WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES THE BODY MAKE? 53(Clough 2007, 2010; Puar 2007, 2012; Sedgwick 2003).^13 Feminist and queer
affect theorists argue that racialized, classed, gendered, sexualized relations
of power can be experienced as bodily changes that are “irreducible to the
individual, the personal and the psychological” (Clough 2007, 3). For ex-
ample, in her discussion of post- 9/11 modes of securitization and biopower,
Jasbir Puar (2007) shows how a Sikh man wearing a turban can be turned
into a national threat — one that is specifically racialized and sexualized as
a “terrorist fag” — virtually overnight. Racism, homophobia, and national-
ism can create the queer terrorist body not as a subject or an identity, but
instead as “an affective and affected entity that create[s] fear but also feel
the fear they create” (174).^14 Although some theorists insist on affect’s com-
plete autonomy from signification, affect can be seen as a way into thinking
about the “mutual imbrication” of the body- mind and world, or “as a kind
of knowledge about the interface between ontological or epistemic consid-
erations” (Hemmings 2012, 149; see also Ahmed 2006; Blackman 2012; Leys
2011). For example, drawing from the writings of Franz Fanon and Audre
Lorde, Hemmings argues, “racially marked subjects can have [both] a crit-
ical and affective life that resonates differently” (2005, 564).
Feminist and queer accounts of embodiment, on the whole, see it as a
differentiating condition, one that multiplies rather than universalizes cog-
nition or affect. The perspectival, spatial, and temporal locatedness, histo-
ricity, visibility, and vulnerability afforded by the body is not generic and
unifying, but specific and woven through with relations of power and
inequality. As I discuss shortly, disability scholars also have contributed
richly to theorizing embodiment as variant and multiple. The recognition
of disability, whether conceived as a social construction or as a material
reality, disallows universalizing treatments of the body and embodiment.
Attention to bodies deemed disabled also reveal the many ways in which
the environment is more and less functional for different people and in
different circumstances. They show not only that bodies have varying ca-
pacities and morphologies but also that environments and social invest-
ments affect how well bodies and worlds come together. Attention to bodily
vulnerabilities can also show their queerness; that is, “bodies are not just
different from others^ —^ as monolithic identities^ —^ but sometimes individual
bodies, in themselves, are not recognizable as singular, stable, or categoriz-
able identities” (Bost 2008, 361).