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Public Bodies: Conceptualising Active Citizenship and the Embodied State

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Beyond Citizenship?

Part of the book series: Citizenship, Gender and Diversity ((FEMCIT))

Abstract

The idea of the state’s body has had a long and varied history, as questions of rule, sovereignty and representation get spliced into tropes that range from the organic body politic, to the ‘king’s two bodies’, to the artificial person of Hobbes’s (1998 [1651]) Leviathan. In more recent times, as conceptualising the state moves between disembodied abstraction and the changing material forms through which the state takes shape, analyses and narratives of the body politic continue (e.g. Dumm 1999; Neocleous 2003). One interesting account is Gary Laderman’s (1997) exploration of the symbolic role Abraham Lincoln’s assassinated body played, as his train-conveyed corpse was publicly displayed through America’s northern states. Laderman (1997: 124) recounts how Lincoln’s body ‘served as a “travelling” sacred center around which the government displayed its coherence, legitimacy, and permanence … [T]he president’s embalmed body was supposed to represent the immortality, the incorruptibility of the nation; the state corporealized and made flesh’.

When all the world proclaims the death of the nation-state, and consequently that of the social … we need to explore once again the ‘mythicised abstraction’ and ‘immediate, affective and tragic form’ of the cold monster.

(Dean 2008: 25–26)

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Authors
  1. Davina Cooper
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Birkbeck, University of London, UK

    Sasha Roseneil

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© 2013 Davina Cooper

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Cooper, D. (2013). Public Bodies: Conceptualising Active Citizenship and the Embodied State. In: Roseneil, S. (eds) Beyond Citizenship?. Citizenship, Gender and Diversity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137311351_6

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