Sustaining the change agent: Bringing the body into language in professional practice

Abstract

In the Introduction to Volatile Bodies, feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz announced that the book was a ‘kind of experiment in inversion’, based on a wager that ‘bodies have all the explanatory power of minds’ (Grosz 1994, p. vii). The purpose of this wager was to displace the centrality of ‘mind, psyche, interior, and consciousness’ in conceptions of subjectivity through a reconfiguration of the body. In this chapter we take up this stance of body as method in order to explore the body in professional practice. The structure of the chapter is based on pivotal conversations between the two authors in the process of doctoral supervision. It is written through key conversations when the body made its presence felt. The conversations we re-enact in this chapter are hesitant and discontinuous, each representing a performance of the pivotal moments of coming to understand the power of the body in professional practice.