Bodies – Doing Politics

6.1 Body politics

We tend to delete the body from political discourse in favour of the mind: we focus on the rational over the corporeal and physical, on cognition over emotion, on orality and literacy over style and dexterity. Yet the human body remains central and essential to the conduct of politics […]

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6.2 Body talk

We express ourselves in ways other than words: in posture and gesture, in the ways we stand or sit, by waving our arms and hands, and sometimes simply by being present, by putting our bodies forward as signs […]

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6.3 Political physiology

Eating is at the centre of human sociality, and so is part of our politics, too. We eat in families, at parties and weddings, with colleagues at work. We eat together, and the way we eat has much to do with the kind of togetherness we have. We do politics in our eating […]

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6.4 Collective actions

To demonstrate is invariably to walk, together. Most demonstrations entail a march to a point of assembly and speech-making, while some consist principally in collective walking […]

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6.5 Political feelings

Anger has been described as ‘an indispensable political emotion’. Aristotle defined it in his Rhetoric as ‘an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight […]

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6.6 Face-to-face

US President Richard Nixon went to China in February 1972, opening diplomatic relations with Mao and changing the dynamics of the Cold War. Henry Kissinger, his Secretary of State, went to China six months before, in July 1971, in great secrecy and in order to explore the possibility of a Nixon visit […]

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