Long abstract: Culture flows, circulates, changes, stabilizes, and destabilizes. Culture is processes, relations, and performances, it is argued. But what about materialities - do they also flow and circulate on their own? In the paradigm of diffusion material forms crossed national borders and 'traveled alone' according to cultural geographies. Later things got their own biographies and social livesof changing meanings (Appadurai 1986) or even became actors with agency (Latour 1993). However, the materiality of the biological and gendered body is often seen as a kind of threshold for social and discursive constructions and inscriptions of meaning 'on a material surface'. The performative strategy, as led by Butler (1993), reintroduced the sexed body in its materiality, but the question remains as to whether this understanding is limited to discourses about the body or whether a much broader range of material-discursive practises must be employed if we are to investigate and understand how the body is enacted in all its concrete complexity. Taking the point of departure in a auto-ethnographic case where 'academic bodies' met in a Turkish hamam, it is argued, that bodies as material-discursive phenomena come to matter, and are (de)stabilized and reconfigured in ongoing processes and circulations.
Fotogalerii