Last week, Moving Bodies Lab Lead Cassandra Phoenix and collaborator Meridith Griffin attended the Women’s Marginalised Health Network symposium, in Linkoping, Sweden, where they led an interactive workshop introducing some provocations around the notion of corporeal comfort as it relates to women’s marginalized health.
As a concept, comfort has been taken up in a wide variety of disparate fields of study (medical anthropology, cultural geography, postcolonial studies, etc.) – demonstrating its multidimensional nature, and how it plays out across various axes of analysis. Through creative facilitation, participants engaged in discussions around the dualistic nature of comfort as both objective and aesthetic, as both material and semiotic, and its promise for interrogating embodiment and health for marginalized women. Using the example of movement through menopause, Cassie and Merdith shared data from their MoveMeno project (with Erica Bennett) and emerging analyses to consider dis/comfort as a complex affective complex that is felt in and through women’s bodies.
The WoMaHN symposium (2–3 April 2025) brought together artists and academics from Sweden, Norway, The Netherlands, France, UK and Italy to discuss their work in relation to the timely theme of Social Critique: Critical perspectives on women’s health
