The politics of becoming bodies: Sex, gender and intersubjectivity in motion

• Bodies are considered not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena.
• A critical engagement with a range of feminist bio-psycho-social and performative discourses of sex, gender and bodies.
• I examine the role that the screendance Becoming Bodies has played in knowledge production and re-visioning body politics.
• The material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies highlight a co-implication of biology and body politics.
• The implications for clinical practices include re-thinking intersubjectivity in terms of mutual entaglement and body ownership.

This paper presents readers with one (research) story about (sexed and gendered) bodies not as objects with inherent boundaries and properties but as material-discursive phenomena. In telling such a story I examine the role that the screendance, Becoming Bodies, has played in knowledge production and argue for a less ontologically ‘old fashioned’ view of what counts as ‘evidence’. Throughout the paper I draw from a range of feminisms: biological, phenomenological, poststructural, psychoanalytical, and post humanist and performative scholarship of sex and gender. These discourses contest nature/nurture, male/female, body/mind dualisms, and take the political and ethical view that bodies are not neutral; that sex and gender, being a woman or a man are both socially and biologically constructed forms of identity (similar to class and race) that are acquired and learned through socio-cultural regimes of discipline and intersubjective bodily practices. Building on this dynamic and developmental bio-psycho-social view I discuss selected aspects of interview data: (1) the material-discursive tensions and contradictions of sexing and gendering bodies and (2) troubling the intersubjective implications of this for clinical practices.