The Body As Medium in the Digital Age: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

This essay glosses an attempt to capture communication in the Arab uprisings through the prism of the human body. Such an approach to communication and revolution entails several challenges and opportunities. Challenges include tension between biopolitical approaches and a perspective that considers the body as an instrument of practice, the tendency in scholarship that restricts discussions of the body to discussions of gender and sexuality, and not politics at large, and the glossing over of issues of social class and geographic location, all crucial when considering the body as an instrument of communication. Opportunities afforded by using the body as a focal point include a fuller consideration of human agency that eschews technological determinism when studying power and resistance, a historically grounded analytical approach that preempts an uncritical dalliance with presentism, the body being in effect the “oldest medium,” and an analytical advantage whereby the body functions as a heuristic eye of the needle through which all empirical materials, and theoretical considerations are filtered, considered and interpreted.

Keywords:

• The Body
• Revolution
• Arab Uprisings
• Media Determinism
• Presentism

Notes

[1] M. M. Kraidy, Reality Television and Arab Politics: Contention in Public Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

[2] Frank Rich, “Wallflowers at the Revolution,” The New York Times (2011, February 5), http://www.nytimes.com

[3] Frank Rich, “Wallflowers at the Revolution,” The New York Times (2011, February 5), http://www.nytimes.com

[4] L. Hunt, “May. Against Presentism,” Perspectives (Washington, DC: American Historical Association, 2002).

[5] See A. De Baecque, Le corps de l'Histoire (1770–1800) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993); and Ziad Fahmy, Ordinary Egyptians: Creating the Modern Nation through Popular Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

[6] M. Durham, “Body Matters,” Feminist Media Studies, 11, issue 1 (2011), 53–60.

[7] J. D. Downing (with T. Villarreal Ford, G. Gil, and L. Stein). Radical Media (London: Sage, 2011), 19.

[8] See M. M. Kraidy, “The Revolutionary Body Politic: Preliminary Thoughts on a Neglected Medium in the Arab Uprisings,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 5(1) (2012), 68–76.

[9] R. Hariman, “Parody and Public Culture,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 94, issue 3 (2008), 247–72.

[10] See, for example, A. De Baecque, Le corps de l'Histoire (1770–1800) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1993).

[11] M. Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” Public Culture 14 (2002), 77–78.