This essay offers a layered account of professional wrestling training in Florida in the months surrounding both WrestleMania 36 and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. These events draw attention to the necessity of performing bodies in the production of professional wrestling shows and the compounded somatic risks implicit in carrying out such performances. I situate the wrestler’s laboring body as a primary site of production, complicated by the risk of sharing the wrestling ring amid calls for social distancing.

A residency on the coast inspires reflections on the view. How has the shoreline “view” been compromised by private interest? What happens when the need to gaze deeply into epic nature, to get lost in the scale and beauty of the shore, is no longer accessible? How can popular forms of education push back and build environmental consciousness? If climate change is about aesthetic devastation as much as toxicity, resource depletion, and colonialism, then the shoreline offers a reflexive site through which to reconsider views of the land and to argue for democratic access.

Contributors to this Critical Intervention forum turn to lived and envisioned sexual experience and desire to theorize sexual potentiality. Collectively, we perform what we term “critical erotic/a.” Informed by Audre Lorde, the erotic is a unit of measure engaging the space between what is , as a result of structural constraints, and what can be through the envisioned removal of the same. The erotic serves as a critical theoretical means of focusing the sexual experiences and desires we narrate and perform in what is commonly termed “erotica.” Conjoining the two, critical erotic/a provides a narrative platform for theorizing and performing lived and envisioned sexual experience and desire.

The power of the small can be seen in Jonathan Wyatt's articulation of creative-relational and its institutional embodiment at the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh. This short essay explores some ways this embodiment of the small has large repercussions for those of us who need and wish to have creative space made, held, and shared in the academy.

Using phenomenological descriptions, this essay explores the performative effects of disciplining our bodies to speak Standard American English as a second language and dialect. Theorizing the act of speaking as habituated embodiment in cultural matrices of power and hegemony, we foreground the sensuous materiality of the speaking body and interrogate how the enactive body works as a mnemonic device for normative ways of being. We contend the body is always more than a textual surface on which social meaning is discursively inscribed and reinforces the path toward a more phenomenologically materialist understanding of the body and embodiment in communication.

This essay draws upon the author’s performance script Fall and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project as a provocation for considering the ways performance texts provide a threshold for somatic inquiry, and for recognizing the limits of scholarly analysis that does not take up performance-as-inquiry. Set at the Empire State Building, this essay embodies the connections and missed possibilities between strangers and intimates in the context of urban modern life. Fall ’s protagonist is positioned within a landscape of capitalist exchange, but defies this matrix to offer instead a gift at the threshold of life/death, virtual/real, and love/loss. Through somatic inquiry and witnessing as threshold experiences, the protagonist (as Benjamin’s flaneur ) moves through urban space and time, proving that both scholarship and performance remain irrevocably embodied, and as such invariably tethered to the visceral, the stranger, risk, and death.

Scholars have noted the increase in “Eastern movement forms” (e.g., non-sporting martial arts, yoga, meditation, and Tai Chi), which have been penetrating into social-cultural spaces and institutions outside their native contexts. The practice halls and studios where such movement forms are trained are intercorporeal communicative spaces where practitioners are not only grappling with the specificity of movements, but enmeshed in an assemblage of moving bodies and cultural resources. By plunging into the practice of aikido, a martial art style originating from Japan, this study explores how practitioners in the United States understand their martial art practice through their bodies. Three themes emerged: practicing, ki , and mastering. Listening to the voices of martial art bodies revealed that skillfulness is a ceaseless endeavor that uses movement to draw new relationalities between one's own corporeal assemblage and those of others rather than the internationalization of movement techniques. In the case of aikido practice, the on-site learning and practice open the way for new relationship-making across multiple lines of difference, suggesting cultural appropriation as a transformational process that exceeds the simple use and borrowing of cultural elements.