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forwarded on behalf of Mathias Detamore. The Body: Embodiment, Politics and Practice CALL FOR PAPERS: AAG International Meeting, Boston MA - spring 2008 Sponsored by: Sexuality and Space Speciality Group Organizer: Mathias Detamore, University of Kentucky Contact: [log in to unmask] There is a long standing understanding in the "post" turn in social theory through Foucault that population as it began to be understood through "liberal governmentality" is a technology of the state. Through this idea of governmentality, the body itself enters into a particular relationship with the state, as discourses circulate between bodies managing the deployment and maintenance of social relations. Contemporary theories of the body continue to destabilize common Enlightenment ideals that the (white, male, heterosexual) body is a bounded and immutable object - specifically, but not limited to how that relates to an understanding of masculinity (again white, male and heterosexed - and perhaps middle class) as the single, disembodied and transcendent source of rationality. As theories of the body continue to interrogate the relationship of the body to social relations more and more work has been recovered on the "embodied" qualities of being one's body qua body (re)dressing issues of the permeability of the body from what goes in and out of bodies to how bodies are marked in particularly visceral, corporeal ways. Meanwhile, the body as a unit of population is still rigorously brought under the purview of the deployment of state, from policies that continue to scrutinize the moral and ethical impacts of sex on society to late capitalist assumptions about the body as a site for consumption. This paper session seeks papers that deal with a range of spatial, temporal, social, cultural, economic, political, radical, etc impacts of how the body is implicated in the production of the state and statecraft. These papers can be at any scale from micro-geographies of the body to broad national and international policies that seek to keep the body "in its place". In this way, state is defined past its pragmatic borders but seen rather as many forms of disciplinary institutions and apparatuses that define how bodies relate to each other and/or what ways bodies can/have transgress(ed) these boundaries/limitations. Any topic that relates to the body in relationship to their management in space is welcome - from the body as a fluid, leaky, messy, unbounded entity running up against the embodiment of desire and the expectations demanded of "proper" citizenship, to the body as a commodified representation of gender regimes that normalize power relations of gendered, raced, classed, sexed, aged, abled (and so forth) bodies. Broad areas of focus can include but should certainly not be limited to: -bodily fluids and practice -body and disciplinary machines -the state and population -the body and sexuality/gender/ambiguity -public/private toilets and expectation -genderqueer bodies -the body and abjection -the body as spectacle -bodies of masculinit(ies)y -pregnant bodies in (public/private) space -the menstruating body and body politics -the body and statecraft - managing the corporeal -the body as the site for hetero-/homo-normativity