Transcorporeal politics in the COVID-19 health emergency: An essay on the body as collaboration and governance

Abstract

Two discursive categories triggered by the COVID-19 sanitary emergency are proposed: body-ecology and the body-discipline. The first is intertwined with the affirmative concept of what Stacy Alaimo called transcorporeality in favor of an empathic action and management towards the environment. The second opens the way to a “dark” version of this same transcorporeality: the control, governance and surveillance of the sick body. The analysis of both possibilities seeks to complexify a vision of possibilities to overcome western notions of individuality and essentialism (the body-identity) sustained by the extractivist enterprise of the environment. This exercise takes into account the risks of governance still present in bodies sickened by another of the great forgotten pandemics of recent history: HIV-AIDS. Artistic projects analyzed by curators, producers and academics are presented with the aim of crystallizing in a practical way the ideas displayed in the text.