Ped­ago­gies Of Embo­di­ment – Move­ment, The Post­hu­man, and Putting the Human Back into the Body

The central question of the present work concerns the concept of mythification as a process that evacuates bodies of their historicity—that is, the way anti-human practices force a process of dis-embodiedness from the particular ways in which each human person iterates a sociohistorical, experiential, and infinitely complex story. With the aim of furnishing the ambiguous concept of “dehumanization,” I will work with embodiment and disembodiment as metrics for who, in the currently globalized anti-human common sense, is allowed an experience their humanity, paying particular attention to lived experience as the grounds where humanization is negotiated.

Following Sylvia Wynter, I will utilize the figure of “Man” as the negative space against which all marginal subjectivities are constructed, and therefore the figure at the service of which these mythifications are put. Chief among the elements composing the anti-human common sense of Man is the nation state. I will loosely lay out how the dangers of mythification are hidden from view when the process of mythification is executed in the service of nation-building specifically, and I will do this by expanding my dissertation work exploring Spain’s use of “[t]he colonized marginal figure of the Gypsy woman.” The Gypsy woman, specifically in her laboring and flamenco dancing form, has historically been relocated to the center in the process of a fraught and erratic reconfiguration of Spain’s national identity, revealing “the cultural anxieties provoked by the complex conflicts of gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality in the formation of the modern self.”

Elucidating the connections between marked female bodies, dance, labor, and state power, I will assess how a forced process of disembodiment (the abstraction of one's political, historical, and aesthetic agency), can be overcome via an intersectional queer feminist pedagogy (Toni Cade Bambara, Amber Mussser, Kandice Chuh, Katherine McKittrick)—how these praxis could aid us in putting the human back into the body. More broadly, this inquiry seeks to offer insight into how full humanity—understood as full embodiment—can coexist within what to this day remains an (almost) paradigmatically anti-human commonsense.

Inma Naïma Zanoguera attained her PhD at CUNY Graduate Center in the Fall of 2026 with the work “The Body Moves/Knows in The Fringes of History: Carmen as Myth, and Flamenco as a Fugitive Form of Knowledge Transmission.” Spanning academic, creative, and journalistic genres, her writings explore humanity’s resilience, particularly in the face of colonial oppression, and its manifestations in the literary arts. Her aim is to understand and amplify historical and  contemporary instances where the (seemingly) totalizing influence of colonialism and liberalism falters and leaks, foretelling possibilities of otherwise living, knowing, and being. Based between Paris and Mallorca, she sporadically works on projects related to sports and activism/community, primarily around the Sahrawi diaspora. Despite all the books, she can trace most of what she’s learned to the creative, spiritual, and embodied practices of running on the trails or swimming endless laps at some local swimming pool.