ABSTRACT
We have been tasked within this chapter to write on and about ‘embodiment and reflexive body politics’ as (separately and conjointly) related to the broader physical cultural studies (PCS) project. Our work to date, individually and collectively, has focused on embodiment, reflecting upon how we as critical, interpretivist, anti-/non-foundationalist researchers might best make sense of the moving body in empirically nuanced, culturally attentive ways (see e.g. Bunds, Newman, and Giardina, 2014; Giardina and Newman, 2011b; Grainger, Falcous and Newman, 2012; Newman and Giardina, 2014). Further, we have recently written a series of articles seeking to unsettle the ontological and epistemological moorings seemingly inherent to such a deep culturally corporeal approach (see e.g. Giardina and Laurendeau, 2013; Giardina and Newman, 2011a, 2011c; Newman, 2011, 2013). Despite, if not because of, our recent forays into what we could define as the nascent PCS project, we have more questions than answers with regard to the interpretive body, and the disquiet thereof (and certainly as they relate to one another). In what follows, then, we offer a series of mediations about our struggles in coming to terms with the empirical and metaphysical bases of physical cultural studies. In particular, we deconstruct our chapter’s title as a series of articulations which, in our estimation, need to be reconciled in order to move the physical cultural studies project forward – those being:
the body as and in embodiment;
the body politic and/as body politics; and
reflection and/as reflexivity (i.e. empirical techne).
