Confined Bodies

Used as punishment since antiquity for the political and social dissidents, exile, penal colonies, concentration camps, and prisons have been produced as conceptual and concrete spaces where constructions of the body politic have been contested. How does the experience of the spatialized body produce social and political subjectivities, especially with the employment of discourses of inclusion and exclusion, of grafting and excising onto and from the body politic? In this seminar we will explore these questions especially as they pertain to the instrumentalities that seek to erect rhetorics and narratives of utopias within the enclosures of specific dystopic spaces: prisons, refugee and concentration camps, schools and other morphing institutions of re-formation.