Narratives Of Embodiment Research Articles

Zora Neale Hurston, Anthropometrist

Abstract: Zora Neale Hurston's academic scholarship began in physical anthropology, measuring Black bodies and relating their statistical data to racial type. While Hurston's critics have understood her subsequent work in fiction and folklore as fleeing this troubling research, this essay reconsiders her work in anthropometry as well as the narratives of embodiment that she curated in Mules and Men . Employing what Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks theorizes as "a slow composition" (111) of "self as a body," this rereading presents Hurston as an acute critic of eugenic interpretive methods whose writings anticipate the racism built into contemporary facial recognition algorithms.

Looking for Maternity: Dress Collections and Embodied Knowledge

Childbearing accounted for a large proportion of women’s lives in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet the questions of what they wore and how they balanced bodily change and the dictates of fashion have been generally under-explored. This is especially true of object- and collections-based research where scarcity of surviving examples limited the range of material culture analysis of maternal dress and bodies in those centuries. This article complicates that seeming absence by critically considering the process of looking for maternity in dress collections. Working with evidence drawn from a database of approximately 300 garments associated with maternity studied between 2015 and 2017, this article reflects on the modes of encountering maternity therein. The object biographies of maternity-associated garments in such collections reveal the disjointed nature of the material record of pregnancy and how historical practices of reuse, storage and recording can obfuscate that record. Current perspectives on materialism and material culture in fashion studies are mobilized here to consider how a methodological combination of object-based study and recognition of the connection between material and wearer informs new narratives of embodiment contained in existing dress collections.

The bodies who tell stories: tracing Deleuzian becoming in the auto/biographies Iranian female refugees

The undercurrents of autobiographies can reveal more than just stories to their readers. The entanglement of authors and readers provokes the dialogic imagination and reproduces a text beyond the book. I ask how this entanglement can be addressed through notions of representation, subjectivity and embodiment. The article explores auto/biographies of two Iranian female refugees to trace the emergent process of their dialogic voices. Their voices are followed through their portrayal of body and home in transnational settings. I read their tales of desire and sorrow while departing from the Bakhtinian dialogic imagination to frame the narratives of embodiment and home in the mode of Deleuzian becoming.

Embodying Progress: Aesthetic Surgery and Socioeconomic Change in South Korea

Since the early 1960s South Korea has had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. These developments have had a deep impact on the structure of society, but what impact have they had on the body? This article examines the relationship between such rapid socioeconomic transformations and the changes in uses and perceptions of the physical body among Koreans. This article uses a phenomenological theoretical framework to look at the narratives of embodiment of young Koreans that have had experiences with aesthetic surgery. The research examines the hypotheses that (1) the rapid transformations occurring in the South Korean economy are partly enabled by a specific ideology—a kind of ideology of progress in which economic productivity is valued above other aspects of everyday life, and (2) this ideology is articulated in the way individuals view and manage their bodies. In particular, it is evident in the embodied practices of Korean youths, such as the relatively recent popularization of aesthetic surgery. Thus, through surgical technologies the body is made to be more economically “productive” and may better contribute to the progress of the country as a whole.

Imagining the Other? Ethical Challenges of Researching and Writing Women's Embodied Lives

Feminists influenced by post-conventional and critical perspectives confront a significant challenge when researching women's embodiments: the dilemma of representation. For researchers from positions of bodily privilege, issues of interpretation intensify when researching and writing across physical differences distorted by colonial and other hegemonic histories and legacies. In this article, I draw from interviews with diversely embodied women to discuss difficulties encountered in interpreting their narratives of embodiment. I reflect on strategies of embodied engagement, including de-centring my bodily self, re-visiting my body story, and imagining the other's embodied experiences in the creation of provisional meanings about participants' bodies and lives. To shed light on risks and rewards of researcher-embodied reflexivity to study sensitive subjects such as appearance and difference, I show how analysing my `body secrets' invites deeper exploration into dynamics of bodily privilege and abjection underpinning women's accounts. I conclude by questioning the ethics of my `imaginative leap' into other/ed women's lives and by considering more broadly the perils and possibilities of traversing the space between self and other, and other in the self, within feminist research.

They stole my baby’s soul: narratives of embodiment and loss

The controversy over retained organs, arising from the Bristol and Alder Hey findings about postmortem uses of body parts, has revealed a gulf between medical and lay understandings of the...

Narratives of embodiment: The discursive formulation of multiple bodies

Dans le cadre d'une recherche sur la notion et la categorie de personne, l'A. propose une etude critique de la notion occidentale et cartesienne du soi et du corps unifies et plaide pour la reconnaissance de la multiplicite. L'A. presente une synthese des discours sociologiques et anthropologiques sur le soi corporel, puis les resultats d'une etude ethnographique sur les discours du corps parmi les etudiants de l'universite de Tel-Aviv (Israel) : les narrateurs expriment leurs conceptions sur leur personne et leur corps dans des contextes de guerre ou de pathologies. Enfin, la conclusion reevalue depuis un point de vue anthropologique l'illusion occidentale de l'unite (Ewing 1990) et tente de proposer une perspective constructionniste capable de rendre compte des discours et des pratiques sur la multiplicite de la notion de personne.