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Lisa KällProfessor

Publications

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

  • Marking the Unmarked

    2016. Jenny Björklund, Ingvil Hellstrand, Lisa Folkmarson Käll. Illdisciplined Gender, 99-113

    Chapter

    This article confronts the notion of intersectionality with its conditions of materiality and embodiment. Understanding intersectionality as an overarching framework for analyzing power imbalances, we locate the body at the core of intersectionality as the site or situation where intersectional identities emerge and are made manifest. Our point of departure is that identities are always embodied, socially, culturally, spatially, and historically situated, and in continuous relational becoming. Considering the relevance of the body in intersectional structures of domination, our analysis aims to elaborate on the ways in which categories of identity are inscribed precisely as bodily markers and reinforced through embodiment.

    We discuss and develop the notion of intersectionality in light of lived embodiment. To facilitate our discussion, we use cultural representations, namely, the two contemporary films Mammoth by Lukas Moodysson (2009) and Antichrist by Lars von Trier (2009). The films serve as a particular lens through which intersections of power and dominance are brought to light as embodied, relational, and dynamic. By analyzing scenes from Mammoth and Antichrist, we highlight how intersectional identities are conditioned by and condition embodiment. Our analysis underlines how identity categorizations are inscribed on and in the body and how lived embodiment constitutes the very site in which seemingly stable identity categories intersect and have the potential of being both reproduced and transformed. This theoretical position not only brings to light bodies already marked by intersecting strands of oppression and marginalization but also makes visible the intersectional embodiment of privileged and seemingly unmarked bodies—it marks the unmarked.

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  • Performativity and Expression

    2016. Lisa Folkmarson Käll. Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities, 153-174

    Chapter

    Through a reading of David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly, this chapter brings Judith Butler’s idea of the performativity of gender into conversation with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings on the expression of embodied subjectivity. The chapter brings out how the portrayal of the two protagonists in Cronenberg’s film, Song Liling and René Gallimard, on the one hand illustrates Butler’s contention that gender identity is performatively constituted through a stylized reiteration of bodily acts that produce the illusion of an inner core on the surface of the body and on the other hand points to the limitations of a strictly performative framework. The character of Song Liling is portrayed in such a way as to also provoke questions of how to account for subjectivity or a felt sense of self that cannot be captured by third-person descriptions nor reduced to a product of reiterated performative imitation. Challenging Butler’s simplistic account and dismissal of expression, the chapter turns instead to the account of expression offered by Merleau-Ponty and argues that this provides a non-reductive way of understanding subjectivity as embodying both a first- and a third-person perspective in interrelation and of rethinking the relation between interiority and exteriority without reducing one to the other.

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  • Bodily Relational Autonomy

    2014. Lisa Käll, Kristin Zeiler. Journal of consciousness studies 21 (9-10), 100-120

    Article

    Conceptions of autonomy in western philosophy and ethics have often centred on self-governance and self-determination. However, a growing bulk of literature also questions such conceptions, including the understanding of the autonomous self as a self-governing independent individual that chooses, acts, and lives in accordance with her or his own values, norms, or sense of self. This article contributes to the critical interrogation of selfhood, autonomy, and autonomous decision making by combining a feminist focus on relational dimensions of selfhood and autonomy with phenomenological philosophy of the embodied self as being-in-the-world. It offers a philosophical investigation of different dimensions of bodily relational autonomy by turning to phenomenological accounts of the lived body as self-reflexive. When so doing, we hope to contribute to bridging the gap that sometimes exists between discussions of autonomy in analytic moral philosophy and of freedom and facticity in phenomenological philosophy. We see this gap as unfortunate, and hold that a nuanced understanding of autonomy and autonomous decision making can be reached if these strands of philosophy are brought into dialogue.

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