This book opens a discussion on bodies, gender, and decolonial horizons, subjects that are increasingly becoming a political front in the search for justice. It offers an in-depth look at the positions and current developments in decolonial theory, Black Marxism, trans* studies, and contemporary performance research and practice. The focus is on decolonial theory and trans* bodies, bringing forth a discussion of otherness shaped by race, class, and trans*. What kind of body, movement, and politics can be conceived to attack the neoliberal current with its accelerated digital changes and seemingly dispersed, but in reality hyper-flexible, bureaucratic controls?

A study of supine, prone, and recumbent figures in contemporary literature The prostitute, the protester, the murder victim, the invalid, the layabout, the depressive: all are associated with lying down. Skewing and flattening the perpendicular axis that defines the human in Western philosophy, art, and humanist inquiry, these downward-directed figures’ refusals or failures to hew to the moral and postural logics of uprightness enable a reassessment of subjectivity, ecological relation, and representation—that last of which is, after all, a process of standing-in-for. Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form works across an array of well-known and counter-canonical texts, showing that recumbent figures saturate the literary arts of the present and respond to the proliferation of contemporary forms of grounding, in all its meanings. Reading these figures in dialogue with critical Indigenous studies, disability studies, and horizontalist feminisms, Sarah Dowling reveals the potential in thinking with and through a position stretched out across, dependent on, and undetachable from the earth.

The politics of the body is often highly contested, culturally specific, and controlled, and this book calls our attention to how bodies are included or excluded in the polity. With governments regulating bodies in ways that mark the political boundaries of who is a citizen, worthy of protection and rights, as well as those who transgress socially proscribed norms, the contributors to this volume offer a systematic investigation of both theoretical and empirical account of bodily differences broadly defined. These chapters, diverse in both the populations and the political behaviours examined, as well as the methodological approaches employed, showcase the significance of body politics in a way few edited works in political science currently do. Arguing that the body is an important site to understand power relations, this book will be of interest to those studying the unequal application of rights to women, racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Politics, Groups, and Identities.