“Bodies in Transit/ Cuerpos en Tránsito” (refs. FFI2013-47789-C2-1-P and FFI2013-47789-C2-2-P) adds synergies from the previous projects “Sexualities and Gender Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Cultures” and “Globalized Cultural Markets: the Production, Circulation and Reception of Difference”, which shared common epistemological foundations.

The new coordinated project focuses on the effects that the neoliberal premises characteristic of the postmodern era and their globalization have on our conceptualization of bodies as repositories of difference. It will conjointly study the very processes that construct difference onto specific bodies, considering on the one hand the material experience of the body and, on the other, its representation in a diversity of cultural products circulated in globalized cultures.

Having analyzed the construction of gender and sexual identities in the project “Sexualities”, and their commodification in the global market –in intersection with other differential features of identity, such as ethnicity, class and nation– in the project “Globalized Cultural Markets”, we wish to engage
now in a deeper revision of our common critique to humanist concepts of identity from post-identitarian perspectives, a view that does not completely reject identity but rather envisions it as a contextual/relational political strategy.

Keeping a foot on classic theories of difference (racial, sexual, gender) at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial and queer studies, which have been so fruitful to our previous projects, we intend to place more emphasis now on theory and cultural critique regarding the following main research topics:

• posthumanism, in relation to technology but also to sexuality (following Rossi Braidotti’s and Donna Haraway’s pathbreaking lines of thought);
• analysis of current necropolitics (Achille Mbembe’s term), in the context of armed conflicts and humanitarian narratives;
• theories of trauma and healing and their artistic expression, both in relation to the global necropolitics of armed struggles and to gender violence in a more private sphere;
• specific theories of globalization, paying special attention to neoimperialism and neo-Orientalism and their impact on cultural production (using founding texts by Hardt and Negri, Gilroy, Huggan, Spivak, Appadurai or Castells, among others).

We will analyze contemporary cultural productions in a number of different formats (literature, film, visual arts), attending to the transnational character of globalized cultures as well as to the transformative processes of the posthuman body and of the cultural corpus of diverse communities in the global context.

General goals:

1. To contribute to the theorization about subjectivity from a post-humanitarian and gender perspective with regard to globalization and its social transformations.
2. To examine the representation of systemic and subjective violence in contemporary cultural discourses on a range of cultural forms (literature, popular culture, media, etc.).
3. To relate such violence to the ideological and political discourses that shape the bodies on a global scale in a way that commercialize and make them go beyond the frontiers.
4. To identify literary and cultural proposals that defy neoliberal discourses about late capitalism and offer alternatives to the conceptualization of both the individual and community identity in such a way that overcome the traumatic effects of these discourses.