Claiming Democratic Bodies, Ethics, and Equality

Abstract

This article demonstrates how protests as modes of political action are not only about claiming public spaces and democratic rights. Essentially, they articulate a mode of claiming corporeal democratic bodies cultivated and inhabited by revolutionaries in their attempts to unsettle the established political order. To elucidate this argument, this article reflects on the Life March, a 267-kilometer march from Ta'izz to San'a on foot over five days, staged by Yemeni protesters in 2011. It pays attention to the ways in which the bodily actions of the marchers incited a social imagination of the democratic communitarian order. The marchers' injured feet mobilized desires to reciprocate through collective ethical practices of waiting, greeting, giving, and protecting enacted by communities en route to San'a. The article suggests that through these enactments, communities sought to ethically elevate themselves as political equals to the marchers, allowing a novel form of democratic ethos to emerge. The article contends that an equality among differences rather than sameness was fashioned as the political of a different order came into being.