<P> Gesture has frequently been taken up by researchers in the field of dance studies and performance studies in ways that emphasize the ways they are culturally and contextually inflected . Performance scholar, Carrie Noland, describes gestures as "learned techniques of the body" and stresses the way gestures are embodied corporeal forms of cultural communication . But rather than just residing within one cultural context, she describes how gesture migrate across bodies and locations to create new cultural meanings and associations . She also posits how they might function as a form of "resistance to homogenization" because they are so dependent on the specificities of the bodies that perform them . </P> <P> Gesture has also been taken up within queer theory, ethnic studies and their intersections in performance studies, as a way to think about how the moving body gains social meaning . José Esteban Muñoz uses the idea of gesture to mark a kind of refusal of finitude and certainty and links gesture to his ideas of ephemera . Muñoz specifically draws on the African - American dancer and drag queen performer Kevin Aviance to articulate his interest not in what queer gestures might mean, but what they might perform . Juana María Rodríguez borrows ideas of phenomenology and draws on Noland and Muñoz to investigate how gesture functions in queer sexual practices as a way to rewrite gender and negotiate power relations . She also connects gesture to Giorgio Agamben's idea of "means without ends" to think about political projects of social justice that are incomplete, partial, and legibile within culturally and socially defined spheres of meaning . </P> <P> Within the field of linguistics, the most hotly contested aspect of gesture revolves around the subcategory of Lexical or Iconic Co-Speech Gestures . Adam Kendon was the first linguist to hypothesize on their purpose when he argued that Lexical gestures do work to amplify or modulate the lexico - semantic content of the verbal speech with which they co-occur . However, since the late 1990s, most research has revolved around the contrasting hypothesis that Lexical gestures serve a primarily cognitive purpose in aiding the process of speech production . As of 2012, there is research to suggest that Lexical Gesture does indeed serve a primarily communicative purpose and cognitive only secondary, but in the realm of socio - pragmatic communication, rather than lexico - semantic modification . </P> <P> Although the scientific study of gesture is still in its infancy, some broad categories of gestures have been identified by researchers . </P>

Gestures involve movements of which of the following body parts