Synopses & Reviews
What do we mean when we talk about "the body"? This reader challenges the assumption that it can be invoked as a neutral, or indeed natural, point of reference in critical discussion or cultural practice. The essays collected here foreground the historical construction of "the body" throughout a range of discourses from the modern to the postmodern, and seek to present it not as a biological "given," but as a contestable signifier in the articulation of identities.
About the Author
Tiffany Atkinson is a Lecturer in the English Department at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements * Notes on Contributors * PART I: DEPTH * Introduction--T.Atkinson * The Renaissance Body: From Colonization to Invention--J.Sawday * Second Meditation: Of the Nature of the Human Mind; and that it is Easier to Know than the Body--R.Descartes * A Case of Hysteria: Frëulein Elisabeth Von R.--S.Freud * The Incitement to Discourse--M.Foucault * PART II: DIFFERENCE * Seduction and Guilt--C.Clément * 'Who Kills Whores?', 'I Do,' says Jack: Race and Gender in Victorian London--S.Gilman * Nietzscheanism and the Novelty of the Superman--M.Boscagli * Male Bodies and the 'White Terror'--K.Theweleit * The Fact of Blackness--F.Fanon * PART III: DECONSTRUCTIONS Womanliness as Masquerade--J.Riviere * The Anorexic Body: Reading Disorders--A.Bray * Bodies That Matter--J.Butler * Intensities and Flows--E.Grosz * Beyond Food/Sex: Eating and an Ethics of Existence--E.Probyn * Piercings--M.Torgovnick
* Summaries and Notes * Suggestions for Further Reading * Index