Marked Bodies: A Corporeal History of Colonial Australia (Report‪)‬

Western imaginings about marked 'primitive' bodies have a long history, yet studies of these practices have remained largely a-historical. Drawing on recent scholarship addressing the history and cultural meanings of the corporeal surface of the Western body this paper presents a preliminary historical analysis of the remaking of Indigenous corporeal surfaces and subjectivities under colonialism in Australia as part of the nineteenth century 'civilising project'. The body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs (Foucault, 1977: 25).