The Corporeal Self argues that questions about identity, conceived in bodily terms, are not only relevant for Melville and Hawthorne, the two nineteenth-century authors whose works are positioned at opposite extremes of the consideration of human identity, but lie at the heart of the American literary tradition, and have, in that tradition, their own revisionary status.
Explorees the cultural origins and psychological aspects of body identity disorders. Discusses the influence of contemporary virtual and cyberspace imagery on self-image. Draws on author’s professional experience largely dedicated to exploring disorders wherein body identity is the chosen field for communication and exchange. Re-examines such illnesses as anorexia, bulimia, body dysmorphic disorder, and others
Rosalyn Diprose contends that generosity is not just a human virtue, but it is an openness to others that is critical to our existence, sociality, and social formation. Her theory challenges the accepted model of generosity as a common character trait that guides a person to give something they possess away to others within an exchange economy. This book places giving in the realm of ontology, as well as the area of politics and social production, as it promotes ways to foster social relations that generate sexual, cultural, and stylistic differences. The analyses in the book theorize generosity in terms of intercorporeal relations where the self is given to others. Drawing primarily on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and offering critical interpretations of feminist philosophers such as Beauvoir and Butler, the author builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.
How do we understand the agency and significance of material forces and their interface with human bodies? What does it mean to be human in these times, with bodies that are inextricably interconnected with our physical world? Bodily Natures considers these questions by grappling with powerful and pervasive material forces and their increasingly harmful effects on the human body. Drawing on feminist theory, environmental studies, and the sciences, Stacy Alaimo focuses on trans-corporeality, or movement across bodies and nature, which has profoundly altered our sense of self. By looking at a broad range of creative and philosophical writings, Alaimo illuminates how science, politics, and culture collide, while considering the closeness of the human body to the environment.
The emotions have traditionally been marginalized in mainstream social theory. This book demonstrates the problems that this has caused and charts the resurgence of emotions in social theory today. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, both classical and contemporary, Simon Williams treats the emotions as a universal feature of human life and our embodied relationship to the world. He reflects and comments upon the turn towards the body and intimacy in social theory, and explains what is important in current thinking about emotions. In his doing so, readers are provided with a critical assessment of various positions within the field, including the strengths and weaknesses of poststructuralism and postmodernism for examinin
Body/Self/Other brings together a variety of phenomenological perspectives to examine the complexity of social encounters across a range of social, political, and ethical issues. It investigates the materiality of social encounters and the habitual attitudes that structure lived experience. In particular, the contributors examine how constructions of race, gender, sexuality, criminality, and medicalized forms of subjectivity affect perception and social interaction. Grounded in practical, everyday experiences, this book provides a theoretical framework that considers the extent to which fundamental ethical obligations arise from the fact of individuals' intercorporeality and sociality.
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.
In The Corporeal Turn, political theorist John Tambornino offers a thorough rethinking of ethical and political theory by emphasizing human embodiment, and the primacy of passion and need, in response to the neglect of these matters in much of contemporary thought. Tambornino calls for a 'corporeal turn' or, as he explains, sustained attention to human embodiment--something that is often occluded when priority is given to reason or language. Working through a diverse set of thinkers, exploring such themes as necessity and freedom, need and desire, nature and convention, and public and private, and noting vivid instances of politicized embodiment, Tambornino takes seriously Nietzsche's claim that philosophy has largely been an interpretation and misunderstanding of the body. The result is nothing less than a new orientation to ethical and political theory--one that appreciates the complex relations of language, politics, culture and corporeality-and a powerful intervention into those domains.
This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied, and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it. Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people’s conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality. The book is suitable for students, scholars, and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice.
Challenging a prevalent Western idea of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness, Scott L. Marratto argues instead that subjectivity is a characteristic of the living, expressive movement establishing a dynamic intertwining between a sentient body and its environment. He draws on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary European philosophy, and research in cognitive science and development to offer a compelling investigation into what it means to be a self.
