or dangerous, which excluded women, the working class, ethnic minorities, and slaves from the political realm, has not been fully overcome by the ad hoc political emancipation of such groups. Social discrimination, marginalisation in policy making, and actual harm remain. Contemporary slavery is examined through examples in different countries and in terms of cross-border flows of persons (through trafficking, illegal immigration, and failed refugee status). Slaves are often considered as both abjectly passive, victims of criminal gangs, and as dangerous, in being positioned outside stable narratives of the good citizen, and in their potential for making claims beyond what governments and agencies want to agree to. Such persons do not fit readily into the mainstream liberal notion of the rational, autonomous, speaking, deliberative agent who is, in an important sense, free of their body. The panel brings together specialists on the reconceptualisation of the body with experts on specific case studies on contemporary slavery. The panel will demonstrate the value to empirical case material of extended notions of the body beyond the biological to phenomenological and other theoretical perspectives.

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