Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body / Edition 1

by Kathy Davis

Overview

This book focuses on the significance of the body in contemporary feminist scholarship. In recent years, the body has become a ‘hot item' in both contemporary social theory and research. This renewed interest has received a mixed reaction from feminists. While the body may be back, 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 which evoked the feminist critique in the first place: a flight from femininity and everything that is associated with it in western culture.

Embodied Practices offers a critical appraisal of the recent ‘body revival', drawing upon insi

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780761953630
Publisher:	SAGE Publications
Publication date:	08/18/1997
Series:	European Journal of Women's Studies Readers series , #1
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.47(d)

Table of Contents

Embody-ing Theory - Kathy Davis
Beyond Modernist and Postmodernist Readings of the Body
PART ONE: THE FEMALE BODY: DIFFERENCE AND POWER
Reading the Body - Anne Woollett and Harriette Marshall
Young Women's Accounts of Their Bodies in Relation to Autonomy and Independence
Performing the Body, Creating Culture - Anna Aalten
Female Bodies and Brittle Bones - Ineke Klinge
Medical Interventions in Osteoporosis
The Body of Gender Difference - Gesa Lindemann
Victims or Offenders? ‘Other' Women in French Sexual Politics - Rachel A Bloul
Sex as Usual - Dubravka Zarkov
Body Politics and the Media War in Serbia
PART TWO: FEMINIST INTERVENTIONS IN BODY/POLITICS
Erotic Bodies - Gon Buurman
Images of the Disabled
Women's Public Toilets - Julia Edwards and Linda Mc Kie
A Serious Issue for the Body Politic
Chic Outrage and Body Politics - Joanne Finkelstein
‘My Body Is My Art' - Kathy Davis
Cosmetic Surgery as Feminist Utopia?
The Researching Body - Monica Rudberg
The Epistemophilic Project

Editorial Reviews

‘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

From the Publisher