Body-lived experiences in confronting coloniality: unfoldings of the construct in Critical Applied Linguistics

Abstract

Since the European invasion of Abya Yala in the late fifteenth century, the racial, onto-epistemological, and linguistic supremacy of the white, cisheterosexual, patriarchal, European, and Christian man has been widely disseminated as the sole and necessary representation of the modern subject. Countering this logic, in my doctoral dissertation, defended in 2023, I proposed the reintegration of non-white, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-cisheteronormative bodies as central elements in identifying, questioning, and interrupting the many forms of erasure produced by coloniality, which I termed decolonial body-lived experiences. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the concept of body-lived experiences has been established as a strategy for confronting coloniality and its multiple dimensions, both within and beyond the English language classroom. To do so, I analyze
studies by scholars in Critical Applied Linguistics who mobilize the construct, selected through searches on Google Scholar. More than reinforcing language as a neutral, apolitical entity with merely communicative purposes, body-lived experiences reveal possibilities for meaning-making and for reimagining worlds through language. The analyses indicate that these same potentialities permeate the studies that mobilize the construct, highlighting its relevance for confronting coloniality and for fostering alternative praxiologies that articulate body, subjectivity, writing, lived experience, resistance, and re-existence.