Since the 19th century, the body has played an increasingly important role in the formation of social identities. Social turning points come to attention only belatedly and through detours, e.g. in the ways in which bodies and their vulnerabilities are treated. Partly because of their welfare systems, the Nordic democracies have long been regarded as a special group of Western democracies. Their special approach has affected the handling of legitimate and illegitimate violence as an expression of state and interpersonal power (revolution, prison, demonstration, abuse, amok). The intersection between body politics and the individual body is crucial when addressing conflicts, expectations, and changes. In these processes of negotiation, literature and theatre offer the possibility to give voice to sidelined narratives, while also revealing and making palpable societal exclusion mechanisms and the sanctioning of bodies deemed non-conforming. Theatre performances and literary works dealing with welfare state actors in Northern Europe and their handling of the AIDS epidemic, for example, expose conflicting versions of gendered narrations of ambiguous bodies.
In Nordic countries, traditional costumes, hairstyles or pieces of jewellery, for example, have not disappeared from the public sphere and everyday life to this day. This indicates how the staging of bodies in everyday life culture is closely connected to regional or national identity formation and the demarcation from others.
Turning points, time-shattering events, and peripeties are intensely connected to affective responses. Traumatic experiences like wars and genocide are not only mirrored in collective memories, but also provoke complex emotional reactions that are reflected, described, and further constructed or evoked through media and literature in particular. Valuable impulses can also be gained from the emerging field of ‘embodied narratology’ which draws upon recent debates about embodied cognition and allows for an examination of inter- and transmedial storyworld experiences. How, then, do peripeties affect bodies, both within and beyond narrative?
This research frame investigates the meaning of the body in zones of change and seeks to understand its embeddedness in regional and transregional discourses. As it intersects with the research frames Shifting Expectations, Narrative Escalation and Conflicting Versions, it opens up numerous research topics, e.g. examining changing expectations of body behaviour, experiences of violence in literature, or conflicting versions of the gendered body in political debates. How do changes in health conditions or bodily functions change our expectations towards the relationships in which we take part, or the perceived narratability of our experiences? How do personal memories of political violence and trauma travel across generations and cultures in Scandinavia and the Baltics? Similar to experiencing violence and catastrophe, the onset of illness or diagnosis will often be perceived as a life-changing event (peripety) connected with new insights (anagnorisis), to which both the subject and their next of kin or community has to actively relate. Combining theories from care ethics and cultural memory studies, a focus on the (gendered) body allows for reseach on how this active relationality is narrated or mediated aesthetically.