The International Colloquium Politics and Narratives of the Body aims to open an interdisciplinary dialogue, considering the multiple ways of thinking, representing, embodying and writing corporeality, particularly in contemporary contexts. The policies created around the body generate diverse, dissenting, irreverent and complex narratives, discourses and poetics. In this way, the congress is expected to convene studies on the body and the policies and narratives built around it, from perspectives that include an interdisciplinary approach. Thus, different disciplines of the human, social and artistic sciences would converge in order to transversally think about corporeality.

Argument

1 | The Body In Contemporary Literature

Coordinated by : Marta Pascua Canelo (University of Alcalá, Spain) and Marta Fernández Extremera (University of Granada, Spain)

• More-than-human bodies : technobodies, metamorphoses, animations, new materialities ;
• The senses : corporeality and affects, sensocorpographies ;
• Non-normative corporealities : feminized bodies, racialized bodies, sick, abject, disabled, queer-cuir, crip bodies ;
• Bodies that write : authorial figurations, politics of the body in the literary industry.

Contemporary literatures (re)inscribe the body as a surface of contestation where notions of life, matter, and subjectivity are reconfigured. In this sense, various experimental textualities rewrite the relations between language, body, and power, while simultaneously dismantling the normative regimes that sustain the politics of the sensible. Through hybridity, dissidence, and mutation, bodies in contemporary literature challenge the hierarchies that structure both the cultural field and the social imaginary.

This thematic axis proposes to examine the poetics and politics of the body in 21st-century writing, focusing on its displacements toward the more-than-human, the sensorial, its non-normative figurations, and its authorial inscriptions. The aim is to reflect on how these embodied narratives experiment with alternative modes of existence, circulation, and resistance that strain the boundaries between art and life, between the human and its excesses, configuring in their materiality a critical space for political imagination.

2 | The Body In Latin American Literature

Coordinated by : Andrea Pezzè (Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy) and Lucía Caminada (Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italy)

• Specters, ghosts, and weird corporeality ;
• The trans, queer body : rethinking corporealities ;
• Politics of sexuality.

This section aims to study the diverse corporealities that, through their excesses, eccentricities, overflows, and disruptions, roam anarchically through contemporary Latin American narrative—breaking, in every possible sense, the mold of form, calling into question the very possibility of order, and proposing a profound revision of current epistemological coordinates, cultural categories, and (bio)political arrangements, thereby exposing the conventions on which they rest.

Particular attention will be given to the fissures in the socio-normative fabric provoked by the disturbing ‘appearance’ of impossible bodies (invisible, unrepresentable) within different logics of power—precisely where the discourses of gender, health, and, more recently, that of ‘reality’ itself, both literally and metaphorically, produce monsters.

3 | Embodied Audiovisuals

Coordinated by : Mariana Baltar (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil) y Catarina Andrade (Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Brazil)

• The politics of the body in the filmic body
• Embodied experiences that stress the theories of the image and the look
• Body, affection, performance and performativity
• Colonial and decolonial bodies and imaginaries
• Body genres and their politico-aesthetic relations

This thematic axis addresses contributions that focus on issues regarding bodies at screen and cinematic bodies as locus of political and aesthetic debates. In which capacity, the debate on embodiment, affect and embodied experiences raises distinctive questions to cinema and audiovisual field ? How politics and aesthetic relate to one another in cinematographies or other audiovisual forms that place body and sensations as main strategy (correlations with theoretical approaches such as excess, body genres, performance and haptic regimes are stimulated) ? In which ways, the body taken as methodological starting point and as arena for political agency, troubles narrative traditions, hegemonic ways of productions, of seeing and experiencing audiovisuals works. The proposals submitted to this thematic axe should be able to address critical debates that touches issues such as : the centrality of body, sensations and affect in contemporary context. In this sense, cinema and audiovisual field are sensitive answers that both destabilize and troubles colonial, racialized and cisheteronormative domains and knowledges.

4 | Affections And Transgressions Of The Body In Contemporary Art

Coordinated by : Jessica Ragazzini (Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada / Université de Strasbourg, France)

• Body and posthumanism
• Body and technology
• Body and ecology
• Body and animality

Contemporary art is known for testing the limits of the body, both physical, conceptual and emotional. According to the perspective of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the physical and sensitive limits of the body allow “être au monde”, to interact with our environment, while establishing a tangible border with what surrounds us. What happens when artists shake up corporeality to strive for fusion with “the other” ? In this axis, the “other” can represent both the human and the non-human. In “Mille Plateaux”, the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari invited us to rethink corporeality by considering it as a moving and fluid state. What he calls “Le Corps sans organe” would envisage a disturbance of the human organism, a becoming-machine as much as a becoming-animal. By way of example, it is possible to mention the work “Let the horse live in me !” of Art Orienté Objet which consisted, among other things, of transfusing horse blood into the veins of the artist Marion Laval-Jeantet ; this discursive performativity around biological and ethical limits also drew attention to the commonalities that unite humans and animals. The processes of hybridization of the body with new technologies as Stelarc, ORLAN or Moon Ribas do, present themselves as political manifestos which use technology for the improvement of the human condition. Beyond performance, Patricia Piccinini’s monstrous hyper-realistic sculptures and Unica Zürn’s drawn creatures deconstruct and reconstruct the body, provoking a sense of uncanny Freudian strangeness. Leading to aroused reactions ranging from admiration to repulsion, why is the affect of the spectators so jostled ? How do the transgressions of the body make it possible to give flesh to social, political and cultural issues ? In what ways do explorations around the body make it possible to address issues relating to the human psyche ? What dialogues does art make possible between affections and transgressions of the body ?

5 |Politics Of The Body In Contemporary Activisms

Coordinators : Fernando Gonçalves (Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) y Rose de Melo Rocha (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing-São Paulo, Brazil)

• Body, image and resistance
• Body and political representativeness
• Body and artivism
• Body, digital activism and mediativism

This axis addresses the body as a point of inflection and reflection in the context of contemporary activisms. We are interested here in the analysis and reflections on the production of body images as forms of resistance, as well as the struggles for political representativeness in the field of cultural, racial, gender and sexual identities in social and community movements. The axis also welcomes reflections on the construction of the political body and its performativity in the arts (artivism), on the uses and appropriations of technologies in digital spaces and on the struggles in the contexts of human and non-human rights and environmental activism.

6 | Indigenous Corporality, Human Rights, And Memory

Coordinators : Teresa Basile (National University of La Plata, Argentina) and Emilia Perassi (University of Turin, Italy)

• Representations of Indigenous bodies in the context of internal armed conflicts, dictatorships, genocides, and civil wars that have afflicted Latin American countries since the 1970s and earlier ;
• Figurations of disappeared, murdered, appropriated, violated, displaced, humiliated, imprisoned, sexualized, and tortured bodies in these contexts of radical violence ;
• Corporealities and their strategies of resistance, organization, and struggle during armed conflicts ;
• Active bodies in the political agency developed within human rights institutions, in the struggles for memory, truth, and justice, and in courts and truth commissions ;
• Indigenous bodily narratives and fictions in testimonies, literature, cinema, photography, weaving, altarpieces, theater, poetry, sculpture, performance, and judicial processes referring to these contexts ;
• Theorizations of Indigenous corporeality developed within postcolonial and decolonial studies, Indigenous and Southern epistemologies, and decolonial feminisms, among other perspectives (Frantz Fanon ; Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui ; Lorena Cabnal ; Rita Segato ; Ramón Grosfoguel ; Santiago Castro-Gómez, etc.).

Considering the high percentage of victims among Indigenous communities, this section proposes to investigate Indigenous bodies within the context of so-called internal armed conflicts, dictatorships, genocides, and civil wars that have afflicted various Latin American countries since the 1970s—and even earlier, depending on each national context. What are the specific marks borne by Indigenous victim-bodies under State terrorism and other sources of violence, and what are their bodily strategies of resistance and struggle ?

Since the Latin American tradition that goes back to the Letters, Relations, and Chronicles of the Indies, the native body was positioned in colonial discourse as a form of radical negative otherness vis-à-vis the European conqueror—racialized, feminized, desexualized, infantilized, barbarized, animalized ; represented as primitive, savage, obedient, submissive, defeated, dirty, inarticulate, and so forth (Rolena Adorno ; Walter Mignolo). A discourse saturated with denigrating stereotypes that has continued to circulate across other moments and contexts.

From postcolonial and decolonial studies, Indigenous and Southern epistemologies, and decolonial feminisms, among other perspectives, alternative conceptions have emerged that seek to restore the value of the body within the long history of Indigenous resistance and agency, while also foregrounding the central role that corporeality occupies within Indigenous worldviews. The bodily epistemology developed by Bolivian intellectual and activist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, the notion of territory-body-land articulated by Maya Q’eqchi and Xinka Indigenous community feminist Lorena Cabnal, or the concept of the body as an inscription of ownership (dueñidad) traversed by coloniality and gender proposed by Argentine anthropologist Rita Segato, are among these key frameworks.

In this context, we ask : What new representations of Indigenous bodies have been produced in the dual scenario of, on the one hand, violence exercised by the State and other agents during internal armed conflicts, dictatorships, and genocides, and on the other, the struggles within the field of human rights and the demands for truth, memory, and justice ?

From these questions emerge several projections. The figure of the disappeared Indigenous body, which interrogates and distances itself from familiar images by establishing a bodiless corporeality that unleashes prosthetic forms of the ghost, the specter, the apparition, the haunting—while simultaneously preventing the burial rituals that are central to many native cosmologies.

The sexualized body, subjected to the masculine power of perpetrators and to practices of sexual terrorism such as rape (in the case of women) and other forms of sexual violence (in the case of men). The reproductive body of Indigenous mothers whose pregnancies resulted from rape. The displaced body, expelled from its territory, is likewise a product of extreme violence inflicted by multiple agents, as are the tortured, imprisoned, and dispossessed bodies—all victim-bodies, stripped of rights, rendered vulnerable, and exposed to bare life.

At the other end of the spectrum, agentive corporealities emerge—bodies configured through struggle and resistance, not only in the field of direct confrontation but also in political agency developed within human rights institutions, in the struggles for memory, truth, and justice, and in courts and truth commissions where Indigenous witnesses testified, displaying their distinct bodily marks, dress, and languages.

We therefore ask : What are the Indigenous bodily narratives and fictions—in testimonies, literature, cinema, photography, weaving, altarpieces, theater, poetry, sculpture, performance, and judicial processes—that address these disappeared, appropriated, violated, displaced, humiliated, imprisoned, sexualized, and tortured bodies ? How does the Indigenous victim-body speak—what is its bodily, somatic, symptomatic language ?

7 | Corporality And Gender

Coordinated by : Mala Shikha (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India) and Seema Kumari (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India)

• Representations of the female body in literature, cinema, and other art forms ;
• Clinical and biopolitical gaze on sexuality ;
• Technology and the construction of new female corporalities ;
• Language and body image of women with disabilities.

This thematic axis welcomes contributions focused on the study of the intersections between corporeality and gender. How are women’s bodies and corporealities defined and experienced beyond the limitations of the body ? How are these bodies with disabilities perceived within the socio-cultural framework ? How are they represented in literature, cinema, and other artistic forms ?

The axis encourages a critical reflection on the bodily dimension through the clinical gaze, and promotes its analysis within the Foucauldian framework of the biopolitics of sexuality. Submissions should foster critical debates addressing the issues of language and body image of women with disabilities, as well as proposals that undertake a critical study of the role of technology in constructing new corporalities for women with disabilities.

8 | Corporality, Raciality, And Processes Of Self-Determination

Coordinators : Renata Nascimento (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) y Verônica Lima (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil)

• Racialized corporalities, processes of subjectivation and representation ;
• Coloniality and race ;
• Territorial violence resulting from racial policies ;
• Anticolonial strategies of resistance ;
• Processes of resignification linked to ancestry, rituals, and performative dynamics of reconstructing subjectivity.

The importance and necessity of deepening the racial debate in different sectors of society is recognized, taking into account the centrality of race in processes of subjectivation. In this sense, the thematic axis Corporality, Raciality, and Processes of Self-Determination proposes to establish discussions on processes of oppression, focusing on ethno-racial issues and their intersections with identity and subjectivity. The call seeks works that address themes and conceptual frameworks related to racial questions in dialogue with other social markers such as gender, class, and sexuality, among others. Furthermore, it is of interest to discuss the processes of constructing raciality from diverse geographic territories and temporalities that shape and impact individuals’ paths toward self-determination. This thematic axis welcomes a variety of methodological and theoretical contributions, as well as plural epistemic perspectives, that help to understand the multiple social, political, historical, and discursive practices that denounce or obscure the systems of dehumanization imposed by ethno-racial classifications. The aim is thus to foster debate around racialized corporalities, processes of subjectivation and representation ; coloniality and race ; territorial violence resulting from racial policies ; anticolonial strategies of resistance ; and processes of resignification linked to ancestry, rituals, and performative dynamics of reconstructing subjectivity.

9 | Body And Transhuman Ecologies

Coordinators : Ellen Maria Martins de Vasconcellos (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and David Loría Araujo (National Autonomous University of Yucatán, Mexico)

• Body, Technology, and Transcorporealities ;
• Queer Ecologies, Ecofeminisms, and Postnatural Affects ;
• Poetics of Waste and Inorganic Materialities ;
• Ancestralities, Cosmopolitics, and Plural Ecologies ;
• Speculative Narratives and More-than-Human Futures ;
• Bodily Experimentation, Living Archives, and Interspecies Alliances.

This axis proposes to interrogate the ways in which contemporary narratives, arts, and discourses configure bodies and worlds in states of ecological and technological mutation. In a time marked by environmental catastrophe, neoliberal precarity, and the crisis of the human, the body—neither a fixed nor an isolated entity—emerges as a space of experimentation, archive, and resistance : a territory where the tensions between life and technique, matter and waste, species and machine, are inscribed.

We are interested in exploring transhuman ecologies—those that overflow the boundaries of the organic body to encompass biotechnologies, waste, minerals, algorithms, bacteria, or fictions—and the imaginaries of the future that, from art and literature, seek to reinvent the ways of inhabiting a ruined planet, reconfiguring relations and attachments.

This axis welcomes contributions that reflect on new bodily ontologies, interspecific communities, material and symbolic extractivisms, and aesthetic strategies of survival, with the aim of exploring how bodies—human and more-than-human—can imagine, from the remnants, other possible beginnings where ecology, justice, and corporeality intertwine.

10 | Corporality And Philosophy

Coordinators : Ricardo Pérez Martínez (National Autonomous University of Mexico) and Sofía Mateos (National Autonomous University of Mexico)

• Topoi (or commonplaces) of the body ;
• Boundaries and thresholds of the body ;
• Heterotopias of the body ;
• Metatopologies of the body.
• Topologies of the Body

In The Utopian Body (1966), Michel Foucault contrasts two ways of conceiving the body and its topology. In the first, the body would be an inescapable topia that, through its desire to escape itself, gives rise to fantastic utopias—the soul being its paradigm. In the second, the body becomes the origin and principal actor of all utopias, since it has no fixed or entirely visible place, but rather, from it, all possible places emerge—visible and invisible, open and closed, opaque and transparent, real and fantastic. After all, utopia is the space that, in the strict sense, has no determined location.

To think through these two contrasting narratives, Foucault draws on several key images : the infant, the possessed, the drugged, the corpse, and love. In Powers of Horror (1980), Julia Kristeva also reflects on the body and its topology, specifically concerning its images of boundary and threshold, based on dichotomies such as inside and outside, the living and the dead, being and not-yet-being. This framework allows her to consider the corpse, the criminal, sexuality, and the abject in authors such as James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, and Antonin Artaud.

We invite proposals that, from a philosophical perspective, reflect on the topologies of the body through a freely chosen corpus—from literature to the visual or performing arts, from anthropology to sociology.

Submission guidelines

The abstracts submission period is open until December 15th, 2025. Abstracts must be sent exclusively through this form : https://forms.gle/dKTLWv1PcjNvqwGg9

The organizing committee will notify the results of the submissions evaluation process on January 30th, 2026.

The payment of the registration fee must be made before March 30th, following the instructions that will be sent via email later.

• December 15th, 2025 : Abstracts submissions
• January 30th, 2026 : Notification of the submissions evaluation process’ results to the authors
• March 20th, 2026 : Participant fee payment deadline
• March 30th, 2026 : Publication of the congress program
• April 14th, 15th and 16th, 2026 : Congress
• June, 30th 2024 : Deadline for sending written communications

Practical information

Participant Fees

• General fee : 70 euros
• Latin American residents : 50 euros
• Payment of the registration fee must be made before March 20th, 2026.

The participant fee gives right to :

• Access to all sessions.
• Certificate.
• Possibility of sending an article of the communication to be evaluated for publication.
• Registration And Attendance Fee
• Attendance at conferences is free of charge.

Contact : iiicolloquecorps@gmail.com

Scientific Committee

• Andrea Ostrov, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones, Argentina
• Andrea Pezzè , Università degli studi di Napoli L´Orientale, Italia
• Anna Boccuti, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italia
• Catarina Andrade, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
• Christine Mello, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo
• David Loría Araujo, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Yucatán, México
• Ellen Maria Martins de Vasconcellos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México
• Emilia Perassi ,Università degli studi di Torino, Italia
• Fernando Gonçalves, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
• Gabriele Bizzarri, Università degli studi di Padova, Italia
• Guadalupe Maradei, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Icaro Ferraz Vidal Junior, Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
• Indrani Mukherjee, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Nueva Delhi, India
• Jessica Ragazzini, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canadá/ Université de Strasbourg, Francia
• Laura Scarabelli, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italia
• Lucía Caminada, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italia
• Mariana Baltar, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil
• Marta Pascua Canelo, Universidad de Alcalá, España
• Marta Fernández Extremera, Universidad de Granada, España
• Martin De Mauro Rucovsky, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones, Argentina
• Maurício de Bragança, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil
• Mónica Barrientos, Universidad Autónoma de Chile, Chile
• Paula Bianchi, Universidad Nacional de Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Paula García, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, Brasil/ Marina Abramovic Institute, New York, Estados Unidos
• Paula Sibilia, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil
• Renata Nascimento , Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil
• Ricardo Peréz Martinez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Rosalía Baltar, Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata, Argentina
• Rose de Melo Rocha, Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing, São Paulo, Brasil
• Silvio Mattoni, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
• Sofía Mateos, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, México
• Teresa Basile, Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina
• Teresa López Pellisa, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, España
• Verônica Lima, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brasil
• Zairong Xiang, Duke Kunshan University, China

Organizing Committee

• Lucía Caminada, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Italia
• Fernando Gonçalves, Universidade do Estado de Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Executive Committee And Contacts

• Coordinator and secretariat : Valeria Noguera
• Secretariat and translations : María del Rosario Bakun
• Coordination and communication : Claudia Griselda Rodríguez (iii.colloquecorps@gmail.com)
• Web Manager : Enrico Greco