Disembodiment

Book excerpt: Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Banu Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair, taking the reader on an unsettling journey that passes through the suicides of enslaved Africans, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists, Gandhian fasting practices, Bouazizi's self-incineration, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers to chart a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment offers a bold materialist theory of corporeal agency that upholds the fundamental rebelliousness of the body.