Cirrus@Austlit

'Approaching through the lens of transnational corporeal feminism, this article reflects upon the veiled, inscribed, and stripped bodies as the rhetoric of protest and site of justice negotiation in the works of Sylvia Plath, Imtiaz Dharker, Shirin Neshat and Randa Abdel-Fattah. Undeniably, the root of sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism, and ageism lies in the forceful denial, or attempt to erase the bodily existence, of the marginalised other. Corporeal feminism is about revealing this purposeful denial of “unwanted” bodies and the structural process of terrorising and monstracising those bodies. Above all, it is not enough to kill those bodies or let those bodies die: more importantly, the bodies must be a spectacle of shame, what Jasbir Puar calls "debilitation" in her book 'The Right to Maim'. The bodies of the oppressed are the site of fear for the oppressor and hence become the space to prove the oppressor’s superiority of maleness, whiteness, and ableism. This article examines the strategic feminist praxis of embodied epistemology and how the assaulted, shamed, veiled, and erased bodies could be weaponised in feminist consciousness raising.' 

(Publication abstract)