Journal for Educators, Teachers and Trainers

Abstract

The body is the support of our practices, it is shaped by them, it is real, material, given and, at the same time, it is restrained to multiple representations that change over time, places and ways of symbolizing, languages and cultures. The body is an intersection between the social and the individual, between nature and culture, the psychological and symbolic, the economic and the political. Body is where class, gender, race, ethnic group intersect, but it is also where strategies of resistance are unleashed. The question of body has been read by feminists in a political key for centuries. This subject has implied a history marked by the repeated efforts of expelling the body out of the spotlight, or by the identification between women and sex. There were some operations of neutralization and reduction to biology, such as hiding, objectifying and sexualisation of women that had found in our bodies the roots of our restraint. This is the reason why we insist on the political consequences of incarnation against the insistence for removing corporality, for neutralizing human sexuality and transform it in an irrelevant piece of information. The critic to the rule of binary sex and heterosexuality as sense organizer and producer of shaped individuals made the discussions of the last years more complex.