Nirmal Puwar's lecture Space Invaders looks at the 'arrival' of women and racialised minorities in spaces from which they have been historically or conceptually excluded, such as the art world or the public domain. Formally, today, women and racialised minorities can enter positions from which they were previously excluded. However, social spaces are not blank and open for 'any body' to occupy. There is a connection between bodies and space, which is built, repeated and contested over time. While anyone may, in theory, enter, it is certain types of bodies that are tacitly designated as being the 'natural' occupants of specific positions. Some bodies are deemed as having the right to belong within, while others are marked as trespassers who are, in accordance with how both spaces and bodies are imagined (politically, historically and conceptually), circumscribed as being 'out of place'. Not being the somatic norm, they are 'space invaders'. Investigating the paradox of the increasing proximity of hitherto outside 'dissonant' bodies with inside 'proper' bodies, allows us to see how less obvious, nuanced exclusion operates within institutions via the tacit reservation of privileged positions for the somatic norm. A brilliant analysis journeying through ontological anxiety, social cloning and super surveillance, taking us from high theory to everyday cultural spaces and back again.
