Body Gender Senses

Challenges visuality as the dominant mode through which we understand gender, social performance, and visual culture

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires.

The body, touch and its sensations are present, sometimes viewed in contradictory ways, both expressed, visualized, and rejected, in early modern art and literature. In seven essays moving from the 16th to the mid-18th century, and from Italy and Spain to France and Sweden, this volume explores strategies used by early modern women poets, philosophers, and artists in order to create subversive expressions of the body, gender and the senses. Showing how body and soul, the carnal and the divine, the senses and the mind, could be represented as intertwined and dependent on each other in various ways, it gives due attention to European women writers and artists that in unconventional ways responded to the period's two main intellectual and philosophical attitudes - Epicurean and Stoic - towards the body and its senses. These attitudes not only intersect in the period's discussions of virtue and other moral phenomena, but are central to critical assessment of the relations between emotions, perception, and reason. By following this topic from a gender perspective, the book highlights other forms of subjectivity than the ones usually related to the early modern period's dominating subjectivation of female bodies, thinking and desires.

The classic manifesto of the liberated woman, this book explores every facet of a woman's life.

The body is an emissary. We know little of our own feelings or the feelings of others, but that ignorance is mediated through our organ of touch, the skin. The term 'consensuality' stands for the co-presence of perceptions on the skin, which is the backcloth to sensation and thought. If the intelligence of the body is the basis of both sense and consent, consensuality also has to do with human relations based on the sense of touch, particularly the mother-child couple and the relation of desire, love and loss. This book touches on a range of cultural figures including Gide, Princess Diana, Kafka, Gautier and Rilke, and such films as Gattaca, The Talented Mr Ripley, Being John Malkovich, The Piano and The Truman Show, together with theories of the caress, phantom limbs and replacement children. Connecting all these is the work of psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu, who wrote on group psychology, psychodrama, psychic envelopes, creativity and thought; he also published a study of May '68 written from the heart of Nanterre. He was analysed by Lacan, not knowing at the time that the latter had treated Anzieu's mother. His Le Moi-peau (The Skin-ego) shows how the psychic skin holds, protects and communicates but can also constrict or tear. If love enwraps and loss flays, how do we mourn?

The author traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. THE INVENTION OF WOMEN demonstrates that biology as a rationale for organizing the social world is a Western construction not applicable in Yoruban culture where social organization was determined by relative age.

Taking the Noli me tangere and Doubting Thomas episodes as a focal point, this study examines how visual representations of two of the most compelling and related Christian stories engaged with changing devotional and cultural ideals in Renaissance and Baroque Italy. This book reconsiders depictions of the ambiguous encounter of Mary Magdalene and Christ in the garden (John 20:11-19, known as the Noli me tangere) and that of Christ?s post-Resurrection appearance to Thomas (John 20:24-29, the Doubting Thomas) as manifestations of complex theological and art theoretical milieus. By focusing on key artistic monuments of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque periods, the authors demonstrate a relationship between the rise of skeptical philosophy and empirical science, and the efficacy of the senses in the construction of belief. Further, the authors elucidate the differing representational strategies employed by artists to depict touch, and the ways in which these strategies were shaped by gender, social class, and educational level. Indeed, over time St. Thomas became an increasingly public--and therefore masculine--symbol of devotional verification, juridical inquiry, and empirical investigation, while St. Mary Magdalene provided a more private model for pious women, celebrating, mostly behind closed doors, the privileged and active participation of women in the faith. The authors rely on primary source material--paintings, sculptures, religious tracts, hagiography, popular sermons, and new documentary evidence. By reuniting their visual examples with important, often little-known textual sources, the authors reveal a complex relationship between visual imagery, the senses, contemporary attitudes toward gender, and the shaping of belief. Further, they add greater nuance to our understanding of the relationship between popular piety and the visual culture of the period.

Although transgender persons have been present in various societies throughout human history, it is only during the last several years that they have become widely acknowledged in our society and their right to quality medical care has been established. In the United States, endocrinologists have been providing hormonal therapy for transgender individuals for decades; however, until recently, there has been only limited literature on this subject, and non-endocrine aspects of medical care for transgender individual have not been well addressed in the endocrine literature. The goal of this volume is not only to address the latest in hormonal therapy for transgender individuals (including pediatric and geriatric age groups), but also to familiarize the reader with other aspects of transgender care, including primary and surgical care, fertility preservation, and the management of HIV infection. In addition to medical issues, psychological, social, ethical and legal issues pertinent to transgender individuals add to the complexities of successful treatment of these patients. A final chapter includes extensive additional resources for both transgender patients and providers. Thus, an endocrinologist providing care to a transgender person will be able to use this single resource to address most of the patient’s needs. While Transgender Medicine is intended primarily for endocrinologists, this book will be also useful to primary care physicians, surgeons providing gender-confirming procedures, mental health professionals participating in the care of transgender persons, and medical residents and students.