The Mobile Body

Drawing from French post-structural philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, I examine what social and political forces caused physiotherapy to create the concept of the body-as-machine, reducing the body down to parts which wear out, require fixing, replacing, and realignment. I argue that Physiotherapy has concretized the body-as-machine, a fabricated concept, as seemingly representative of a thing in the world: rendering the body rigid, symmetrical, predictable, and universal. My research destabilizes this machinic orthodoxy in order to create a mobile concept of the body that moves and contorts with political, social, and material forces. The body in the image is metallic, and parts are becoming transparent suggesting the body was once solid metal – perhaps part of a machine – and is becoming a liquid that can traverse and morph based on the context it finds itself in. The body’s parts are contorted, rendering them unrecognizable and strange. The body swirls unpredictably, entangled and composed of a field of forces. It seems to be resisting and escaping any stable fixity or normativity; surpassing both physical constraints, and the constraints of what it means to be a body.