Performing Embodiment: Choreographies of Affect, Language, and Social Norms (Cultural Inquiry)

Combining the notions of performativity and embodiment, this book situates the body in the realm of processes, movement, and poiesis, seeking to generate alternative configurations to mind-body dualism. Focused on language, literature, dance, affect, gender, sport, and disability, the contributions to this volume emphasize doing over being: the body does and is done; it is engaged in a movement of co-constitution with the world. It is in doing that bodies produce knowledge and shared or contested social meaning. Such a relational process is best described through the notion of choreographies - patterns of movement which capture the embodied dynamic of passivity and activity, design and improvisation, inner and outer states, and which fittingly describe the modalities through which social norms discipline bodies, or are challenged by them.

Federica Buongiorno is an Assistant Professor in Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology of Technology at the University of Florence, Italy. Her research interests include Husserlian and post-Husserlian phenomenology, the philosophy of technology (with a special focus on AI, algorithmic thinking and the digital culture), psychoanalysis, and cyberfeminism. She received her PhD in Philosophy in 2013 from Sapienza University of Rome and has been a post-doctoral researcher at several academic institutions in Italy and Germany, including the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in 2021-2022. She is the co-founder and co-editor in chief of the philosophical book series Umweg (Inschibboleth editions) and the editor-in-chief of the international journal of philosophy 'Azimuth'. Her latest book is titled Iperindividualità. L'individuazione nel presente tecnologico (Meltemi 2025). She is also a translator from German and collaborates with several Italian publishers.

Alberica Maria Bazzoni is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University for Foreigners of Siena, Italy. She completed her PhD at the University of Oxford, and then held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Warwick and a Research Fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. She is the author of Il presente vivo. Temporalità del divenire e del trauma in Lispector, Ortese e Philip (2025) and Writing for Freedom: Body, Identity, and Power in Goliarda Sapienza's Narrative (2018), and co-editor of 'The Politics of Translation', Comparative Critical Studies (2023); Gender and Authority (2020); and Goliarda Sapienza in Context (2016). Her current research explores textual performativity and feminist and decolonial literary imaginaries of trauma and resistance.