| "Reclaiming" names the current proliferation of discourses surrounding the body. Marking a crisis of embodiment, reclaiming means to rescue or retrieve, and it implies that something has been lost or forgotten. While reclaiming is practiced in a variety of ways ranging from plastic surgery to participation in extreme sports, this study focused on mediated contexts in general and reality-based television in particular. As an understudied academic area, reality-based television programming provided a means through which to engage material reclaiming practices in a context of representation, discourse, and power. Data was collected from the reality-based television program Fear Factor that itself provides a forum for participants to engage in dangerous and grotesque reclaiming activities. Fear Factor is unique because it represents bodies in strategic ways in order to incite an increased and embodied form of participation. Both Critical Discourse Analysis and Visual Analysis were employed in order to examine reclaiming as a series of "moments" in projects of embodied subjectivity in which the production of participation frameworks was the focal point of analysis. These moments articulated a variety of positions such as body/surface, body/signifier, and body/subject as situated along the material/discourse thematic. The material/discourse thematic refers the privileging of varied academic positions surrounding embodiment. Three positions were analyzed as conceptual categories. First, examining the body as a surface for inscription found that a body in need of reclamation is produced through bio-political and (neo)liberal discourses in which fear and risk are strategically deployed. Second, the body as a cultural signifier analyzed gendered and idealized bodies and addressed how specific bodies produce situated meaning. Third, analyzing the body as an active subject engaged materiality as volitional through the analysis of abjection and the consumption of abject foods. Examining the body across these conceptual categories engaged the complexity and multiplicity of meanings surrounding embodiment yet did not definitively privilege any singular position. Consequently, these elements were viewed as contextually specific and inter-constitutive. Thus, the articulation of multiple positions and the constitutive spaces between them effectively dis/articulate the material/discourse thematic in a way that has opened the field of possibility for conceptualizing embodied subjectivity. |
