Birth Death And Femininity

Issues surrounding birth and death have been fundamental for Western philosophy as well as for individual existence. The contributors to this volume unravel the gendered aspects of the classical philosophical discourses on death, bringing in discussions about birth, creativity, and the entire chain of human activity. By linking their work to major thinkers such as Heidegger, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Arendt, and to major philosophical currents such as ancient philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, and social and political philosophy, they challenge prevailing feminist articulations of birth and death. These philosophical reflections add an important sexual dimension to current thinking on identity, temporality, and community.

In this ground-breaking collection, psychologists, Jungian analysts, feminists and scholars of Goddess cultures explain for the first time that a new state in women's growth is about to emerge--conscious femininity.

A sensitive exploration of the development of pivotal life cycle rituals as they touch Jewish women's lives.

Bronfen presents the argument that narrative and visual representations of death can be read as symptoms of culture and because the feminine body is culturally constructed as the superlative site of "other" and "not me," culture uses art to dream the deaths of beautiful women.

All human beings are born and all human beings die. In these two ways we are finite: our lives begin and our lives come to an end. Historically philosophers have concentrated attention on our mortality—and comparatively little has been said about being born and how it shapes our existence. Alison Stone sets out to overcome this oversight by providing a systematic philosophical account of how being born shapes our condition as human beings. Drawing on both feminist philosophy and existentialist concerns about the structure of meaningful human existence, Stone offers an original perspective on human existence. She explores how human existence is shaped by the way that we are born. Taking natality into account transforms our view of human existence and illuminates how many of its aspects are connected with our birth. These aspects include dependency, the relationality of the self, vulnerability, reception and inheritance of culture and history, embeddedness in social power, situatedness, and radical contingency. Considering natality also sheds new light on anxiety, mortality, and the temporality of human life. This book therefore bears on death and the meaning of life, as well as many debates in feminist and continental philosophy.

Why did Greek society foster social conditions, especially early marriage with its attendant early childbearing, that were known to be dangerous for both mother and child? What were the actual causes of death among women described as dying of childbirth in the Hippocratic Epidemics? Why did families choose to portray labor scenes on tombstones when the Greek commemorative tradition otherwise avoided reference to suffering and illness? In Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece, Nancy Demand offers the first comprehensive exploration of the social and cultural construction of childbirth in ancient Greece. Reading the ancient evidence in light of feminist theory, the Foucauldian notion of discursively constituted objects, medical anthropology, and anthropological studies of the modern Greek village, Demand discusses topics that include midwifery, abortion, attitudes of doctors toward women patients, and the treatment of women generally. For evidence, she relies primarily on the case histories in the Epidemics concerning women with complications in pregnancy, abortion, and childbirth. She also draws relevant details from cure records and dedications from healing sanctuaries, labor scenes depicted on tombstones, Aristophanic comedy, andPlatonic philosophy.

This book makes an important contribution to the fields of obstetrics, midwifery, childbirth education, sociology of the body, cultural studies and women's studies.

Age and aging are pressing social-political issues. Yet, philosophers still have not paid sufficient attention to one of the major explorations of this topic, Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Coming of Age (1970). For much too long, it has been overshadowed by her other groundbreaking work, The Second Sex (1949). Now, for the first time, this volume focuses on Beauvoir's essay on old age and critically explores its significance from a phenomenological and feminist perspective. International Beauvoir scholars and renowned feminist phenomenologists from Europe and North America offer a unique look at one of the 20th century’s most outstanding existential-philosophical studies on age and aging. Thematically, the articles and short comments collected in this volume cover three main issues which are crucial with respect to an investigation of Beauvoir's study on age: gender, ethics, and time. The volume essentially contributes to Beauvoir studies, aging studies, cultural and gender studies, feminist theory, phenomenology, and existential philosophy.