Social Construction Of Body Research Articles

You Must Be Shitting Me

This article explores the gendered construction of disgust, and analyzes how it plays out in Peter Vack’s 2017 directorial-debut Assholes. Based on feminist and queer scholarship on abjection, disgust, and the social construction of bodies and sexualities, this article aims to delve into how Assholes frames the relationship between disgust and masculinity, as it shifts how gendered bodily boundaries are played onscreen. The movie’s un-shaming of women’s bodily functions and fluids directly impacts its representation of disgust and masculinity; it destabilizes the discourses that have framed normative—white, heterosexual, and able-bodied—masculinity as non-disgusting; and it establishes that normative male bodies can, too, become abject.

“In the name of harmony.” The imaginary of whiteness in the field of contemporary dance

Cet article interroge la construction sociale des corps au prisme d’un imaginaire de la blanchité et des processus de racialisation dans le champ transnational de la danse contemporaine afin de comprendre comment les corps deviennent marqués par la différence raciale lors des auditions et du travail de création. Fondé sur une enquête sociologique qualitative avec des danseurs et danseuses et des chorégraphes circulant dans ce champ, il expose dans un premier temps comment la blanchité représente une norme hégémonique fortement invisibilisée dont les effets performatifs participent à produire des corps altérisés. Nous verrons par la suite comment les danseur·euse·s et les chorégraphes marqué·e·s par cette différence se réapproprient et revalorisent cette dernière à travers des pratiques de création. L’enquête soulignera dès lors comment ces dernier·ère·s peuvent subvertir ces assignations par l’intermédiaire de registres chorégraphiques et d’esthétiques des corps pensés autour de l’idée de créolisation et d’hybridité.

The Panopticon of physical education: pretty, active and ideally white

Background: Recently, a growing number of researchers have explored students' social construction of the body in school settings. Young peoples' construction of the body, inextricably linked to dominant cultural discourses of the mass media, bears upon their identity and physical activity participation choices. Purpose: This study employed a qualitative research design in two public high schools to explore young people's social construction of the ideal body in physical education by using body images drawn from fitness and sport magazines. Participants: Participants were high school students, and formal interviews were conducted with 28 students. Students' construction of meanings about the ideal body were gendered and racialized. Conclusions: We conclude the paper by suggesting that further work on understanding girls' and boys' construction of the body is needed, especially regarding gender and race issues; and that the creation of pedagogical spaces in schools to destabilize and subvert the gendered, racialized social norms of the ideal body are necessary.

An Embryonic Nation: Life Against Health in Canadian Biotechnological Discourse

This article traces the protracted public debate over reproductive and genetic technologies in Canada through an examination of the federal government’s efforts to pass legislation in the area. Four attempts were made, in 1997, 2000, 2003, and finally 2004, before a bill was passed that regulated the use of embryos in both infertility treatments and nonreproductive genetic therapies. At stake in the debate was the supremacy of health over life as a fundamental value of Canadian national identity, and the role of biotechnology in ushering Canada into a new era of prosperity and global leadership. Using a feminist cultural framework, the author challenges notions of modernity versus postmodernity in the social construction of bodies, nations, and knowledge. She critiques the legal intrusions on women’s bodies in particular for the way that they, perhaps inadvertently, offer some limited form of autonomy for embryos as valuable commodities in scientific progress. Canada has long been considered to occupy a unique space in the Western world as a new country that has effectively skipped over some of the assumed logical steps toward modern nation building. Many have pointed to the country’s lack of revolution in its history as endemic to its problematic position as a modern nation-state. Although some may contest this as a carte blanche characterization, it is nonetheless a generally accepted and even sometimes cherished ideal, seen as central to Canada’s consensual, rational civil culture. However, in an era of globalization and transnationalism, where everything is cited as potentially revolutionary, that perception could stand in the way of Canada gaining access into this brave new world order. Thus, it is interesting that the government has placed a claim on biotechnology, and in particular health and therapeutic research, as a major priority for both economic and intellectual growth. At the same time, however, the legal and regulatory frameworks established thus far can only be characterized as strategies of avoidance. Since the final round of failed legislation on abortion in 1989,

An Embryonic Nation: Life Against Health in Canadian Biotechnological Discourse

This article traces the protracted public debate over reproductive and genetic technologies in Canada through an examination of the federal government's efforts to pass legislation in the area. Four attempts were made, in 1997, 2000, 2003, and finally 2004, before a bill was passed that regulated the use of embryos in both infertility treatments and nonreproductive genetic therapies. At stake in the debate was the supremacy of health over life as a fundamental value of Canadian national identity, and the role of biotechnology in ushering Canada into a new era of prosperity and global leadership. Using a feminist cultural framework, the author challenges notions of modernity versus postmodernity in the social construction of bodies, nations, and knowledge. She critiques the legal intrusions on women's bodies in particular for the way that they, perhaps inadvertently, offer some limited form of autonomy for embryos as valuable commodities in scientific progress.

Embodied [by] Dance: Adolescent de/constructions of body, sex and gender in physical education

Using developmental, sociological, feminist, and dance studies perspectives on the social construction of body, sex, and gender, the author discusses the functions of agency and performativity in the physical education curriculum with specific attention to the embodied performance of culture through dance and movement. Classroom examples of critical and feminist approaches to dance pedagogy are provided to deconstruct body/sex/gender through dance education. A dialectical approach to critical self-reflection is proposed that limits reproduction of the mind/body split, thus reinscribing the body as subject.

From Margin to The (Canadian) Frontier: “The Wombs of Language” in M. Nourbese Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

In this close reading of M. Nourbese Philip’s collection of poetry She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, the author examines the revised Canadian literary cartography by Philip’s complex poetry series. In her effort to foreground the “histories” of Africans in the New World and their entangled relationship to the history of the West, Philip ultimately challenges the “uni-verse-all” voice, while calling attention to the politics that underlie assertions of “universalism” and “objectivity." The author pinpoints a number of Western epistemologies that are the targets of Philip’s re-vision: specifically Greek myth, Christianity, the English language/grammar and its impact on the social construction of bodies. For instance, Philip re-visions Greek myth so that the Proserpine/Ceres separation of mother/daughter becomes rewritten to encompass the fragmentation of cultures that resulted from the African diaspora. The author argues that Philip traverses the Caribbean and Canadian landscape in an effort to create a “mother-tongue” that is not circumscribed by sexist or racist hegemony and that Philip’s overall objective is to reposition Black Canadian poetry from the literary margins to the frontier.

Arts of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600 (review)

Reviews 163 on to the bones of the inarticulate masses of the past adding to the specific examples available without for the most part offering any new insights or useful methodological breakthroughs. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Starn, Randolph and Loren Partridge, Am of power: three halls of state in Italy, 1300-1600 (The new historicism: studies in cultural poetics, no. 19), Berkeley/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth; pp. xi, 374; 8 colour plates, 128figures;R.R.P. US$65.00. In Jacob Burckhardt's portrait of Renaissance Italy, the state became 'a work of art'. As the authors of Arts of power observe correctly, the Swiss historian shied away from the corollary of his own insight that art became a work of state. It is the complex interrelationships, exchanges, and transferences between politics and art, between power and imagination, that provides their theme. Their focus is the decoration of three halls of state in Renaissance Italy: Ambrogio Lorinzetti's frescoes, commonly known as Good and bad government, in the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; Mantegna's frescoes in the Camera degli Sposi in the ducal palace in Mantua; and Vasari's paintings in the Sala Grande in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The last are considered in conjunction with the decorations for the state entry into Florence in 1565 of Giovanna of Austria, bride of Francesco de'Medici. The three case studies come from three different centuries and three different types of regime: the civic republics of the fourteenth century, the princely courts of the fifteenth, and what the authors define as the 'triumphalist' states of the sixteenth. The three halls of state correspond to the three ages into which Vasari first divided the revival of the arts but Starn and Partridge have no interest in working out another variant on the theme of renewal and progress. Rather than constructing a narrativeteleology,their concern is with the pictorial and political specificity of each site, the distinctive configuration of power and authority under each regime, with how different artistic styles encode distinct political messages. Four sets of premises underlie the discussion: that the halls of state of the successive regimes were an extension of politics by another means, strategic instruments of government; that art far from merely reflecting distinctive political messages, both constructs and contests ideologies; that power does not distinguish between the real and the ideal; and that the settings and forms appropriated by each type of regime depended on a particular conception of politics. The authors are concerned with the 'hows' as much as the 'whats' and 'whys', with form as much as content. The formal properties of cultural performance are also seen as representations of structures of authority. 154 Reviews Part of Starn's discussion of the Mantua frescoesfirstappeared in 1989 in The new cultural history edited by Lynn Hunt and Arts ofpower is published as a volume in the general series edited by Stephen Greenblatt The new historicism: studies in cultural poetics. Thus its provenance is explicit. Despite Starn's claim that the inquiry draws much of its energy from a 'poststructuralist' moment or mood, the authors are, to say the least, eclectic in their theoretical underpinning: semiotics, structuralism, and cultural anthropology as well as the postmodern preoccupation with surfaces. The authors draw on Mary Douglas's work on the social construction of bodies, on Michel Foucault's articulation of power, on Victor Turner's liminality, and on Erwin Goffman's theories of self presentation and encounters in every day life. Given the theoretical allegiance of the authors, it is not surprising that their analysis has its share of jargon, of discourses, texts, master narratives, structuralists' paradises, and empires of signs. Nevertheless, the authors have much to say that is accessible and enlightening. Without documentation and badly damaged, Lorizetti's Good and bad governnent frescoes in Siena have long attracted the attention of historians of politics and ideas, including Nicolai Rubinstein and Quentin Skinner. Where Starn and Partridge depart from their distinguished predecessors is in looking beyond the frescoes as programme to their form, positioning and sequence, and in regarding the images and inscriptions...