The Few and the Best of the Bodily Contract: On the Unrepresentable in Parliamentary Democracy

This article examines the relationship between parliamentary democracy and corporeality through the problem of the unrepresentable body. Taking the 14th Spanish Legislature (2019–2023) as a case study, it analyses the corporeal configuration of parliamentary representation in terms of sex‑gender, race, and dis/ability. The article argues that modern/colonial constitutionalism produces a democracy without bodies, where representation operates as substitution and where passive suffrage remains governed by an implicit bodily norm. Through a rereading of Rousseau’s social contract, Carole Pateman’s sexual contract, racial and colonial contract theories, and Bernard Manin’s elective aristocracy, the article proposes the notion of the bodily contract as a heuristic category for understanding the exclusion of corporeal difference from democratic representation. This exclusion is framed as a hermeneutic ontological injustice: certain bodies are not merely underrepresented but rendered unintelligible as subjects of representation. Against this bodily aristocracy of the few and the best, the article advances bodily democracy as an anti‑oligarchic principle. Such a principle places corporeality, relationality, and situatedness at the centre of constitutional thought, challenging the abstract inclusions and concrete exclusions through which parliamentary democracy has historically been organised.