Corpo(real)ities

edited by Chris Snyder

“Corpo(real)ities” asks us to wonder with digestive folds, dripping honey, ‘unruly’ archives, intersex genitalia, salivary glands and hungers. The title’s parenthetical “real” denotes a material emphasis, while also loosening the processes of meaning-making inscribed upon bodily comportments and junctures. These reviews inquire across myriad patterns and experiences of consumption and expulsion; they sit with and against blockages, cravings, and demands. These texts open corporeal existence with their varied attention to how ‘the material’ encounters ‘realness;’ they ask us to grasp both where structural disruptions accumulate physically as well as where resistance does. We read how material and social conditions rearrange matter, but also how matter rejects compliance: how it queers entanglements, kinning, decolonial praxis, and spatiotemporal phenomena. Moreover, these reviews embrace leakiness. Far from submitting to any Cartesian split, “Corpo(real)ities” thinks, feels, and reaches for the tangled and unkempt relations of the bodymind in and with the material world.

To lead us beyond digestion as metaphor, Sriyanka Basak’s review of Dissident Gut and Paige Welsh’s review of Land of Famished Beings, attend to the concreteness of food’s interfacing with global biopolitics. Sriyanka Basak’s engagement with Jean Walton’s work appreciates the complex braiding of materialist, feminist, and ecological thought, which links “micro-peristalsis to macro-politics” across trans-historical case studies. Her review lauds Walton’s “abolitionist and ecological horizon where peristaltic politics unites the bathroom, the border, and the body politic.” Building on this political impetus of foodways and hungers, Paige Welsh reviews Sophie Chao’s methodologically “hesitant anthropology” living with the Marind people of West Papua. Welsh addresses, “You cannot know hunger from reading a book, but you must know there is hunger, and ours is implicated in an interwound world.” Following Chao’s analysis of Marind satiation, involving reciprocity with the forest and more-than-human worlds, Welsh also expertly conveys the book’s attention to corporate settler colonialism invading Papuan life via the palm oil industry. She ends the review with a poignant and haunting reminder, “There’s genocide in Papua you may have never heard of, and you may be eating its fruits right now. It is an unsatiating realization, which makes Choa’s project a solemn success.”  

Taking us to the queer implications of embodiment, Kelvin Ronghan Qin reviews Iain Morland’s Intersex: A Manifesto Against Medicalization. This entry works alongside its text to urge against the self-estrangement forced medically onto intersex bodies, noting that invasive surgical interventions focus more on visual ideas of “normalization” rather than genital use and tactility. Thus, “the genital is trapped in a temporality marked by delay and interruption” creating an asynchronous embodied perception. Embracing the needs of the postsurgical intersex body, Morland suggests that queer theory’s centralizing of sexual pleasure in activism might instead be replaced by ‘reaching.’ Qin illuminates this notion as “grounding desire instead in movement, orientation, and relational becoming rather than in physical sensations.” Ultimately, Kelvin Ronghan Qin celebrates Morland’s ability, and the necessity, to write across medical, gender, and trauma discourses. Furthermore, the practice of reaching and dynamic movement extends in the Chicana praxis of María Cotera’s Fleshing the Archive. Here, the past is written with, in all its still-unfolding momentums. Elizabeth Martinez reviews Cotera’s riveting exploration of memory and commitment to fluid conceptualizations of archival practice. This review beautifully admires Cotera’s personal turn, particularly the intimate revelations founded in conjunction with her mother’s sprawling and unordered materials. Crucially, Martinez emphasizes the importance of this book in light of the ongoing threats to Chicana feminist lifeways and scholarship, honoring the necessity for ‘tlamatini praxis’ like radical community access and organizing, in ongoing and embodied materializations of archival memory.

Meeting the reader at the sensuous intersections of food, body, and art, Winona Guo and Lauren Schilling consume Summer Kim Lee’s Spoiled and Lesley A. Wolff’s Culinary Palettes. For Guo, Spoiled “drip[s] in honey” moving between ruination and ravishment, all while asking, “What about the racialized, gendered representation and aspiration of the Asiatic body must not be refused but rather allowed to rot, attuned to and even enjoyed in its decomposing?” This piece delights in the possibility and excess of spoiling, as a “critical process of deidealizing and deforming its subject formation.” Drenched in performance art pieces of leaking breasts and “excessively sweet want,”Winona Guo’s writing cherishes Summer Kim Lee’s sensorium which troubles and decays “the culturally-produced ideal of feeling Asian enough.” In a corresponding realm of visual arts, Lesley A. Wolff’s Culinary Palettes, takes up the ways that photography, painting, and mural reflect post-revolutionary Mexican food practices. Considering Wolff’s “critical framework of heritage-as-food,” Lauren Schilling skillfully portrays the complexity of food visuals which complicate and analyze “facets of national identity formation, intersectional identities, and the lasting legacy of foodways.” They thoroughly engage Wolff’s case-studies of mole poblano, sandía, and bebidas, which visualize mestizo nationalisms, transatlantic analysis, andindigenous nursing practices respectively. 

The reviews of “Corp(real)ities” take on the haptic, knotted, and synesthetic implications of material encounter. They submerge us in guttural depths and skim flesh’s surfaces; we emerge to rot, extend, or supplant the boundaries of embodiment and politics.