Abstract

By looking at corporeal agency, kinesthesia, and embodiment from a feminist perspective, this dissertation investigates the corporeal emancipatory strategies employed by the Catalonian artist Fina Miralles. It focuses specifically on her series of works from 1972-76, including Sensitiveland, Natura Morta, Fenòmens Atmosfèrics, Translacions, Relacions and Petjades. It argues that producing corporeal sensorial knowledge generated from her experience and movement is a transgressive and emancipatory act (even if only temporarily) in the context of the acute restrictions on body politics during the Franco dictatorship (1935-1975). This dissertation argues that Fina Miralles’ performances explore new corporeal experiences and existences in order to inhabit bodies in new and possibly empowering ways. Her artwork helps to cause a momentary rupture in the chauvinist socialization of the Francoist system that reinforced women’s disembodiment, or their inhabiting objectified bodies. The dissertation then turns to the expressive capacity of the body and its possibilities as a rich source of knowledge (within the body and in the body’s relation with the world) in feminist liberatory processes. Drawing from my research experience developed in and through the fieldwork and archival stages, the dissertation proposes ways of “doing” research based on “embodied methodologies” (Spatz, 2017), “research-creation” (Chapman and Sawchuck, 2012), “practice as research” (Barrett, 2014), “kinesthetic empathy” (Sklar, 1994; Reynolds & Reason, 2012), and proceeding from a situated feminist approach (Haraway, 1988).