Perspectives On Embodiment

Perspectives on Embodiment offers multiple ways of conceptualizing human corporeality. These essays collectively defy arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture and reveal the complex ways in which nature and culture interact to produce embodied subjects. A central premise of this collection is that a variety of perspectives is needed to illuminate the fluid, ever-changing features of human corporeality. This book not only explores what it means to be an embodied subject, but also encourages speculation about our future bodily incarnations.

Until recently, the body has been largely ignored in theories and empirical research in psychology, particularly in developmental psychology. Recently however, several conceptions of the relation between body and mind have been developed. Common among these conceptions is the idea that the body plays an important role in our emotional, social, and

Despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive technologies, sexual violence, objectification, motherhood, and sex trafficking, among others, constitute ongoing, pressing concerns for women’s bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital. This book engages with these themes by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on women’s bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists’ concerns—both theoretically and empirically—about gender and embodiment in the present context and beyond. The collection brings together essays from a variety of feminist scholars who deploy diverse theoretical approaches, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and new materialisms, in order to examine philosophically the question of the current status of gendered bodies through cutting-edge feminist theory.

In this collection leading thinkers, writers, and activists offer their responses to the simple question “do I have a body, or am I my body?”. The essays engage with the array of meanings that our bodies have today, ranging from considerations of nineteenth-century discourses of bodily shame and otherness, through to arguing for a brand new corporeal vocabulary for the twenty-first century. Increasing numbers of people are choosing to modify their bodies, but as the essays in this volume show, this is far from being a new practice: over hundreds of years, it has evolved and accrued new meanings. This richly interdisciplinary volume maps a range of cultural anxieties about the body, resulting in a timely and compelling book that makes a vital contribution to today’s key debates about embodiment.

The Incorporated Self demonstrates that although embodiment has long been a central concern of the theoretical humanities, embodiment's potential to alter epistemology and open up new areas of non-dualistic inquiry has not been pursued far enough. This anthology collects the works of scholars from a broad range of disciplines, each examining the nature of the body and the necessity of embodiment to the human experience--for our self awareness, sense of identity, and the workings of the mind. The essays offer a sustained attack on Cartesian dualism and methodological positivism. The Incorporated Self is suitable for undergraduate and graduate seminars on mind-body relations, the psychology of perception, the nature of thought, and questions of social, political, and individual identity. This interdisciplinary book is an important work for philosophers, literary theorists, historians, sociologists and psychologists.

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence.

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.