Deviant Body Research Articles

The Deviant Body: Object and Spectacle in The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract: The Old Curiosity Shop , by title and by content, sublimely exhibits the Victorian period's enchantment with the curious. At first blush, the items of allure are the inanimate objects on display in Nell's grandfather's shop. With more measured inspection the question of animacy blurs, as both living and nonliving curiosities are subjected to the glare of fixation and fetishization. The Old Curiosity Shop is crowded with both inanimate and animate curiosities, the partition often obscured. As Victorian society obsessed over things and peculiarities, the animacy distinction collapsed. Deviant body forms were not exempt, reduced to mere curiosities, interchangeable and without identity, resulting in their ultimate abstraction through commodity culture, and displayed for profit in fairground sideshows. The Old Curiosity Shop embraces this fascination with body deviance, serving both as a reflection of cultural interest and as a vehicle to fuel societal captivation.

”Gör plats!”

”Make room!” Concerning ableism, paternalism and the construction of dis/ability Within the social work profession, social vulnerability and social justice are central concerns. However, professional emphasis is on economic and social conditions and less on dis/ability, despite the fact that dis/ability is important, not only for services aimed specifically at people with dis/abilities, but the entire profession of social work is linked to dis/ability in various ways. The purpose of the article is to contribute to a deepened understanding of vulnerability in general and, in particular, the vulnerability of people with dis/abilities. An advertisement from the Swedish Public Employment Service’s campaign “Make room!” forms a point of departure for a theoretical discussion of how dis/ability is constructed. The article demonstrates how the advertisement is based on paternalistic and ableistic ways of thinking that connect dis/ability, gender, and race/ethnicity. Able-bodied perfection is regarded as desirable, while the deviant body is linked to deficiency and suffering. The article also deals with the critical discussion that followed the advertisement, which eventually led to the Swedish Public Employment Service withdrawing it. Finally, we argue in favour of a cripistemological perspective in social work. This means taking previously marginalized knowledge as a starting point and reformulate traditional perspectives. It also means seeking cross-border cooperation between social work and the disability rights movement as well as other social movements. Thus, the lived experience of vulnerability that can result from impairment and its effects, as well as the political vulnerability that arises due to lack of resources, are made visible, without vulnerability being interpreted from paternalistic and ableistic perspectives. Moreover, ideas of the normal body and the normal way of thinking and feeling can be

The (Ho)rror of It All

The (Ho)rror of It All

Eating habits and physical activity of the medical students during the Covid-19 pandemic

Rationale: The number of people with deviant body mass index (BMI) has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Disturbed eating habits associated with decreased physical activity (PA) result from psycho-emotional deviations.

Around The Blind Musician: The Artistic Representation of Deviant Sense Organs

Referring to V. G. Korolenko’s story The Blind Musician and a number of other works of Russian literature, this article considers the image of a human being with deviant sense organs and its communicative potential as a subject of literature. The article looks at the period when deviant sense organs started to be perceived as a feature of a disabled person and deviation as a disability, the reasons behind it, and how it influenced literature. Relying on these criteria, the author reconstructs the history of the depiction of people with deviant bodies in European culture between the 12th and 20th centuries. It is demonstrated that T. Shevchenko and I. Turgenev mainly focused on the social oppression of people under serfdom, and not on the problems of a person with disabilities. Such a tendency is characteristic of other works of the period. V. Korolenko’s The Blind Musician was published during the years when the Patronage Committee for the Blind operated. The characters argue about their attitude towards the blind: patronage protects the blind from the troubles of the surrounding world, while attempts to integrate them into the world of those who can see leads to them losing their identity as blind people. While they are apparently opposed, the two positions rely on the idea that a person with deviant sense organs is not comfortable because of their state. This caused blind people themselves to protest: A. Birilev and A. Shcherbina stated that the blind do not aim to see light and do not suffer because of it: they claimed to be entitled to internal representation. I. Osorgin and M. Shishkin joined this debate. The portrayal of a person’s self is valid in terms of social, gender, age, and national deviations but does not extend to deviant sense organs. A person with a deviant body agrees to be qualified as an invalid; a person with a deviant feeling or communicative ability objects to being qualified as such. Deviant sense organs, unlike a deviant body, cannot have an external representation, as the presence of such sense organs means the development of deviant forms of communication, which provokes the blind and the deaf to create texts of auto-representation.

Foucault: On the Monstrosity of the Hermaphroditic Body

Stefanos Milkidis’ “Foucault: On the monstrosity of the hermaphroditic body” guides us through Foucault’s discourse on the hermaphrodite body. Focusing on two Foucauldian case studies, Milkidis traces the ways in which the hermaphrodite body is pathologized, underscoring the relationship between knowledge production and power relations. Milkidis’ emphasis on Foucault’s research proves fruitful to better understanding how the “deviant body” was historically demonized and pathologized as an abnormal “other” within medical spaces/discourse.

COMIXXX: corporalidades grotescas e ciborgues no quadrinho independente feito por mulheres no Brasil

This paper analyzes the expression of corporality in Zine XXX, an independent publication organized in 2014 by the cartoonist Beatriz Lopes, in order to diffuse the production of women in the comic book market. Based on an analysis that seeks the convergence between feminist theories about cinema, contemporary research on female visibility and the language of comics, we seek to investigate the expression of the deviant female body in a context of author’s independent comics made by women. To this end, we will use contributions of Nochlin (2003) and Pollock (2011) on the History of Art, considering the place of women’s artistic production, as well as the historical and socio-political characteristics that influenced the construction of their work. Considering Laura Mulvey’s thesis on scopophilia, and her concept of male gaze, comprising the elements of language proposed by McLoud (1993), associated with the concepts of Feminine Grotesque (Russo, 2000) and Ciborgue (Haraway, 2000), which subsidize the analysis. We understand, through this research, that the divergences of representation that mark the female body built by the hands and from the perspective of a possible feminine look are, sometimes, marked by strangeness and dissidence. Keywords: Comics, women, body and gender, Zine XXX.

Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body

Transgression in Anglo-American Cinema: Gender, Sex and the Deviant Body

Introgressive hybridization and morphological transgression in the contact zone between two Mediterranean Solea species.

Hybrid zones provide natural experiments where new combinations of genotypes and phenotypes are produced. Studying the reshuffling of genotypes and remodeling of phenotypes in these zones is of particular interest to document the building of reproductive isolation and the possible emergence of transgressive phenotypes that can be a source of evolutionary novelties. Here, we specifically investigate the morphological variation patterns associated with introgressive hybridization between two species of sole, Solea senegalensis and Solea aegyptiaca. The relationship between genetic composition at nuclear loci and individual body shape variation was studied in four populations sampled across the hybrid zone located in northern Tunisia. A strong correlation between genetic and phenotypic variation was observed among all individuals but not within populations, including the two most admixed ones. Morphological convergence between parental species was observed close to the contact zone. Nevertheless, the samples taken closest to the hybrid zone also displayed deviant segregation of genotypes and phenotypes, as well as transgressive phenotypes. In these samples, deviant body shape variation could be partly attributed to a reduced condition index, and the distorted genetic composition was most likely due to missing allelic combinations. These results were interpreted as an indication of hybrid breakdown, which likely contributes to postmating reproductive isolation between the two species.

The deviant body in neo-Victorian literature: a somatechnical reading of the freak in Rosie Garland’s "The palace of curiosities" (2013)

The contemporary fascination with historical, social and literary representations of the deviant body calls for new understandings of corporeality that question the body as a purely biological entity, and invites readings of corporeality as culturally inflected. The present article explores neo-Victorian enfreakment through the lens of “somatechnics” reading “[e]mbodiment as the incarnation or materialisation of historically and culturally specific discourses and practises” (Sullivan and Murray 2014: 3). I will apply the concept of somatechnics to (neo-)Victorian enfreakment practises drawing on scholars as Bordo (1993), Grosz (1994), Sullivan and Murray (2014) who, among others, have challenged the binary split between the mind and body, and argued for the social construction of embodied subjectivities. Although the body’s physical materiality is irreducible, the body is always invested, shaped and transformed by external forces, or “technologies of power” as denominated by Foucault (2003a). I seek to address the human exhibit in Rosie Garland’s The Palace of Curiosities (2013) to examine neo-Victorian reinventions of the divergent body. With this objective in mind, I will analyse how the neo-Victorian mode interlocks the Victorian freak-show discourse with the reader perspective to bring subjective responses to corporeality, humanity and normativity to the forefront, and in doing so, turns an exploitative space as the freak show into a site of self-reliance, self-expression and even fulfilment.

‘Indelible Characters’

ABSTRACTSince the late nineteenth-century works of criminologists Lombroso and Lacassagne, tattoos in Europe have been commonly associated with deviant bodies. Like many other studies of tattoos of non-indigenous origin, the locus of our research is the convict body. Given the corporeal emphasis of prison records, we argue that tattoos form a crucial part of the power dynamic. Tattoos in the carceral context embody an inherent paradox of their being a component in the reidentification of ‘habitual criminals’. We argue that their presence can be regarded as an expression of convict agency: by the act of imprinting unique identifiers on their bodies, convicts boldly defied the official gaze, while equally their description in official records exacted power over the deviant body. Cursory findings show an alignment with other national studies; corporeal inscriptions in Ireland were more prevalent in men's prisons than women's and associated, however loosely, with certain occupations. For instance, maritime and military motifs find representation. Recidivists were more likely to have tattoos than first-time offenders; inscriptions were described as monotone, rudimentary in design and incorporated a limited range of impressions. Further to our argument that tattoos form an expression of convict defiance of prison authority, we have found an unusual idiosyncrasy in the convict record, that is, that the agency of photography, while undermined in general terms, was manipulated by prison officers.

Performing Virtuosity: Queer Embodiment and Administrative Violence at the US–Canadian Border

While attempting to cross through the US customs checkpoint in October 2012, Canadian transsexual performance artist Nina Arsenault was detained and interrogated by border security. In addition to being targeted as a transgender woman, Arsenault was also forced to prove her validity as an artist before she was allowed passage into the US, and was subsequently subjected to an intensive artistic evaluation. This article recounts the details of this previously undocumented incident, exposing the scenario as a vivid example of administrative violence precisely because the proscriptive methodologies used by border security refuse to acknowledge Arsenault’s queer form of embodiment. Incorporating extensive interviews in order to recreate the scene from Arsenault’s perspective, Gillespie shows how queer bodies are forced to repeatedly perform virtuosity as a survival tactic at the borders and blockages of normativity. Gillespie argues that in questioning the validity of Arsenault’s queer artistic work, the agents were also inherently questioning her validity as a productive citizen and positioning her as a deviant body.

From iron maiden to superwoman: The stochastic art of self-transformation and the deviant female sporting body

This paper develops a theoretically grounded account of one extraordinary individual’s journey from female bodybuilder to Strongwoman. It is set against the challenges socially marginalised sportswomen confront in seeking to forge a coherent identity amidst the competing demands of the social, practical and embodied environments that invariably impinge upon such quests. Highlighting the complexities and ambiguities of the regimes to which Sarah and other ‘gender outlaws’ dedicate themselves, we begin by suggesting that these sporting vocations constitute stochastic arts; the practical indeterminacies of which are exacerbated by both the ultimate frailty of the physical body and the social inequalities women confront in pursuing such activities. Focusing upon Sarah’s life-narrative, we then explore within this framework the pleasures and problems she encountered when participating in and switching from bodybuilding to Strongwoman competitions, and identify what is at stake in this sporting route to self-transformation.

The Malleability of Mate Selection in Speed-Dating Events

This study examined to what extent individual mate selectivity could be explained by characteristics of the mating market. Specifically, we hypothesized that females' selectivity would be more malleable, or context-dependent, than males' mate selectivity (cf. Baumeister, 2000; Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). In a series of 22 speed-dating events in which 546 adults aged 22-42 years participated, we investigated whether the proportion of available potential mates (i.e., male-female ratio), which sex rotated during the speed-date event (i.e., approached the other sex), and mate qualities of same-sex competitors affected individuals' selectivity, as indexed by the proportion of no's given during the speed-dating events. Results from multilevel analyses demonstrated that, as hypothesized, event characteristics explained mate selectivity only for females. Specifically, women with a lower facial attractiveness and more deviant body mass index (BMI) values were overall less selective, but this trend was only present in speed-dating events characterized by higher intrasex competition--when females rotated or when other females in the event were more attractive or had healthier BMI. The findings partially support the idea of "erotic plasticity" in females, demonstrating that females' mate selectivity is more malleable and dependent on context than males' mate selectivity.

Television And The Domestication Of Cosmetic Surgery

An exploration of the discursive production of cosmetic surgery on the television shows Extreme Makeover and Nip/Tuck illustrates that these programmes contribute to and reflect the processes through which cosmetic surgery has become domesticated within increasingly globalised contexts. I demonstrate that across a range of cultural sites, including some feminist scholarship, the press, and surgical television, post-feminist frames have displaced feminist frames for comprehending cosmetic surgery, enabling the culture's surgical turn. Feminist attention to risk, oppressive standards for appearance, and the cultural and discursive location of suffering around the deviant body is displaced by the post-feminist celebration of physical transformation as the route to happiness and personal empowerment. It is this logic that is played out through Extreme Makeover's rendering of surgery as the solution for personal suffering and a meting out of justice to the “moral” individual. Extreme Makeover explicitly domesticates cosmetic surgery by publicising its benefits and undoing the former imperative to hide surgery rather than be viewed as “inauthentic.” As a corollary, the show promotes a system of visual eugenics where “unaesthetic” raced and gendered facial and bodily features are erased. Nip/Tuck gestures toward feminist responses to surgical culture through making its violent interventions into the body explicit, by including a feminist character, and through incorporating plot lines which critique the narcissism and gendered cruelty of surgical appearance work. However, these gestures serve as dramatic devices, the political potential of which is curtailed by the requirements of the melodrama to favour sensational story arcs and to retain a degree of sympathy for the surgeon leads. Thus, both shows contribute to a post-feminist mediascape which renders the inevitability of the culture's surgical turn, providing limited frames for viewers negotiating their own responses to the meanings of cosmetic surgery.

Muscular Tension and Body Posture in Relation to Voice Handicap and Voice Quality in Teachers with Persistent Voice Complaints

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between extrinsic laryngeal muscular hypertonicity and deviant body posture on the one hand and voice handicap and voice quality on the other hand in teachers with persistent voice complaints and a history of voice-related absenteeism. The study group consisted of 25 female teachers. A voice therapist assessed extrinsic laryngeal muscular tension and a physical therapist assessed body posture. The assessed parameters were clustered in categories. The parameters in the different categories represent the same function. Further a tension/posture index was created, which is the summation of the different parameters. The different parameters and the index were related to the Voice Handicap Index (VHI) and the Dysphonia Severity Index (DSI). The scores of the VHI and the individual parameters differ significantly except for the posterior weight bearing and tension of the sternocleidomastoid muscle. There was also a significant difference between the individual parameters and the DSI, except for tension of the cricothyroid muscle and posterior weight bearing. The score of the tension/posture index correlates significantly with both the VHI and the DSI. In a linear regression analysis, the combination of hypertonicity of the sternocleidomastoid, the geniohyoid muscles and posterior weight bearing is the most important predictor for a high voice handicap. The combination of hypertonicity of the geniohyoid muscle, posterior weight bearing, high position of the hyoid bone, hypertonicity of the cricothyroid muscle and anteroposition of the head is the most important predictor for a low DSI score. The results of this study show the higher the score of the index, the higher the score of the voice handicap and the worse the voice quality is. Moreover, the results are indicative for the importance of assessment of muscular tension and body posture in the diagnosis of voice disorders.

Demythologizing the Presentation of Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century Spanish Narrative: A Virtual Impossibility

Criticism has repeatedly suggested the need to demythologize the role of the prostitute as a supposedly altruistic and necessary character in nineteenth-century society and literature, replacing this image with that of an unnatural laborer/character manipulated by male desire. The mythic dimensions of both prostitution and the prostitute, however, cannot be altered despite their flawed mimetics, owing to the rational and individualistic nature of modern society. This essay examines Spanish literary depictions of prostitution in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, together with various other myths, elucidating the difficulties and pitfalls inherent in efforts at demythologization, deconstruction, and the elaboration of alternative discourses. In a recent study of considerable interest, Taming the Deviant Body: Representations of the Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century Spain, Akiko Tsuchiya demythologizes and decon structs the prevailing idea of the prostitute in nineteenth-century Spanish fiction. Contrary to the threadbare and still popular notion that focusing upon prostitutes and their downfall serves to curb immoral female (and, by derivation, male) behavior, Tsuchiya produces many examples from Spanish and French narratives, plus the partial but kindred judgments of numerous theorists (Bell, Beizer, Bernheimer, Matlock) in support of her conclusion that the

Escaping the stigma, is there hope for obese adolescents?

Adolescents are teased and stigmatized for having a deviant body size which leads to a poor body image as the adolescent becomes an adult. Society defines which personal and physical traits are acceptable, and which are deviant for the general population. Today, persons with invisible stigmas, such as mental patients, escape the consequences of stigma as long as they keep the condition hidden from others. However for persons with visible stigmas like obesity, such escape is impossible. In the past, a round, robust body was an indication of wealth, but today, a person whose body is larger than acceptable suffers from stigmatization based on the visible trait. This paper will make a case for how the stigmatization of obesity by adults might impact adolescent development, both emotional and physical, and how it impairs the attempts of adolescents at healthy weight management, which includes healthful diet, activity, and body image.

Corpo desviante: olhar perplexo

Assuming intolerance to diversity, this paper discusses some reactions aroused by the interaction with a partner who has an unusual or disabled, thence stigmatized, body. The monster metaphor is used to analyse the historical approach to abnormality, thus identifying the value judgements responsible for the perpetuity of the stigma attributed to those who have (or who are, as Sartre would put it) a deviant body.