Synopses & Reviews
Review
"This is an exciting and timely new collection which focuses on and helps to explain the current fascination with bodies in their social, cultural, biological, and political configurations. This anthology brings together many of the leading and most innovative figures rethinking corporeality today. Exploring a number of trajectories with postmodern explorations of the body, this book raises many of the key questions that not only problematize traditional conceptions of the body (through emphasis in its social, geographical, spatial, historical, economic, and performative dimensions) but also forge the terms in which new conceptions can be developed." --Elizabeth Grosz, Monash University
"The number of books on body studies continues to mount. Here we have an essential handbook on the social and political reading of the body from an international and comparative perspective. Schatzki and Natter's volume will be a standard one in the library of any one interested in body studies." --Sander L. Gilman, Henry Luce Professor of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology, The University of Chicago
Synopsis
"This anthology brings together many of the leading and most innovative figures rethinking corporeality today. Exploring a number of trajectories with postmodern explorations of the body, this book raises many of the key questions that not only problematize traditional conceptions of the body, but also forge the terms in which new conceptions can be developed". -- Elizabeth Grosz, Monash University
"An essential handbook on the social and political reading of the body from an international and comparative perspective". -- Sander L. Gilman, University of Chicago
Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this unique book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. Celebrated authors from a range of disciplines explore the ways that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our experience of our physical selves, and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities, and desires reinforce or challenge the societal status quo. Timely and theoretically sophisticated, this book makes a significant contribution to some of the most vital debates of cultural studies and political theory today.
Synopsis
Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this unique book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. Celebrated authors, including Judith Butler and Emily Martin, explore the ways that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our physical selves and how we experience them, and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities, and desires reinforce or challenge the societal status quo. Timely and theoretically sophisticated, this book makes a significant contribution to some of the most vital debates of cultural studies and political theory today.
About the Author
Theordore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, founding members of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky, are coeditors (with John Paul Jones III) of
Postmodern Contentions and Objectivity and Its Other. They are also members, respectively, of the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature.
Table of Contents
1. Sociocultural Bodies, Bodies Sociopolitical, Theodore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter
I. Bodies and Selves
2. Performativity's Social Magic, Judith Butler
3. Practiced Bodies: Subjects, Genders, Minds, Theodore R. Schatzki
4. Montaigne on the Arts of Aging and Dying, John O'Neill
II. Political Bodies, Discursively
5. Gray Matters: Brains, Identities, and Natural Rights, Kathi L. Kern
6. Names, Bodies, and the Anxiety of Erasure, Thomas Laqueur
III. Bodies Sociopolitical and Economic
7. The Body at Work: Boundaries and Collectivities in the Late Twentieth Century, Emily
Martin
8. Feminism and the History of the Face, Kathy Peiss
9. From "Trained Gorilla" to "Humanware": Repoliticizing the Body Machine Complex
Between Fordism and Post-Fordism, Ernest J. Yanarella and Herbert G. Reid