Writing-the-body on the political flesh: fugitive movements, visionary fiction, and subjectivation

Abstract

This article engages in a dialogue between a fugitive writing that politicizes the wound and an imagination of other possible places for dissident poetics, bodies, and existences. We are interested in exploring the potential of writing as a technique of the self and as a mode of subjectivation that is not aligned with a violent white cisheteronormative framework. To this end, we draw on Jota Mombaça’s book Não vão nos matar agora (They Will Not Kill Us Now), published in 2021, which presents itself as “a space of experimentation, making of the word and the body tools of critique, potency, and struggle.” Gathering essays, poems, letters, and pieces of “visionary fiction,” the book offers contributions for thinking about dissident bodies in a world configured as both trauma and denial of their very existence. The aim is to understand how Mombaça mobilizes writing and its relations with art and performance to propose a pedagogical dimension of the self through an ethical engagement with violence against dissident bodies, and how their speculative practice enables a process of reconfiguring and disputing the domain of the possible.