Description:

Please join the International Relations Speaker Series as they host Prof. Noelle Brigden, Associate Professor of Political Science at Marquette University.

Body Geopolitics looks through the lens of fitness to tell the story of El Salvador in its geopolitical context, scaling from the body to the global and back again.  The book shows how fitness, as experienced in post-conflict El Salvador, constitutes a particular form of coloniality emerging from globalization in the shadow of US empire. Fitness is a package of lifestyle practices tied to both consumerism and neoliberal values, such as discipline. As such, it reorganizes racial, class, gender, and national identities in such a way that reinforces and normalizes ableist, socio-economic and political inequities. However, through engagement with feminist concepts of embodiment and somatic approaches to collective trauma and healing, Body Geopolitics also explores potential emancipation from these oppressions. The gym floor can become a critical site where people experience joy and power in their bodies. Physical movement and resistance training in the gym can contribute to social movements that lift communities, not just barbells. Thus, Body Geopolitics proposes that the words that capture our experience of ‘fitness’ come packaged with a double entendre of deeper social and political meaning: power, resistance, performance, mobility, and discipline. Fitness is embodied political struggle.
 
For this reason, Body Geopolitics takes Salvadoran gyms as a starting place to explore questions central to broader debates about gendered bodies, citizenship and belonging under conditions of globalization. Moving from the Cold War into the War on Terror and the War on Gangs, this book puts everyday experiences of the body at the center of the study of global politics thematically. Body Geopolitics also centers the body methodologically by developing ‘trauma-informed’ research that builds on traditions of feminist auto-ethnography. Ultimately, this centering on the body elucidates possibilities for playful resistance to violence."

Dr. Noelle Brigden is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Marquette University. Her research and teaching interests include gender, human security, international relations, borders, transnationalism, violence, the politics of the body, trauma, fieldwork ethics, and political ethnography. She will be presenting work from her forthcoming book, Body Geopolitics, Dr. Brigden is a certified powerlifting coach with special training in trauma-informed lifting and para-powerlifting. She was the 2022 IPF Masters World Champion in the 47kg weight class and holds several U.S. national records in powerlifting.

Please use the "Registration" link for both in-person and virtual attendance.