Bodily Boundaries Research Articles

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

‘I also Melayu ok’ – Malay-Chinese Women Negotiating the Ambivalence of Biraciality for Agentic Autonomy

Resisting Disability, Claiming HIV: Introducing the Ability Contract and Conceptualizations of Liberal Citizenship

This paper interrogates the ambiguity of disability identification for women living with HIV, drawing on a nine-month field research project where participants formed a book group, reading memoirs about chronic episodic conditions such as HIV, lupus, MS, and chronic depression, and discussed their relationships to disability. In investigating this ambiguity, this paper re-reads Social Contract Theory, primarily the work of John Locke, Mills, Pateman, and Winnubst, to introduce the Ability Contract. Social Contract Theory can provide us with an understanding of labor’s centrality in the construction of the liberal subject, which implicitly shapes construction of dis/ability. Several scholars have written about Social Contract Theory’s applicability to gendered subjects and racialized subjects, but few scholars have used dis/ability to interrogate Social Contract Theory. This project looks at John Locke to argue that his understanding of labor, utility and waste, and the predictability of what will be produced, is a result of understanding one’s bodily boundaries. The Ability Contract is this triad of labor-utility-predictability that is foundational to liberal subjectivity. Disability upsets this construction of liberal subjectivity, which in turn, enables an unstable negotiation of identity that extends Chicana feminist theorist Chela Sandoval’s theorization differential consciousness. For women living with HIV, disability identification is useful for accessing temporary assistance but ultimately, the women who participated in this nine-month book group, disidentified with disability through a negotiation of labor. Through the Ability Contract, and the centrality of labor-utility-predictability, we can understand that a stable identification with disability is a privilege dependent upon male-bodied whiteness.

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

A Taste for the Transgressive: Pushing Body Limits in Contemporary Performance Art

From Masisi to Activists: Same-Sex Relations and the Haitian Polity

From Masisi to Activists: Same-Sex Relations and the Haitian Polity Thérèse Migraine-George While the inextricable connection between democracy and human rights has been well documented, it is also no coincidence that countries enjoying a high degree of socioeconomic stability and political liberalism are generally striving to achieve gender equality and, in some cases, have even legalized same-sex relationships. Indeed, the public ways in which bodies are represented, shaped, and disciplined undergird a complex interplay of social, political, and cultural ideologies that, in turn, reflect on the civic health of a nation or a community. Drawing on Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva among others, Judith Butler notably shows that the constitution of bodily margins and boundaries through which sexual others are both produced and “abjected” is based on an arbitrary yet regulatory differentiation between the “inner” and “outer.” This distinction undergirds homophobia as well as racism. As she puts it, “The boundary of the body as well as the distinction between internal and external is established through the ejection and transvaluation of something originally part of identity into a defiling otherness.”1 Moreover, the strategies used by sexual minorities to become more visible in the civic space, to move from the outer social margins to the inner public realm, significantly point toward the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion that operate in any society, in regard not only to its sexual minorities but to disenfranchised groups in general. The margin, whether ethnic or sexual, is therefore a critical vantage point to observe the central functioning of power. In the context of Haiti, the status of people who engage in same-sex relations and the ways in which some organizations have recently begun to advocate more vocally for their rights are particularly significant in relation to ongoing efforts to build a sustainable democracy and to counter the pervasive anomy of the civic space. Although the integration of different sexual behaviors within Haitian Vodou has been highlighted, particularly in the 2002 documentary Of Men and Gods, people engaging in same-sex relations in Haiti are subjected to various forms of harassment [End Page 8] and stigmatization. Homophobia in post-earthquake Haiti has been further reinforced by the popular belief that Masisi—a derogatory term used to designate “effeminate” men in Haitian Kreyòl—provoke divine punishment in the form of natural disasters. It is within such a discriminatory context that a “gay rights” movement has recently emerged in Haiti.2 In May 2012, an “LGBT Congress,” which attracted over three hundred people and many nongovernmental organizations, took place in Port-au-Prince to mark the International Day against Homophobia and Transphobia. In the words of one participating organization, Housing Works: The 2010 earthquake further devastated the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, so issues of basic survival can seem to trump the need for other kinds of advocacy. But the work for cultural and national acceptance of LGBT people in Haiti remains a struggle, and this conference is proof that the rebuilding of Haiti means houses, hospitals and schools, and social justice for marginalized groups within the country.3 One newly formed organization, Kouraj, also participated in the May 2012 Congress. On its website, the organization presents itself as “a group of masisi activists, created to politicize other homosexuals and transgender persons in Haiti regarding their fundamental human rights.”4 Interestingly, Kouraj decided to break away from the acronym LGBT in favor of the name “M Movement.” This is based on the Kreyòl terms Masisi, Madivin, Makomer, and Mix, which, the organization explains on its website, more accurately reflect the complex reality of same-sex practices in Haiti while resisting Western-imposed gender and sexual norms.5 This essay argues that the civic space that the “M community” is trying to carve out for itself constitutes a laboratory for the democratization of Haitian society. In its efforts to achieve social justice, the movement follows the communitarian spirit of both Haiti’s Vodou tradition and its revolutionary past, while opposing masculinist forms of centralized government, divisive social prejudices, and Western hegemonic discourses. Although the M community experiences a specific form of ostracization, its struggle for legitimacy reflects a much...

Friction in the interstices: Emotion and landscape in Stone Butch Blues

This article analyzes the role of emotion in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues. Widely understood as one of the first modern transgender novels, Stone Butch Blues depicts the bodily changes of its protagonist, Jess Goldberg, from living as a “he–she,” to passing as male, to living as neither male nor female. This article analyzes how Jess's body, identity, and feelings shape and are shaped by the spaces ze encounters throughout the novel. Finding that Jess experiences emotions as bodily boundaries and metaphorical geographies, I draw from the work of Sara Ahmed to argue that Jess's decision at the novel's end not to pass as female or male is a choice to push back at the gendered norms of hir world through a body and politics shaped by emotion. Turning to contemporary trans* – transgender, transsexual, and trans – movements for social change, I argue that Jess's politics of bodily and emotional abrasion can help in the development of a trans* politics of emotion.

Närhetens intima avstånd. Om Känselsinnet som sammanbindande och gränsdragande

The sense of touch is often both conceptualized and experienced in terms of closeness in contrast to an objectifying distance traditionally ascribed to the sense of sight. In this article I thematize the closeness of touch and examine the relation between touching and touched through a close reading of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the lived body and its relation to the world and others. The purpose of such a reading is to throw light on the closeness characterizing the sense of touch as a closeness involving its own distance or gap through which touch and the relation between touching and touched are given birth. Merleau-Ponty offers sophisticated and fruitful tools for approaching established concepts and understandings of sensation and touch, bodily boundaries, and closeness and distance. In a first step, I reflect on the multiple and ambiguous meanings of the words sense (känna) and touch (beröra), emphasizing the impossibility of understanding these words in any simple terms. In a second step, I turn to Merleau- Ponty’s philosophy in order to reach a deeper understanding of the closeness of touch. I discuss his description of the lived body as sensible sentient, that is as both touching and touchable, his understanding of the notion intercorporeity and his description of the relation between touching and touched in terms of an incomplete reversibility that both binds the two terms together while at the same time drawing a boundary between them.

Embodied geographies of alcohol and the weekend in the Bega Valley, New South Wales, Australia

This paper focuses on embodied geographies of alcohol to rethink the weekend. We explore the weekend as it is produced via the mutually constitutive relationships between time, space and bodies. Drawing on qualitative research undertaken in Bega, New South Wales, Australia with 23 young women, we offer a critical analysis of how alcohol shapes the bodily, social, spatial and temporal boundaries that interpose knowing the weekend. We illustrate how alcohol mediates the felt and performative dimension of the embodied geographies that configure the weekend. We argue that young women’s bodies and spaces may be understood as sites where the pleasures and pain of alcohol may rupture or make resilient bodily, spatial, social or temporal boundaries through which the weekend makes sense.

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Recritude: Reflections on Postural Ontology

Tag, you're different: the interrupted spaces of children at risk of anaphylaxis

Several contributions to understanding the emotional aspects of everyday lives have been made by geographers. What we undertake in this research is to focus that lens on the emotional context of experiences of children at risk and in particular on anaphylactic risk-scapes, particularly within the school environment. This research attempts to go beyond the policy response by privileging the voices of the affected children (and their parents) in order to understand the emotionality of their risk experience; how it is articulated and negotiated in place, and how bodily boundaries are interrupted. Qualitative methods were used to explore children's perceptions of, and experiences with, anaphylactic allergy in the school environment. In-depth interviews were conducted with 10 children (aged 8–12 years) and 10 adolescents (aged 13–17 years) and their parents. Children were also asked to draw a picture of ‘what it was like to live with a severe food allergy’ and to then explain their illustration. Results revealed how the spaces of children at risk of anaphylaxis were interrupted; social spaces were interrupted through their bodily experiences of risk as they negotiated in and through school environments. These findings suggest allergic children contest school and policy constructions of ‘safe place’ through the interrupted spaces and bodily disruptions of emotion.

REPRESENTING, OBJECTIFYING, AND FRAMING THE BODY AT LATE BRONZE AGE KNOSSOS

Abstract This paper explores how the human form is depicted, objectified and contextualized, in order to clarify the complex relationship between ‘representation’ and ‘reality’, and to investigate the various ways the body is bounded. Part one argues that objectification is not always a passive process, but that the body is deliberately presented to the world to be observed and evaluated. Part two focuses on the configuration of bodily boundaries, and how the body is framed, for example, by clothing, architecture and the mortuary context. The wealth and range of evidence (wall paintings, seals and sealings, figurines, stone vases and burials) render Knossos an excellent case study for this approach. This paper asks not who the Knossians were, in terms of identity and ethnicity, but rather how they wanted to be presented to the world and each other.

Shapes of motherhood: exploring postnatal body image through photographs

This article contributes to, and extends, feminist and visual sociological scholarship by examining how a sample of pregnant women in Australia documented their postpartum experiences through digital photographs. It is argued that photography is powerful in helping women to articulate the ways in which subjectivities and bodily boundaries are reframed in the postpartum period. Dressing is used as a key example to demonstrate this. A further aim of this paper is to identify whether women's photographs can be used to contest dominant cultural ideologies and how we may read these using feminist perspectives. Throughout this article, women's individual embodied experiences of post-pregnancy are reflected in the production and viewing of their own photographic images.

Book Review. Manderson, Lenore. 2011. “Surface Tensions. Surgery, Bodily Boundaries and the Social Self”. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press

Book Review. Manderson, Lenore. 2011. “Surface Tensions. Surgery, Bodily Boundaries and the Social Self”. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press

Book Reviews

Aging America and Transportation: Personal Choices and Public Policy (J. Coughlin & L D’Ambrosio)Universal Design as a Rehabilitation Strategy (J. Sanford)Siobhan GregoryThe Long Baby Boom: An Optimistic Vision for a Graying Generation (J. Goldsmith)Susan WardSurface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self (L. Manderson)Amy Paul-Ward

Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self by Lenore Manderson (review)

Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self by Lenore Manderson (review)

Indulgence versus restraint: A discussion of embodied eating practices of pregnant Australian women

This article focuses on ‘health’ discourses in pregnancy as interpretive repertoires for shaping embodiment and creating ‘good’ mothers. Drawing on qualitative data, I argue that pregnancy is an extended period of biomedical and cultural surveillance and intensive self-regulation and government. I examine experiences of ‘cravings’ and restricting eating from my sample of pregnant Australian informants to demonstrate this. Eating was also a socio-cultural mechanism for the maintenance of bodily boundaries. ‘Public’ discourses of maternal responsibility are shown to be in conflict with informants’ ‘inside’, ‘private’ lived experiences of eating.

Feminist ecocriticism: the new ecofeminist settlement

Taking into account the material feminist theories of agency, matter, and body, this essay examines to what extent material feminisms and trans-corporeality can be productive models for conceptualizing feminist ecocriticism, an anti-phallogocentric ecocritical theory that analyzes the complex dynamics of material agencies across human and nonhuman bodies. By contesting gendered dualities and bodily boundaries, it opens up new ecocritical pathways to deconstruct the sexist, speciesist, and homophobic discourses of nature which served as a rhetorical strategy to associate female and queer human beings with animals/nature. Feminist ecocriticism is also a form of literary criticism that examines these issues in literary texts. Richard Powers novel Gain provides a palpable example as it highlights the permeability of bodily natures.

Eradicating Bodies in Invasive Plant Management

It is increasingly acknowledged that invasive plant management, although a significant global issue, is a matter of coexistence rather than control. Nevertheless an adversarial rhetoric dominated by discourses of war and winning persists. This paper focuses on the bodies of plants, the animals with which they become entangled, and the humans who are charged with eradicating them. Plants help to rethink bodily difference beyond the human, extending feminist theories that have contributed to increased recognition of nonhuman difference. Bodies are a barely acknowledged scale of invasive plant management, which is usually conceptualised in landscape terms. Our empirical focus is the eradication of three species in northwestern Australia: Mimosa ( Mimosa pigra), Gamba Grass ( Andropogon gayanus), and Neem ( Azadirachta indica). By paying attention to plant difference and illuminating the experience of invasive plant managers, we show how eradication manages the intersecting timespaces of different bodies in order to stop plants becoming collectives. We identify contradictions in the regulation and application of borders, which are less permeable for some animals than for all humans. We also draw attention to the questions of risk—for humans and others—in the process of killing plants. For embodied geographies, a plant perspective opens up new ways of thinking about bodily boundaries: in particular the individual/collective divide. The implication for invasive plant management is that, even at the eradication end of the spectrum, effective management is an uncertain process that involves living in association with invasive plants rather than living separately from them.

Silverman, Gillian. 2012.Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America

Reviewed by: Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America by Gillian Silverman Jessica Beard Silverman, Gillian. 2012. Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pp. 226. ISBN 978-0-8122-4415-1. $55.00. Jacques Derrida writes of the deceased Louis Marin in The Work of Mourning: “In my relationship to myself, he is here in me before me, stronger or more forceful than I” (160). Derrida is describing the activity of reading the deceased Marin’s writing, in a moment that he will later describe as achieving psychic simultaneity with Marin in the shared space of the book. Derrida’s description of bodily boundaries made variously pliant—“he is here / in me / before me”—by the act of reading is a phenomenon well articulated by readers of the nineteenth century. Gillian Silverman’s book Bodies and Books is a careful investigation of these corporeal reading practices felt, experienced, and theorized by these readers. Silverman’s book chronicles readers’ representations of bodily engagements with the psychic and textual presence of the author. It is a thorough examination of nineteenth-century reading practices that situate the book as a “technology of intimacy” (19). Bodies and Books is made up of two chapters that historicize the act of reading within the contexts of technology and intimacy in nineteenth-century terms, followed by three case study chapters that read Herman Melville’s Pierre, Fredrick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, and Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World as reflective of different variations of this intimacy. Silverman’s insistence that the relationships encouraged by the book were communions and not communities opens [End Page 139] up these variations to relationships that cross bodily boundaries normally restricted by death, questions of race, gender roles, and familial relations. The case studies reveal tangled incorporations within the narratives themselves, usually driven by representations of reading or other textual consumption. Chapter one situates the reader within nineteenth-century reading practices shaped by technological advances that increased a reader’s access to texts. Silverman sees two distinct trends in reading that she calls “Railroad Reading” and “Wayward Reading”. Railroad reading reflected the period’s obsession with productive time, especially as it is found in conduct manuals directed toward women. Idle thinking and reading were considered antithetical to the efficiency reflected by the railroad model, which prioritized the mastery of the reading material and the betterment of the self. Wayward reading, in Silverman’s words, can be characterized by its “value of self-forgetting and to the gratifications of imagined contact with another” (24). This chapter’s thorough review of primary documents — nineteenth-century conduct manuals, reading studies, letters, journals, and works of fiction — is enhanced by Silverman’s careful synthesis and analysis that teases out the period’s anxieties around modernization and suggestive correctives to its chaos. Further, she suggests that the relationship formed between the text and the wayward reader is one of consumption, where the boundaries between reader and text/author are significantly crossed, resulting in their merger. The second chapter, “Books and the Dead”, examines the intimate relationships between “haunted” books and their readers. These relationships were formed with the dead author of the text, and often conceptualized communion via psychic connection, conjuring or total absorption of the authorial persona or point of view. In this section texts are consumed with anything but productive learning or thinking in mind. Readers form intimate spiritual bonds with the dead and are affectively drawn to their texts via the material body of the book. These bonds have their roots in the popular 19th century practices of mesmerism and séance spiritualism. Silverman frames the transgressive relationships readers formed with their texts as reactive to “antiseptic restrictions placed on nineteenth-century social life”, a point she fleshes out further in her case study chapters (68). In the case study chapters, Silverman focuses on the literature, letters, and journals of Melville, Douglass and Warner. Chapter three, “Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melville’s Pierre” makes connections between Melville’s desire for literary originality on a linguistic level and his narrative play with...

Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self (review)

Reviewed by: Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self Jonathan Cole Lenore Manderson. Surface Tensions: Surgery, Bodily Boundaries, and the Social Self. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press Inc., 2011. 295 pp. One question will not go away: how does the mind fit in the body? Though many criticize Descartes for separating the two, somewhat unfairly, they still quote him. In The God Delusion, Dawkins reiterates Paul Bloom’s suggestion that, “the idea that there is a me perched somewhere behind my eyes…is deeply ingrained in me and in every human being” (2007:209). This may be contentious—I escaped that ingraining—but dualism lives. Recently, there has also been a philosophical backlash against overly cognitive approaches to mind, and self, by phenomenologically informed writers such as Varela (1993), Thompson (2010), Gallagher (2005), Noë (2005), and Clark (2011). For them, the mind is distributed in brain, body, and beyond, since we are always within a physical and, importantly, social environment, and our perception of self is as dependent on others as on our own self. This is beautifully captured in Merleau-Ponty’s aphorism, “I exist in the facial expressions of the other, as they exist in mine.” One way to reveal the truth of this is to go to people with problems or impairments of the body and to ask about their experience. An exploration of their loss, and their—and others’—responses to it, allows for a deep understanding of the importance of embodied experience. In Surface Tension, Lenore Manderson provides a series of powerful narratives of medical loss, to explore the relations between self and society and its crucial dependence on the integrity of the body. From her sociological perspective, she follows people after amputation, mastectomy, and receipt of renal transplants, exploring her prefaced premise that, “illnesses are identified, interpreted and managed according to particular knowledge and belief systems, material circumstances [and] social institutions and relations. Bodily states, notions of self, and relations of the self [End Page 1307] to body are socially produced” (12). She begins, incidentally, by briefly outlining the nerve damage to her own left arm, weak for a decade or more after a radial nerve palsy (or a brachial neuritis, or inflammatory problem; she seems to have had treatment for all these). She mingles individuals’ narratives of loss and reconciliation with her own sociological reflections as she goes beyond the immediate dramas of diagnosis and treatment, to the longer, subtler, more hidden experiences of what happens later as people rebuild their lives. She also relates the ways in which artists have seen and forsee medical improvements. Within their creative perspective, she suggests, lies a reflection of society’s attitudes toward impairment and its new treatments. Importantly, in the first chapter, she states that her interviewees “wanted their stories heard and told” (48). This sentiment is too right. Often there is an attitude that patients should be protected. One ethics committee in the UK refused permission for a project, interviewing people about their experiences of a condition, because they thought that talking about it might distress them. Manderson begins with Drew Leder who, following Merleau-Ponty, wrote that though experience of the world and of others comes through the body and, in particular, through the sense organs, the body itself is not usually the “thematic object of experience.” The healthy body is taken for granted, and it enters awareness as an object when it goes wrong. Against this rather classical phenomenological view, Manderson cites the examples of yoga and Pilates to show how many people do live with the body as object. But physical impairments are different and often seen by others as a manifestation of the person’s more general disability, so-called leakage, something which has bedevilled people with disabilities for years. Diseases, conditions, and impairments happen to whole people, and affect their whole lives, in large part because of others’ responses to them. She discusses the increasing uses of new body parts. Hips, cataracts, knees, shoulders, pacemakers, face transplants; the acceptance of more and more replacements is threatening to turn some into cyborgs—an idea taken up in numerous films and novels. Rather than responding to disease, others have...