Decolonizing Tongue and Body: Decolonial Multiliteracies and the Denaturalization Of Violence in The Body Electric

Abstract

This paper analyzes the music video The Body Electric (2014), by the band Hurray for the Riff Raff, as a cultural artifact that engages decolonial multiliteracies practices. Grounded in the work of Duboc and Menezes de Souza (2021), I define decolonial multiliteracies as critical meaning-making practices that integrate multiple languages and media to destabilize colonial structures of power, knowledge, and representation. I argue that the work performs a “grammar of resistance” by subverting the naturalization of gender-based violence in popular culture. Drawing on Judith Butler’s (2018) theory of performativity, I examine how the song and video reinscribe discourses of violence, creating cracks in their normative logic. The intermedial reference (Rajewsky, 2012) to Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus is analyzed through the lens of coloniality critique, challenging Eurocentric representations as discussed by Walter Mignolo (2017) and Maria Lugones (2020). Finally, I propose the analysis of the video as a pedagogical gesture toward decolonial language education, weaving together meaning-making practices that aim to dismantle architectures of oppression and insurgent dissident epistemes, thus materializing social justice in the fabric of the sensible.