Volatile Bodies

Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253208620
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278

Book Description
"Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is subject to the endless rewriting and inscription that constitute all sign systems. Grosz demonstrates that the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan theorize a male body. She then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women--menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause--to lay the groundwork for new theories of sexed corporeality."--Back cover.

Space, Time and Perversion

Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317325451
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 284

Book Description
Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.

Time Travels

Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386550
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

Book Description
Recently the distinguished feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has turned her critical acumen toward rethinking time and duration. Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories. Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

Writing on the Body

Author: Katie Conboy
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231105453
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
This work comprises a collection of influential readings in feminist theory. It is divided into four sections: "Reading the Body"; "Bodies in Production"; "The Body Speaks"; and "Body on Stage".

Bodies that Matter

Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415903660
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.

Gross Anatomy

Author: Mara Altman
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0399574859
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Book Description
An honest, funny, neurotic, and totally gross love child of Mindy Kaling and Mary Roach. Mara Altman's volatile and apprehensive relationship with her body has led her to wonder about a lot of stuff over the years. Like, who decided that women shouldn't have body hair? And how sweaty is too sweaty? Also, why is breast cleavage sexy but camel toe revolting? Isn't it all just cleavage? These questions and others like them have led to the comforting and sometimes smelly revelations that constitute Gross Anatomy, an essay collection about what it's like to operate the bags of meat we call our bodies. Divided into two sections, "The Top Half" and "The Bottom Half," with cartoons scattered throughout, Altman's book takes the reader on a wild and relatable journey from head to toe--as she attempts to strike up a peace accord with our grody bits. With a combination of personal anecdotes and fascinating research, Gross Anatomy holds up a magnifying glass to our beliefs, practices, biases, and body parts and shows us the naked truth: that there is greatness in our grossness.

The Incorporeal

Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231543670
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 455

Book Description
Philosophy has inherited a powerful impulse to embrace either dualism or a reductive monism—either a radical separation of mind and body or the reduction of mind to body. But from its origins in the writings of the Stoics, the first thoroughgoing materialists, another view has acknowledged that no forms of materialism can be completely self-inclusive—space, time, the void, and sense are the incorporeal conditions of all that is corporeal or material. In The Incorporeal Elizabeth Grosz argues that the ideal is inherent in the material and the material in the ideal, and, by tracing its development over time, she makes the case that this same idea reasserts itself in different intellectual contexts. Grosz shows that not only are idealism and materialism inextricably linked but that this "belonging together" of the entirety of ideality and the entirety of materiality is not mediated or created by human consciousness. Instead, it is an ontological condition for the development of human consciousness. Grosz draws from Spinoza's material and ideal concept of substance, Nietzsche's amor fati, Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, Simondon's preindividual, and Raymond Ruyer's self-survey or autoaffection to show that the world preexists the evolution of the human and that its material and incorporeal forces are the conditions for all forms of life, human and nonhuman alike. A masterwork by an eminent theoretician, The Incorporeal offers profound new insight into the mind-body problem

Re-Forming the Body

Author: MR Philip A Mellor
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9781446235294
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
Enriches the concpetual arsenal for interdisciplinary analysis of political, social and cultural change... stimulates more nuanced thinking about the cultural and political legacy of the Reformation era... manages both to clarify tensions surrounding cultural and social integration in the late 20th century while underscoring the real historical complexity of modern bodies' - "American Journal of Sociology " Through an analysis of successive re-formations of the body, this innovative and penetrating book constructs a fascinating and wide-ranging account of how the creation and evolution of different patterns of human community are intimately related to the somatic experience of the sacred. The book places the relationship between the embodiment and the sacred at the crux of social theory, and casts a fresh light on the emergence and transformation of modernity. It critically examines the thesis that the rational projects of modern embodiment have 'died and gone to cyberspace', and suggests that we are witnessing the rise of a virulent, effervescent form of the sacred which is changing how people 'see' and 'keep in touch' with the world around them.

Body Images

Author: Gail Weiss
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135225346
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

Bodies Out of Bounds

Author: Jana Evans Braziel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520225855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity