Corporeal Feminism Research Articles

Phenomenology and embodiment in cross-cultural sporting contexts: a case of Chinese female students

This paper provides an account of how phenomenological methods can be effectively utilized to provide a detailed understanding of sporting bodies. Specifically, this sociological study investigates how Chinese female students perceive their sporting bodies in various contexts. We aim to explore what particular embodied sporting experiences they have in both Chinese and English contexts. Data was collected using Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology method of being-in-the-world through the collection of notes while one of the authors was a participant observer in this research project. Semi-structured interviews grounded in corporeal feminism were also conducted with nine Chinese female students studying in England. The data collected on the students, and supplemented with the participant observation, was organized into the following themes: corporeal-based sensory experiences (sight, hearing, touch and smell), lived temporal–spatial experiences, experiences of being-in-the-world-with-others and embodied cultural ...

The body in breast cancer

Breast cancer is everywhere: it is a leading killer of women and a hyper-visible disease. Breast cancer proliferates and extends into almost every cultural arena in our contemporary moment. It can ...

Disorientation and emergent subjectivity: The political potentiality of embodied encounter

Located in philosophical enquiry, this article considers ways to theorize and articulate the political significance of embodied encounter with the environment. Underlying this discussion is an interrogation of the relationship between presence, embodiment and intersubjectivity, with specific reference to Fisher-Lichte’s proposition of ‘the radical concept of presence’. In doing so, an affinity is proposed between Deleuzian inflected corporeal feminism principally through the work of Rosi Braidotti and Elizabeth Grosz, and somatic-informed movement practice in the environment. It is suggested that both offer a critique of the ‘mind/body’ dualism implicit within humanist understandings of subjectivity. Accordingly, each can be argued to recast subjectivity as an always embodied activity, an inter-corporeal exchange between ‘self’, recast as shifting and multiple, and ‘otherness’. In arguing this point, the article proposes an alternative model of the audience – performer relationship theorized around notions of witness and transformation. Noting the political dimensions of this for issues of difference in performance, the article seeks to elucidate the extent to which existing approaches to performance studies, or that which Melrose terms ‘expert writerly registers’, themselves rooted in a disembodied spectatorship, arguably lack the apparatus to accommodate such understandings.

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative

Making a Pig of the Humanities: Re-centering the Historical Narrative

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

Ambient Thinking: Or, Sweating over Theory

MCS Matters: Material Agency in the Science and Practices of Environmental Illness

If nature is to matter, we need more potent, more complex understandings of materiality. New conceptions of materiality, which are neither biologically reductive nor strictly social constructionist, are emerging in science studies, environmental philosophy, corporeal feminism, disability studies and other fields. This essay analyzes scientific, popular and autobiographical accounts of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS), or environmental illness, arguing that this condition provokes new models of material agency as well as new forms of environmentalism. The material agency of MCS epitomizes “trans-corporeality”—the recognition that the substance of the human is co-extensive with the emergent, more-than-human world.

Passages in Post‐Modern Theory: Mapping the Apparatus

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture [1977] (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1981). 2. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 1998). 3. Nicolas De Oliveira, Nicola Oxley, Michael Petry, Installation Art in the New Millenium. The Empire of the Senses (London: Thames & Hudson, 2003). 4. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p.279. 5. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p.279. 6. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002) p.5. [original emphasis] 7. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p.280. [original emphasis] 8. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p.280. 9. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, p.240. 10. Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press: 1990), p.1. 11. In dys‐appearance, the prefix dys evokes several levels of meaning. (PP) In Greek, dys signifies ‘bad’, ‘hard’ or ‘ill’, a sense of meaning preserved in such English words as ‘dysfunction’, as well as in many terms for illnesses, such as ‘dysentery’ and ‘dyslexia’. (PP) Dys can also be understood as a somewhat archaic spelling of the Latin root dis, which originally had the meaning ‘away’, ‘apart’ or ‘asunder’. Dys‐appearance, therefore, effects an attentional reversal of disappearance. The words dys‐appearance and disappearance have an antonymic significance, while at the same time the homonimity of the words is meant to suggest the deep relation between these modes. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, pp.86–87. 12. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, p.91. 13. ‘Preface’, in The Artist's Body, ed. Tracey Warr, survey by Amelia Jones (London: Phaidon Press, 2000), pp.11–15. 14. Amelia Jones, ‘Survey’, in The Artist's Body, pp.16–47. 15. Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body, 21. 16. Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body, p.43. 17. Tracey Warr and Amelia Jones, The Artist's Body, p.43. 18. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, p.153. 19. Drew Leder, The Absent Body, p.173. 20. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p.92. 21. Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned. Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). 22. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation, p.178. 23. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation, pp.178–79. 24. Elisabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1994). 25. First introduced at the AILA conference Multiliteracies: The Contact Zone (Ghent, Belgium, September 2003). See also Performance Research, 12:1 (2006): A Lexicon.

Adapting Femininities

Adapting Femininities

NEGOTIATING CRISIS IN A FEMINISM CLASSROOM

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes * We would like to express our sincere gratitude to our colleague Ryan Bishop for offering us invaluable input on an early draft. Our thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to shape the subsequent reworking of this paper. The authors welcome further discussion and can be contacted at ellchh@nus.edu.sg or ellcs@nus.edu.sg 1. This is the title of Singapore's first Prime Minister (now Minister Mentor) Lee Kuan Yew's memoir published in 2000 Lee , Kuan Yew . 2000 . From Third World to First: The Singapore story, 1965–2000 . New York : HarperCollins . [Google Scholar]. 2. In the 2006 general election the dominant PAP party garnered 66.7 per cent of the votes, claiming all but two seats in parliament. This is generally understood to reinforce the idea that Singaporeans want to have a strong government in power but one that is checked and balanced by a credible opposition in parliament. 3. Known locally as the Maria Hertog riot, the violent clashes between Muslims and Christians in the 1950s in Singapore resulted from a tussle over the custody of a Dutch-born girl, Maria Hertog, who was raised by a Malay family. This conflict later led to one of the bloodiest riots in Singapore's race history. The riot—on 21 July 1964 between Malays and Chinese—claimed 23 lives and injured 460. This date is now observed as Racial Harmony Day in Singapore. 4. Upon reflection, while writing this paper, it occurred to us (to our own chagrin), that the instinct that caused us to ‘smell’ possible crisis stemming from just one complaint perhaps testifies to the ‘crisis mentality’ that we Singaporeans are said to harbour. This kind of reflexive response to a situation surely says much about the pervasive mode of socialisation as Singaporeans initiated from a national level of consciousness. 5. Bruce Elder (1997, 1–21) sketches a clear history of the mind/body debate in his introduction. Richard Warner also discusses this at great length in The Mind–Body Problem: A Guide to the Current Debate (1994 Warner , Richard . 1994 . Introduction . In The Mind–body problem: A guide to the current debate , edited by Richard Warner and Tadeusz Szubka . Oxford : Blackwell . [Google Scholar]), in his introduction to the volume. 6. For a more detailed discussion of the body in Hinduism and Buddhism, see Richard King (1999 King , Richard . 1999 . Indian philosophy: An introduction to Hindu and Buddhist thought . Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press . [Google Scholar]). In chapter 8 he deals with ‘consciousness and the body’ in both philosophies. 7. For further discussion on the body and feminism, see Jane Gallop (1988 Gallop , Jane . 1988 . Thinking through the body . New York : Columbia University Press .[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]); Elizabeth Grosz (1994 Grosz , Elizabeth . 1994 . Volatile bodies: Towards a corporeal feminism . Bloomington : Indiana University Press . [Google Scholar]); and Judith Butler (1993 Butler , Judith . 1993 . Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex . New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]). 8. Interestingly, Sharina's question echoes the Confucian concern over family/clan and national loyalties, i.e. that the individual in society exists not as self per se but as a self in relation to others. 9. For example, these five principles are classed as ‘national symbols’ on a local school website. An example may be seen on the home page of Victoria School, Singapore at http://vs.moe.edu.sg/ [accessed 13 November 2006]. 10. For further discussion, see Chitra Sankaran and Chng Huang Hoon (2004 Sankaran , Chitra , and Chng Huang Hoon . 2004 . ‘We women aren't free to die’: Transacting Asian sexualities in a feminism classroom in Singapore . Critical Asian Studies 36 ( 2 ): 285 – 301 .[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) and Chng Huang Hoon and Chitra Sankaran (2003 Chng , Huang Hoon , and Chitra Sankaran . 2003 . Looking to East and West: Feminist practice in an Asian classroom . In Fractured feminisms , edited by Laura Rosendale and Gil Harootunian . New York : SUNY Press . [Google Scholar]). 11. See, for instance, Brady (1994 Brady , Jeanne . 1994 . Critical literary feminism and a politics of representation . In Politics of liberation , edited by McLaren Peter L. and Eslin Lankshear . London and New York : Routledge . [Google Scholar]) and McLaren (1994 McLaren , Peter . 1994 . Multiculturalism and the postmodern critique: Toward a pedagogy of resistance and transformation . In Between borders: Pedagogy and the politics of cultural studies , edited by Girone Henry A. and Peter McLaren . New York and London : Routledge . [Google Scholar]).

Imaging the Visceral Soma: A Corporeal Feminist Interpretation

Feminist philosophers of technoscience have long argued that it is vital that we question biomedical and scientific claims to an immaterial and disembodied objectivity, and also, more specifically, that we disable the conception of medical visualising technologies as neutral or transparent conduits to the “fact” of the body. In this paper we suggest that corporeal feminism is well situated to provide such a critique. Feminist phenomenologists over the past decade have theorised embodiment in a number of critical ways, many deriving concepts from the work of Merleau-Ponty, and emphasising the pliability and diversity of our body images and corporeal schematics. Others such as Elizabeth Wilson, Cathy Waldby and Drew Leder have considered the interdependence of our inner biology or viscerality with the socio-cultural inscriptions of embodiment. In this paper, these adaptations of phenomenology, and their account of the specificity and depth of embodied being, will be discussed and applied to the discourse of biomedicine and the apparatus of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Motherly Love

Motherly Love

Breastfeeding as headwork: Corporeal feminism and meanings for breastfeeding

Recognizing that there is now a corpus of feminist work that theorizes the body, sometimes termed corporeal feminism ( Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, 1994), this paper seeks to apply some of those theories in their transformative potential to the practices, policies and experiences of breastfeeding of the late twentieth century in the west. As an example of material sexual difference, the physiology of breastfeeding is examined in comparison with other cultural and institutional discourses. On the narrative level, all are found to varying degrees to characterize breastfeeding as a matter of headwork, as an activity to be learned and managed rather than embodied. Duplicating the preoccupation with and privileging of mind over matter common in western epistemology has entailed a shift in knowledge/power from mothers to professionals at a time when women's corporeality is most active and symbolically significant. New narratives are therefore sought and tentatively applied, which involve reconceptualizing what we understand the brain to be, and ways in which we might strategically read the body (and breasts) as literate and thoughtful.

3 Feminisms

This chapter has four sections: 1. Feminism and Popular Culture; 2. Women and Literature; 3. Feminism and Cultural History; 4. The Female Body and Corporeal Feminism.

Rearticulating Violence

Rearticulating Violence

Feminism, Aestheticism and the Limits of Law

This article seeks to identify and address the normative void that resides at the heart of postmodernist-feminist theory, and to propose a philosophical framework – beyond postmodernism, but incorporating its central insights – for thinking through the normative questions with which feminists are inevitably confronted in their engagements with positive law. Two varieties of postmodernist-feminism are identified and critically analysed: the ‘corporeal feminism’ of Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler, which seeks to ground feminist critical practice in the irruptive capacities of the material body considered as an arte fact of social construction; and the deconstructionist feminism of Drucilla Cornell, for whom ‘the feminine’ is an indeterminate but disruptive force beyond its construction in law and in other social sites. The first component of the argument elaborated here is that each of these approaches ultimately reduces to a form of aestheticism which is incapable of generating a worthwhile and workable feminist approach to the restructuring of politics and law. The second component of the argument involves a return to aesthetics, in particular to the philosophical aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Kant’s aesthetic philosophy, it will be suggested, yields a framework of concepts which, duly re-manipulated, could speak to the very concerns that have inspired postmodernist-feminism: how to attend to (bodily) particularity while avoiding the dangers associated with ‘essentialism’; and how to theorise the propensity of the unrepresentable power of the feminine to exceed both embodied human capacities and the confining rein of socially privileged rationalities. Crucially, however it also responds to a set of preoccupations – those of the feminist lawyer – that cannot be accommodated by postmodernism: how to translate embodied experience into (legal) norms; generalise from the particular; seek consensus; and codify an endless potentiality in the form of law.

The Haunted Flesh: Corporeal Feminism and the Politics of (Dis)Embodiment

Les AA. soulignent que la corporeite et l'image du corps constituent deux questions centrales dans l'analyse feministe. Elles examinent les perspectives qui permettent de depasser le dualisme cartesien et le phallocentrisme du cogito qui denie toute creativite au corps. Elles rappellent que Freud a denonce l'identification, dans la philosophie classique, de la subjectivite humaine a la seule conscience rationnelle. Elles estiment que certaines representations de la feminite, notamment l'image du corps fin, peuvent perturber l'image que les femmes ont de leur corps et etre a l'origine de certaines nevroses comme l'anorexie. Elles montrent comment Gilles Deleuze et Felix Guattari concoivent l'image et la signification du corps.

Making Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity. Leslie AdelsonUnbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Susan BordoBodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex.". Judith ButlerVolatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Elizabeth Grosz

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsMaking Bodies, Making History: Feminism and German Identity. Leslie Adelson Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Susan Bordo Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex.". Judith Butler Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Elizabeth Grosz Jacquelyn ZitaJacquelyn Zita Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 21, Number 3Spring, 1996 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495118 Views: 12Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1996 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jessica E. Brophy Developing a corporeal cyberfeminism: beyond cyberutopia, New Media & Society 12, no.66 (Sep 2010): 929–945.https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444809350901Gillian Townsley Gender trouble in Corinth, The Bible and Critical Theory 2, no.22 (Jun 2006): 17.1–17.14.https://doi.org/10.2104/bc060017 Amy Hollywood Performativity, Citationality, Ritualization, History of Religions 42, no.22 (Oct 2015): 93–115.https://doi.org/10.1086/463699

The Roots of Power: Animate form and Gendered Bodies, by Maxine Sheets Johnstone. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1994. x + 438 pp., prologue, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95paperbound. - Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, by Elizabeth Grosz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. xvi + 256 pp., introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 clothbound; $14.95 paperbound.

The Roots of Power: Animate form and Gendered Bodies, by Maxine Sheets Johnstone. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, 1994. x + 438 pp., prologue, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95paperbound. - Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, by Elizabeth Grosz. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994. xvi + 256 pp., introduction, notes, bibliography, index. $35.00 clothbound; $14.95 paperbound.

Book Reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. By Elizabeth GroszFeminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange. Ed. Linda NicholsonEthics of Eros: Irigaray's Rewriting of the Philosophers. By Tina ChanterMann, Patricia S. Micro‐Politics: Agency in a Postfeminist EraFeminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. Edited by Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in ths article:The Medical Mind of Shakespeare Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism Elizabeth GroszThe Healing Arts: An Oxford Illustrated Andiology RS Downie (ed.)