Renegotiating The Body

Feminism and conceptual practice -- The body and performance art -- Alternative spaces for feminist art -- Feminist themes in contemporary practice.

What makes art 'feminist art'? Although feminist artists do have a unique aesthetic, there can be no essential feminist aesthetic, argues Kathy Battista in this exciting new art history. Domesticity, the body, its traces and sexuality have become prominent themes in contemporary feminist practice but where did these preoccupations begin and how did they come to signify a particular type of art? Kathy Battista's (re-)engagement with the founding generation of female practitioners centres on 1970s London as the cultural hub from which a new art practice arose. Emphasising the importance of artists including Bobby Baker, Anne Bean, Catherine Elwes, Rose English, Alexis Hunter, Tina Keane, Hannah O'Shea, Kate Walker and Silvia Ziranek and examining works such as Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document, Judy Clark's 1973 exhibition Issues, Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy and Cosey Fanni Tutti's Prostitution, shown in 1976, Kathy Battista investigates some of the most controversial and provocative art from the era. This book not only deals with the 'famous' art events but includes analysis of lesser-known exhibitions and performances and explains why so much feminist art has been both marginalised in art history and grossly under-represented in institutional archives and collections.

The First World War mangled faces, blew away limbs, and ruined nerves. Ten million dead, twenty million severe casualties, and eight million people with permanent disabilities - modern war inflicted pain and suffering with unsparing, mechanical efficiency. However, such horror was not the entire story. People also rebuilt their lives, their communities, and their bodies. From the ashes of war rose beauty, eroticism, and the promise of utopia. Ana Carden-Coyne investigates the cultures of resilience and the institutions of reconstruction in Britain, Australia, and the United States. Immersed in efforts to heal the consequences of violence and triumph over adversity, reconstruction inspired politicians, professionals, and individuals to transform themselves and their societies. Bodies were not to remain locked away as tortured memories. Instead, they became the subjects of outspoken debate, the objects of rehabilitation, and commodities of desire in global industries. Governments, physicians, beauty and body therapists, monument designers and visual artists looked to classicism and modernism as the tools for rebuilding civilization and its citizens. What better response to loss of life, limb, and mind than a body reconstructed?

Explores gender and the body in relation to the postmodern condition, challenging the stability of modernist understandings of gender and making a case for viewing gender as a pedagogical tool rather than as a threat.

During the 1990s, infrastructure concessions were hailed as the solution to Latin America's endemic infrastructure deficit, by combining private sector efficiency with rent dissipation brought about by competition. This publication examines the design and implementation of over 1,000 examples of concession contracts, in order to identify the problems that have occurred in the process. It goes on to highlight lessons to be learned for the future, in order to realise the potential benefits of infrastructure reform and to contribute to economic growth and poverty reduction.

The book comprises a series of contributions by international scholars and practitioners from different backgrounds researching in the fields of contemporary visual culture and performance studies. This collection addresses the issue of corporeality as a discursive field (which asks for a “poetics”), and the possible ways in which technology affects and is affected by the body in the context of recent artistic and theoretical developments. The common denominator of the contributions here is their focus on the relationship between body and image expressed as the connection between reality and fiction, presence and absence, private and public, physical and virtual. The essays cover a wide range of topics within a framework that integrates and emphasises recent artistic practices and current academic debates in the fields of performance studies, visual arts, new aesthetics, perception theories, phenomenology, and media theory. The book addresses these recent trends by articulating issues including the relationship between immediate experience and mediated image; performing the image; the body as fictional territory; performative idioms and technological expression; corporeality, presence and memory; interactivity as a catalyst for multimediality and remediation; visuality, performativity and expanded spectatorship; and the tensions between public space and intimacy in (social) media environments. The main strength of this volume is the fact that it provides the reader with a fresh, insightful and transdiciplinary perspective on the body–image relationship, an issue widely debated today, especially in the context of global artistic and technological transformations.

This title was first published in 2000. Since New Labour were elected in 1997, there have been substantial changes made to local and regional economic development policy in the UK. This volume offers an up-to-date overview, setting the new policies within a wider historic context and suggesting future developments. It examines four of these new policies in depth - Regional Development Agencies, New Deal local partnerships, Local Learning and Skills Councils, and the Small Business Service and Business link. In doing so, it offers a critical appraisal of how effective these changes have been in tackling issues such as developing human resources, skills and opportunities, developing land infrastructure and sites, capital formation and development, encouraging innovation, entrepreneurship and technological change and enhancing a supportive institutional context.

"Tulasi Srinivas shows a superb ability to juxtapose contemporary theoretical concerns among scholars of globalization and transnational theory with ethnographic work done on a growing Indian tradition. Adept at negotiating the intricacies of many academic dialogues. Srinivas shows she is a polyglot intellectual."---Deepak Sarma, Case Western University The Sathya Sai global civil religious movement incorporates Hindu and Muslim practices, Buddhist, Christian, and Zoroastrian influences, and "New Age"-style rituals and beliefs. Shri Sathya Sai Baba, its charismatic and controversial leader, attracts several million adherents from various national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds. In a dynamic account of the Sathya Sai movement's explosive growth. Winged Faith argues for a rethinking of globalization and the politics of identity in a religiously plural world. This study considers a new kind of cosmopolitanism located in an alternate understanding of difference and contestation. It considers how acts of "sacred spectating" and illusion, "moral stake-holding" and the problems of community are debated and experienced. A thrilling study of a transcultural and transurban phenomenon that questions narratives of self and being circuits of sacred mobility, and the politics of affect. Winged Faith suggests new methods for discussing religion in a globalizing world and introduces an easily critiqued yet not fully understood community. "This is a wonderful book that can be read on two levels. One: as the fascinating story of how a religious movement spread from India throghout the world, with many vignettes that will stay in one's mind. And two: as a very instructive demonstration that cultural globalization is not a oneway process dominated by the West, but an interaction between cultures, with some processes going from East to West."---Peter L. Berger. Boston University