Embodiments of Truth? An Intersectional Approach

This workshop is convened by the research group “Praxeologies of Truth.” We regard truth as a performative and as a social operator, observable in scenarios that foreground the embodied relationalities of a set of actors and their communicative practices. The workshop seeks to examine the concrete roles ascribed to and enacted by human bodies in truth performances. How do bodies participate in evocations of truth including its rejection or acceptance? How do they partake in and interact with scenarios of truth? Can any person with any body perform a figure of truth (judge, witness, priest, translator, etc.), or would particular ascriptions to their bodies hinder them from fulfilling that role? 

With performance theorists, such as Judith Butler and Diana Taylor, we assume that bodies always already perform and are read through lenses of race, class, and gender. We are interested in how these categories and their intersections affect performances of truth. How do e.g. gendered or racialized bodies affect the legibility of truthfulness of human bodies? In which scenarios do which bodies emerge as signifiers of truthfulness? Which spaces (technologies, media) render bodies not only racialized (see Sara Ahmed) or gendered, but also as conveyors of truth? In short, the workshop is invested in exploring the various practices through which truth becomes embodied.

The interdisciplinary workshop seeks to bring a variety of perspectives on truth and bodies into conversation, we invite papers from the fields of literature, history, philosophy, gender studies, psychology, and sociology to contribute to our discussion on embodied truths. Topics may range from exploring space and bodies of truth, identity politics and truth, epistemic injustice and/or violence and truth, to conspiracy theories and race/gender/sexuality/class, or alternative conceptions of truth.

We hope to hold the workshop in person in Erfurt with a hybrid online option. If continued pandemic circumstances prevent us from meeting in person, the workshop will take place online.

Conference Organizers:
Research Group “Praxeologies of Truth,” Bernhard Kleeberg, Ilka Saal, Antonia Purk