A lively, permeable, and relational event of capacities and connections—human and more-than-human—through which thinking-feeling, sensing, and knowing take shape in situated practices and apparatuses.
In postqualitative, posthumanist, and new materialist work, the body is more than a sealed container for a sovereign mind; it is an ongoing composition of forces, relations, and materials that co-constitute worlds. Haraway famously asks, “why should bodies end at the skin?”, orienting attention to how bodies extend and are extended by tools, infrastructures, microbes, chemicals, and stories, and how these extensions carry ethical and political force. Barad’s agential realism treats bodies as phenomena produced through material-discursive intra-actions, where apparatuses enact agential cuts that configure what a body can become.
Deleuze & Guattari shift the emphasis from what a body “is” to “what a body can do,” foregrounding capacities and affective intensities rather than fixed identities. Building on feminist materialisms, Alaimo names trans-corporeality to describe the movement of substances, forces, and meanings across bodies and environments, highlighting porousness and shared vulnerability; bodies are sites through which environments become sensible and consequential. Bennett pushes toward “vital materiality,” emphasizing that bodies—human and nonhuman—participate in assemblages where agency is distributed and effects emerge from configurations of forces. Affective theorists such as Ahmed and Massumi help articulate how orientations, atmospheres, and intensities move through and with bodies, shaping orientations, possibilities, and constraints. Across this lineage, the body appears as situated, attuned, and more-than-human, where sensing, knowing, and doing unfold in the midst of relations.
Postqualitative inquiry works with the body as a methodological and ethical site of worlding. Researcher and participant bodies are part of the apparatus, so study designs attend to how sensing, material conditions, tools, and concepts co-produce phenomena. This can involve composing situations that foreground embodied movement and relational attunement (for example, walking, sketching, body mapping, research-creation), tracing trans-corporeal flows (toxicity, data, sound, light), and analyzing how affective atmospheres take hold. Rather than extracting “experience,” the body becomes a locus for following how capacities are enabled or constrained within material-discursive arrangements, making analysis inseparable from questions of accountability, access, and care.
In AI-entangled writing instruction, bodies are entangled with interfaces, prompts, keystrokes, screens, and institutional infrastructures. The felt textures of composing—hesitation before a prompt, the haptic rhythms of typing, the eye-fatigue of screen glare, the thrum of notification ecologies—participate in how ideas emerge and decisions are made. Trans-corporeality clarifies how platforms, data capture, and network latency pass through bodies to shape attention, effort, and fatigue, while also situating accessibility and dis/ability as relational achievements of the classroom apparatus rather than personal traits. Affective orientations—anticipation, relief, doubt, curiosity—travel across rooms, policies, media narratives, and model outputs to form atmospheres that condition risk-taking and creativity. Treating bodies as more-than-human makes authorship analyzable as a distribution of capacities across teacher, student, model, interface, and artifact; it invites close study of how prompts, feedback methods, and revision trails enact what the class comes to recognize as legitimate composing, assessment, and learning.