5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

This panel explores body as a site of violence and political resistance across transnational, international, and global issues ranging from health to immigration, to childbirth and death rights, from security to trade, from sexuality to fitness and sport. Power shapes our experience of the body, including its physiology; the effects of physical violence, economic scarcity, and emotional trauma change our cellular biology, as well as our perceptions of self and social identities. Meanwhile, an ongoing, contested politics of exclusion categorizes and marks some bodies as unfit for citizenship. Papers will review concepts developed to understand this politics of the body in everyday life, putting an analysis of power at the center of mundane and seemingly de-politicized physical activities. Building on a long tradition of intersectional feminist scholarship that centers on body struggles, panel contributions will also reflect on the role of ableism, ageism, xenophobia, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity in their own experience of their body and embodied relationships to global politics.