Bodies, Subjects, and Violence in International Relations

• Published in: Bodies of Violence
• Main Author: Wilcox, Lauren B
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: New York Oxford University Press 02.01.2015; Oxford University Press, Incorporated
• Subjects: International relations; liberalism; biopolitics; subjectivity; bodies; feminism; International Relations theory; violence
• ISBN: 0199384487; 9780199384488
• DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199384488.003.0002

Chapter 1 provides a reading of how the subject of International Relations has been theorized in relation to human bodies and violence. The chapter argues that bodies have been problematically understood in liberal humanist terms as individual, material objects, preexisting politics, that house sovereign subjects. Furthermore, contemporary practices of violence are constituted not only in reference to sovereign power, as most IR theory assumes, but biopower as well. Biopolitical practices of violence call our attention to the question of how bodies are constituted as objects and what the parameters and possibilities for embodied subjectivity are. Compared to International Relations, feminist theory has been much more attentive to questions of embodied subjectivity related to power and violence. Engaging with feminist theorists, the chapter provides a conceptualization of a body politics that understands bodies as produced by, and productive of, social and political relations.