Abstract
This commentary underscores critical practices from Jane’s “Unruly Bodies” seminar that Ali, a student in the course and Jane’s advisee, has since mobilized towards anti-colonial organizing. Purposely experimental, the seminar attempted to rethink embodiment as intercorporeal and thus as capable of generating new ways to think about agency and solidarity in contexts marred by forms of militarization, medical violence, and histories of domination. Thinking through our bodyminds as both terrains of contestation and weapons in broader struggles for liberation required us to cultivate a classroom space of radical openness and vulnerability. We describe these efforts, as well as our broader orientation to community and struggle in the course, to show how they provided both theoretical tools and political strategies for engaging in direct action. Focusing specifically on a die-in as a form of embodied action aimed at a ceasefire in Gaza, we show how attuning to our bodies collectively can generate political consciousness, forge coalitions of anti-colonial resistance, and enable new forms of activism rooted in intercorporeality.
Recommended Citation
Imran, Muhammad Ali and Saffitz, Jane L.
(2025)
"Towards a Pedagogy of Unruly Bodyminds,"
Feminist Pedagogy: Vol. 5:
Iss.
5, Article 4.
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/feministpedagogy/vol5/iss5/4