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Embodied Practices
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Embodied Practices
Feminist Perspectives on the Body

Edited by:

September 1997 | 224 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. Whether the body is treated as biological bedrock or subversive metaphor, it is implicated in the cultural and historical construction of sexual difference as well as asymmetrical power relations. The contributors to this volume examine the role of the body as socially shaped and historically colonized territory and as the focus of individual womenÆs struggles for autonomy and self-determination. They also analyze its centrality to the feminist critique of male-stream science as dualistic, distanced, and decontextualized. While the body has become a "hot item" in contemporary social theory and research, the renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. The body may be back, but the "new" body theory often proves to be just as disembodied as it ever was. The body revival seems to be less an attempt to re-embody masculinist science than just another expression of the same condition that evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in Western culture. Drawing on insights from contemporary feminist theories of gender and power, this book offers a timely critical appraisal of the recent "body revival." Embodied Practices not only sets an agenda for research about the body, but for an embodied perspective on the body as well. It will be a valuable and thought-provoking resource for students of womenÆs studies, social theory, cultural studies, and medical sociology.

Kathy Davis
Embody-ing Theory
Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist Readings of the Body

 
 
PART ONE: THE FEMALE BODY: DIFFERENCE AND POWER
Anne Woollett and Harriette Marshall
Reading the Body
Young Women's Accounts of Their Bodies in Relation to Autonomy and Independence

 
Anna Aalten
Performing the Body, Creating Culture
Ineke Klinge
Female Bodies and Brittle Bones
Medical Interventions in Osteoporosis

 
Gesa Lindemann
The Body of Gender Difference
Rachel A Bloul
Victims or Offenders? `Other' Women in French Sexual Politics
Dubravka Zarkov
Sex as Usual
Body Politics and the Media War in Serbia

 
 
PART TWO: FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN BODY/POLITICS
Gon Buurman
Erotic Bodies
Images of the Disabled

 
Julia Edwards and Linda McKie
Women's Public Toilets
A Serious Issue for the Body Politic

 
Joanne Finkelstein
Chic Outrage and Body Politics
Kathy Davis
`My Body Is My Art'
Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?

 
Monica Rudberg
The Researching Body
The Epistemophilic Project

 

`These essays are likely to be welcomed by those coming from a women's studies perspective....In addition, they open up possibilities for articulating an embodied theory of the body, which will be of interest to students of sociology or cultural theory and feminists alike' - Times Higher Education Supplement

`As the editor of this exciting collection notes, while bodies are "in" in social and cultural theory, there has been a surprising neglect of the gendered nature of embodiment. This book presents fascinating and original accounts of the nature and meaning of female bodies over a range of cultural and political contexts and practices. The book's strengths lie in its successful melding of contemporary theory with empirical research and grounded examples of women's embodiment' - Deborah Lupton, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst

`An excellent collection on the body from a specifically feminist perspective... a solid empirical work imbued with cutting-edge theorizing. Political implications for women are always foregrounded' - Judith Lorber

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Hardcover
ISBN: 9780761953623
$249.00

Paperback
ISBN: 9780761953630
$79.00