Somatic theory

It draws on various philosophical models: On the Genealogy of Morals of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger on das Man, Maurice Merleau-Ponty practiced on the lived body as a center of experience, Ludwig Wittgenstein on social practices, Michel Foucault on discipline, as well as theories of performativity emerging out of the speech act theory by J. L. Austin, in point of fact was developed by Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman.

Stephanie Fetta’s approach to somatic theory weaves together an extensive array of disciplinary discourses, ranging from cognitive science and neuroscience to sociology and Sophiology.

As a literary and cultural critic, Fetta draws attention to and investigates the role of the soma in her study of US Latin@/x creative texts.

In 2018, she published Shaming into Brown: Somatic Transactions of Race in Latina/o Literature[13]—a detailed and analytic transdisciplinary study that renders the soma as “a pervasive yet unexpected site of subjectivity.” She employs this conception of soma as a primary tool to investigate intersectional racialization and the transactions of race in her case studies of Latin@/x literature (xiii).

This book develops somatic analysis as a line of investigation, which reviewers maintain has applications in fields such as the humanities, critical race theory, neurology, behavioral studies, and so on.