The Crossroads of the Sexed Body (ENCRUSEX)

The rise of the new materialisms in social sciences and humanities in the past twenty years, together with epochal challenges such as the climate emergency and the pandemic crisis, have brought to the fore the concern about bodies in particular and matter in general. Contemporary philosophical debates have often been marked by an underlying dichotomy or conflict between nature, biology, and matter on the one hand, and culture, language, discourses and symbolic regimes, epistemological frames and norms, sociocultural practices and conventions, and power relations, on the other. Following those thinkers that hold this binary opposition to be impoverishing and/or fundamentally mistaken, “The Crossroads of the Sexed Body: Cultural Matter and Material Cultures of Sexuality” (ENCRUSEX) proposes a notion of the sexed body understood as a crossroads or problematic field constituted and sustained by a plurality of processes, agents, dimensions, and differential relations that cannot be separated into water-tight compartments. The main aim of this project is to provide a conceptual tool that will allow a multidisciplinary engagement with the sexed body that does not foreclose it within a binary schema, such as sex or gender (or, more generally, nature or culture), but affirms the entanglement and co-implication of the manifold of elements and relations that form the body. To do so, ENCRUSEX defends that conflicting theories on the status of the body must be put together in a common theoretical assemblage in order to apprehend the complexity and multidimensionality of sexed bodies. In particular, ENCRUSEX will foster a space of exchange between different approaches that include the already mentioned new materialisms, poststructuralism and critical theory, contemporary scientific discourses on the sexed body, the philosophy of biology, feminist theories and metaphysics, phenomenology, philosophy of birth, and psychoanalysis; that is, a number of theories that in the past decades have invited us to rethink the sexed body not as an immutable and fixed essence but as problematic processes. Ultimately, ENCRUSEX seeks to create a lexicon, a conceptual background, and a set of argumentative resources that can enrich and nuance the discussions on the nature, experience, and practices of sexed bodies.

"The Crossroads of the Sexed Body: Cultural Matter and Material Cultures of Sexuality" (PR27/21-020) is funded by the Regional Government of Madrid and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid under the V-PRICIT agreement, line “Fostering the Research of Young Investigators”.