Inquiry

If bodily freedom, sovereignty, and autonomy are often touted as inalienable rights, how do these ideals fall short? In various ways, women and gender nonconforming people expose the limits of these rhetorics. For one, while they are disproportionately affected by gender-based violence, land dispossession, and resource extraction, they refuse the distinction between the individual body and the social body. In the work of activists, artists, and writers who address femicide and gender-based violence, the harms faced by individuals are invoked to discuss broader social ills: militarization, man camps, and sexual violence. They ask: whose body gets to be sovereign? Where does a “body” end and begin? How can bodily autonomy be truly expressed and perpetuated?