What Can A [Feminist] Body Do? Immanent and Emergent Capacities of Bodies at Chinchorro and Wor Barrow

Abstract

What can a body do? To answer Baruch Spinoza's question, we engage with posthumanist feminist concepts of nomadic subjectivity and relations with non-humans. Through an exploration of two ‘patches’, the Chinchorro Mummies of the Atacama Desert in South America and the burials at Wor Barrow in the Neolithic of southern England, we suggest that these approaches open up a new way of encountering past bodies. What capabilities do bodies, past and present, have? This question is one in which bodies’ capacities are revealed as immanent, historically contextual and emergent.