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In the preceding two chapters, on flesh and bone respectively, I have outlined an
approach to the embodied, geopolitical body that does not thereby presume an
individuated corporeality. There is a diversity of content and capacity apparent
here that, at the broad scale, underlines the potentialities of the matter in hand and
which, more specifically, opens out the not only the physio-biological capacities
that help comprise the subject of a classical geopolitics, but also the making of
gendered knowledges pertaining to these. Yet, as Rosi Braidotti (2002) points out,
there is a diversity within diversity – a singling out amidst a universal matter-ing,
one might say – that must be accounted for, insofar as within particular contexts
it is precisely this gendering that matters. In this chapter, I want to take on board
this attentiveness to singularity and context, and address particular corporealities
that, because of their specific biologies – the twists and whirls of flesh and bone,
the textures and pigments of hair and skin, the presence and absence of bodily
symmetries and so on – and the visceral as well as interpretive apprehension of
these, have become pivotal to a geopolitics driven by abhorrence. That is, I want to
dwell on how these whirls and textures, presences and absences, are apprehended
as significant in the context of larger ensembles such as a corporeal body, but
also of a social body such as a population, and a Natural order pertaining to the
world as we know it. Indeed, what is interesting about these fleshy/boney features
is how they become configured as synecdoches – that is, representative of and
indicating – wider disorderings, which in turn, reveal by their very ‘wrongness’
what the world should look like. Though such a conjuring of ‘wrongness’ can, of
course, be conveyed through words and imagery, and can engender a suite of ‘felt’
emotions, there is also a profound aesthetic dimension to such engagements that
speaks to all manner of learned, embodied responses that, though they may be
rationalised, are neither subsumed nor represented by reason.