During the sixteenth-century reformations, Caspar Schwenckfeld was one of the mavericks and creative thinkers who made up the amorphous grouping of radicals. At the time, and since, much has been made of the number of women who were attracted to his theology. Various reasons for this have been suggested, ranging from the attractions of a well spoken nobleman through to the pull of a more domestic religion. This study argues that the attraction lay in the theology that Schwenckfeld explored and offered, and the ways in which it destabilized the accepted social and biological definitions of gender identity.
Criticizes the patriarchal world view, outlines the historical realities that have produced a culture that glorifies violence and domination, and argues for a worldview that recognizes the full humanity of women.
Working at the local processing plant, Marcos is in the business of slaughtering humans—though no one calls them that anymore. His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the “Transition.” Now, eating human meat—“special meat”—is legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing. Then one day he’s given a gift: a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he’s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost—and what might still be saved.
Emma Heaney's The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory traces the evolution of the "trans feminine" as an allegorical figure from its origins in the late nineteenth century to contemporary Queer Theory.
Modern culture is obsessed with controlling women's bodies. Our societies are saturated with images of unreal, idealised female beauty whilst real female bodies and the women who inhabit them are alienated from their own personal and political potential. Under modern capitalism, women are both consumers and consumed: Meat Market offers strategies for resisting this gory cycle of consumption, exposing how the trade in female flesh extends into every part of women's political selfhood.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book for 1999 Karma Lochrie demonstrates that women were associated not with the body but rather with the flesh, that disruptive aspect of body and soul which Augustine claimed was fissured with the Fall of Man. It is within this framework that she reads The Book of Margery Kempe, demonstrating the ways in which Kempe exploited the gendered ideologies of flesh and text through her controversial practices of writing, her inappropriate-seeming laughter, and the most notorious aspect of her mysticism, her "hysterical" weeping expressions of religious desire. Lochrie challenges prevailing scholarly assumptions of Kempe's illiteracy, her role in the writing of her book, her misunderstanding of mystical concepts, and the failure of her book to influence a reading community. In her work and her life, Kempe consistently crossed the barriers of those cultural taboos designed to exclude and silence her. Instead of viewing Kempe as marginal to the great mystical and literary traditions of the late Middle Ages, this study takes her seriously as a woman responding to the cultural constraints and exclusions of her time. Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh will be of interest to students and scholars of medieval studies, intellectual history, and feminist theory.
Examining the works of such Victorian writers as the Brontes, Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, this study discusses codes and taboos about the female body and explores how female sexuality was represented in Victorian literary and non-literary genres, such as painting, etiquette books and pornography.
This book presents Czeslaw Milosz's poetic philosophy of the body as an original defense of religious faith, transcendence, and the value of the human individual against what he viewed as dangerous modern forms of materialism. The Polish Nobel laureate saw the reductive biologization of human life as a root cause of the historical tragedies he had witnessed under Nazi German and Soviet regimes in twentieth-century Central and Eastern Europe. The book argues that his response was not merely to reconstitute spiritual or ideal forms of human identity, which no longer seemed plausible. Instead, he aimed to revalidate the flesh, elaborating his own non-reductive understandings of the self on the basis of the body's deeper meanings. Within the framework of a hesitant Christian faith, Milosz's poetry and prose often suggest a paradoxical striving toward transcendence precisely through sensual experience. Yet his perspectives on bodily existence are not exclusively affirmative. The book traces his diverse representations of the body from dualist visions that demonize the flesh through to positive images of the body as the source of religious experience, the self, and his own creative faculty. It also examines the complex relations between masculine and feminine bodies or forms of subjectivity, as Milosz represents them. Finally, it elucidates his contention that poetry is the best vehicle for conveying these contradictions, because it also combines disembodied, symbolic meanings with the sensual meanings of sound and rhythm. For Milosz, the double nature of poetic meaning reflects the fused duality of the human self.
The `riddle of femininity', like Freud's reference to women's sexuality as a `dark continent', has been treated as a romantic aside or a sexist evasion, rather than a problem to be solved. In this first comprehensive study, Teresa Brennan suggests that by placing these theories in the context of Freud's work overall, we will begin to understand why femininity was such a riddle for Freud.
