A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities

  2016. Lisa Folkmarson Käll.

  Book (ed)

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• Marking the Unmarked

  2016. Jenny Björklund, Ingvil Hellstrand, Lisa Folkmarson Käll. Illdisciplined Gender, 99-113

  Chapter

  This article confronts the notion of intersectionality with its conditions of materiality and embodiment. Understanding intersectionality as an overarching framework for analyzing power imbalances, we locate the body at the core of intersectionality as the site or situation where intersectional identities emerge and are made manifest. Our point of departure is that identities are always embodied, socially, culturally, spatially, and historically situated, and in continuous relational becoming. Considering the relevance of the body in intersectional structures of domination, our analysis aims to elaborate on the ways in which categories of identity are inscribed precisely as bodily markers and reinforced through embodiment.

  We discuss and develop the notion of intersectionality in light of lived embodiment. To facilitate our discussion, we use cultural representations, namely, the two contemporary films Mammoth by Lukas Moodysson (2009) and Antichrist by Lars von Trier (2009). The films serve as a particular lens through which intersections of power and dominance are brought to light as embodied, relational, and dynamic. By analyzing scenes from Mammoth and Antichrist, we highlight how intersectional identities are conditioned by and condition embodiment. Our analysis underlines how identity categorizations are inscribed on and in the body and how lived embodiment constitutes the very site in which seemingly stable identity categories intersect and have the potential of being both reproduced and transformed. This theoretical position not only brings to light bodies already marked by intersecting strands of oppression and marginalization but also makes visible the intersectional embodiment of privileged and seemingly unmarked bodies—it marks the unmarked.

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• Performativity and Expression

  2016. Lisa Folkmarson Käll. Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities, 153-174

  Chapter

  Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, this chapter brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of embodied subjectivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protagonists in Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and René Gallimard, on the one hand illustrates Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted through a stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body and on the other hand points to the limitations of a strictly performative framework. The character of Song Liling is portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjectivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor reduced to a product of reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s simplistic account and dismissal of expression, the chapter turns instead to the account of expression offered by Merleau-Ponty and argues that this provides a non-reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-person perspective in interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority without reducing one to the other.

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Show all publications by Lisa Käll at Stockholm University