Evgeniya Golman Spoke at International Conference on Interdisciplinary Body Studies

Evgeniya Golman, lecturer at the School of Sociology Department of General Sociology, spoke at one of the largest recent interdisciplinary conferences on body studies, ‘Doing the Body in the 21^st Century.’

The conference was organized by the academic staff of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program and took place from March 31 to April 2, 2016, at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference venue was the renowned neo-gothic Cathedral of Learning overlooking the university campus.

The three days of the conference featured five plenary sessions with key speakers, nine meetings with authors of some recent monographs, and 49 topical sessions. The interdisciplinary character of the conference ensured a wide variety of topics, from gender order to reproductive technologies in intercountry context, from the place of corporality in personal identity evolving to the sociocultural importance of affect and the therapeutic role of performance, from public stigmatizing of individuals out of attractiveness standards to feminist studies of science and technology. Most of the presentations featured high social importance and activism. The conference attracted colleagues from the whole post-Soviet space, and a separate session was dedicated to the region; Post-Soviet bodies: construction of precarious and vulnerable bodies under a normative gaze. A detailed programme of the sections is available at the conference website.

Evgeniya Golman presented her paper ‘Bodily Practices, health and mindfulness’ at the ‘Lifestyles and Age’ session. She used Michel Foucault’s concepts of ‘technologies of the self’ and ‘technologies of power’ to demonstrate that the growing popularity of a healthy lifestyle might have both negative and positive consequences. The results of healthy lifestyle popularization include the spread of discriminatory practices towards those who don’t comply with the actual ‘norm’ of health, as well as overcoming the instrumental approach to corporality specific for the contemporary culture, and harmonization of relations between body and mind. The paper also analyzed the position that bodily practices take in the ‘mindfulness movement’ popular in the West. The paper caused an active discussion on the limits of instrumental or even repressive use of the body and the beginning of the mindful treatment of the self.