Somafictions: Bodybuilding in contemporary, nonconformative literature

This thesis project investigates how nonconformative writing – writing which cuts across established genres and grammars – functions as a somatechné.

The notion of “somatechnics” underscores how the body and technology, soma and techné, are mutually dependent (Sullivan and Murray 2009: 3). Bodies are understood as materializations of historical, cultural and social practices, always crafted through different technologies, never a thing in itself that technology or language remake. I strive to explore how contemporary feminist and queer nonconformative writing, as a kind of bodybuilding, can rewrite what emerges as a possible body, and the conditions of what different bodies can do.

A main theoretical question concerns how modes of embodied being can be formulated in ways that allow them to remain rooted in the historical and material conditions of this world, while still containing the capacity for imagining?