Corporeal Generosity

Challenges the accepted model, and builds a politically sensitive notion of generosity.

This book explores the meaning and practice of corporeal ethics in organized life. Corporeal ethics originates from an emergent, embodied, and affective experience with others that precedes and exceeds those rational schemes that seek to regulate it. Pullen and Rhodes show how corporeal ethics is fundamentally based in embodied affect, yet practically materialized in ethico-political acts of positive resistance and networked solidarity. Considering ethics in this way turns our attention to how people’s conduct and interactions might be ethically informed in the context of, and in resistance to, the masculine rationality of dominating organizational power relations in which they find themselves. Pullen and Rhodes outline the ways in which ethically grounded resistance and critique can and do challenge self-interested organizational power and privilege. They account for how corporeal ethics serves to destabilize the ways that organizations reproduce practices that negate difference and result in oppression, discrimination, and inequality. The book is suitable for students, scholars, and citizens who want to learn more about the radical possibilities of how political actions arising from corporeal ethics can strive for equality and justice.

Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet. Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars lived in the city, on behalf of the city, but—contrary to the new profit economy of the time—with a different locus of value: spirit. Betcher argues that for seculars today the possibility of a devoted life, the practice of felicity in history, still remains. Spirit now names a necessary “prosthesis,” a locus for regenerating the elemental commons of our interdependent flesh and thus for cultivating spacious and fearless empathy, forbearance, and generosity. Her theological poetics, though based in Christianity, are frequently in conversation with other religions resident in our postcolonial cities.

Religious pluralism, the collapse of traditional religious institutions, and the growing impact of religious studies on believers have prompted widespread rethinking of what religion is. Polydoxy offers a brilliant and original theological response to this intellectual crisis by suggesting that there are multiple forms of right belief. Reacting against reductive or nostalgic theological tendencies, the chapters in this book by an impressive array of scholars take an exciting and creative approach to theology in the twenty-first century.

Bringing together research from critical diversity studies and organization theory, this edited collection challenges unspoken norms and patterns of discrimination in organizational bodies. The authors problematize the management of diversity by focusing on the differentiations between racialized, aged, gendered and sexed bodies. By taking a fresh approach and placing the body at the forefront of power relations, this thought-provoking book seeks to challenge the homogenizing and oppressive dimensions of organizational governance, structure and culture that deny bodily difference. An insightful read for scholars of HRM, diversity management and organization, Diversity, Affect and Embodiment in Organizing encourages an active approach to tackling discrimination and recognizes the diversity of embodied lives.

Objectification is a foundational concept in feminist theory, used to analyze such disparate social phenomena as sex work, representation of women's bodies, and sexual harassment. However, there has been an increasing trend among scholars of rejecting and re-evaluating the philosophical assumptions which underpin it. In this work, Cahill suggests an abandonment of the notion of objectification, on the basis of its dependence on a Kantian ideal of personhood. Such an ideal fails to recognize sufficiently the role the body plays in personhood, and thus results in an implicit vilification of the body and sexuality. The problem with the phenomena associated with objectification is not that they render women objects, and therefore not-persons, but rather that they construct feminine subjectivity and sexuality as wholly derivative of masculine subjectivity and sexuality. Women, in other words, are not objectified as much as they are derivatized, turned into a mere reflection or projection of the other. Cahill argues for an ethics of materiality based upon a recognition of difference, thus working toward an ethics of sexuality that is decidedly ­and simultaneously ­incarnate and intersubjective.

How does one read across cultural boundaries? The multitude of creative texts, performance practices, and artworks produced by Indigenous writers and artists in contemporary Australia calls upon Anglo-European academic readers, viewers, and critics to respond to this critical question. Contributors address a plethora of creative works by Indigenous writers, poets, playwrights, filmmakers, and painters, including Richard Frankland, Lionel Fogarty, Lin Onus, Kim Scott, Sam Watson, and Alexis Wright, as well as Durrudiya song cycles and works by Western Desert artists. The complexity of these creative works transcends categorical boundaries of Western art, aesthetics, and literature, demanding new processes of reading and response. Other contributors address works by non-Indigenous writers and filmmakers such as Stephen Muecke, Katrina Schlunke, Margaret Somerville, and Jeni Thornley, all of whom actively engage in questioning their complicity with the past in order to challenge Western modes of knowledge and understanding and to enter into a more self-critical and authentically ethical dialogue with the Other. In probing the limitations of Anglo-European knowledge-systems, essays in this volume lay the groundwork for enter¬ing into a more authentic dialogue with Indigenous writers and critics. Beate Neumeier is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Cologne. Her research is in gender, performance, and postcolonial studies. Editor of the e-journal Gender Forum and the database GenderInn, she has published books on English Re¬naissance and contemporary anglophone drama, contemporary American and British-Jewish literature, and women’s writing. Kay Schaffer, an Adjunct Professor in Gender Studies and Social Analysis at the University of Adelaide. is the author of ten books and numerous articles at the intersections of gender, culture, and literary studies. Her recent publications address the Stolen Generations in Australia, life narratives in human-rights campaigns, and readings of contemporary Chinese women writers.

“In compelling and intricately argued ways, the authors make a resounding case for understanding how vocal sonority is intrinsic to self-identity and self-reception ... Required Reading.” - Jane Boston, Principal Lecturer, Voice Studies, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama A new, provocative study of the ethical, political, and social meanings of the everyday voice. Utilising the framework of feminist philosophy, authors Ann J. Cahill and Christine Hamel approach the phenomenon of voice as a lived, sonorous and embodied experience marked by the social structures that surround it, including systemic forms of injustice such as ableism, sexism, racism, and classism. By developing novel theoretical constructs such as “intervocality” and “respiratory responsibility,” Cahill and Hamel cut through the static between theory and praxis and put forward exciting theories on how human vocal sound can perpetuate -- and challenge -- persistent inequalities. Sounding Bodies presents a powerful model of how the seemingly disparate disciplines of philosophy and voice/speech training can, in conversation with each other, generate illuminating insights about our vocal lives and identities.