Stella Gonzalez-Amal, Gill Jagger, Kathleen Lennon, Embodied Selves.

Abstract

Stella Gonzalez-Amal, Gill Jagger, and Kathleen Lennon, Embodied Selves. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012, 272 pp., $90.00 hardcover (9781137283702) Stella Gonzalez-Arnal, Gill Jagger, and Kathleen Lennon frame their edited anthology, Embodied Selves, both with and against variegated backdrop of scholarly literature concerned with question of body. Vis-a-vis longstanding tensions in humanities and social sciences that pit discursive understandings of body--the body as a marker of social identity, for example, or as a site of power relations and disciplinary practices--against ones--that focus, for example, on biological or organic properties of body--this text is refreshingly committed to theorizing body as a kind of discursive corporeality, a thorough and complete entanglement of matter and meaning (p. 3). Avowedly drawing on theoretical insights from new materialist turn within social and political theory, collection attends explicitly to properties of body and to its corporeal practices; according to editors, text seeks to that matter--the --is accorded an active and that ... weightiness of body's materiality is felt (p. 3). The editors are quick to caution, however, that turn toward ought not (and indeed, I would argue, cannot) be accomplished by turning away from discursive. our view they note, the insights of [new materialist] theoretical turn need to be tempered to ensure that neither nor discursive should be privileged (p. 2). The body always and only appears in midst of a sociocultural milieu that mediates and shapes ways in which it can be lived, understood, and felt. In thirteen essays that comprise this interdisciplinary collection, body appears in a variety of ways, as that which is, at once, decidedly discursive--power and oppression, marginality and resistance--and inescapably material--flesh and bone, mind and senses, pleasure and pain, life and death. A central promise of text and one that is, I think, its most valuable and distinctive contribution, lies in its attempt at depicting indeterminacy of fleshly, body; body that is always corporeally and contextually specific yet can never be reduced to a static or singular nature. The volume is divided into four sections, each drawing on a breadth of topics, questions, and methodologies. Notions of affect, agency, identity, performance, autonomy, intersubjectivity, and interdependency are raised as matters of interest. While four sections serve purpose of curating particular conversations between authors/essays, such partitions are, in words of editors, artificial as many of essays share multiple, overlapping themes. In first section, Biology and Sexed Difference, essays by Linda Martin Alcoff, Kathleen Lennon, and Stella Sandford discuss possible role of biology in anchoring categories of body, each with a notable focus on biological forms of and their relation to division of sexes. Read together, chapters comprising this section exemplify pull of an objectivist account of body as well as limits of such an account. Articulating some of central themes from her 2008 book, Visible Identities, Alcoff argues that one's relationship of possibility to biological reproduction determines material infrastructure of sexual difference (pp. 19, 17). Perhaps more interesting, however, is Lennon's critique of Alcoff in Chapter Two. Echoing Alcoff, Lennon concedes that body's relation to biological has important and even profound effects on who we are and how we can (are permitted to) move through world. And, like Alcoff, Lennon also acknowledges that there are a great many ways of relating to (through use of technology, for example). …