Shielding

Being understood as shields, bodies take on an ambivalent status: they serve as protection or buffer and express resistance. At the same time, they turn and are turned into weapons when they intervene politically, in war, in conflicts, and through activism. The contributors offer a collection of conceptual approaches towards bodies becoming shields by addressing the idea of bodily integrity, both in a material sense and with regard to the symbolic and ethical relations that a body entangles. They engage with ongoing debates around the re-evaluation of corporeality and embodiment in contemporary socio-political contexts.