The Political Body

With a companion website that includes short online film episodes, this book proposes expansive ways of deconstructing and re-constituting sexuality and gender and thus more embodied and ethical ways of 'doing' life, and offers an understanding and critique of embodiment through an integration of performance, psychotherapy and feminist philosophy.

Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. It explores the way that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our experience of our physical selves and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities and desires reinforce or challenge the status quo.

'Political Bodies/Body Politic' draws on feminism, gender studies, and queer theory to examine how myth, symbol and ritual express belief systems. The book explores the operation of gender in a variety of social and historical contexts, ranging from feminist speculative fiction and systems of belief to popular culture and ancient historical texts. 'Political Bodies/Body Politic' makes an original contribution to religious and feminist studies in its examination of gender in human communication and belief systems.

As a field of scholarship, gender and politics has exploded over the last fifty years and is now global, institutionalized, and ever expanding. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics brings to political science an accessible and comprehensive overview of the key contributions of gender scholars to the study of politics and shows how these contributions produce a richer understanding of polities and societies. Like the field it represents, the handbook has a broad understanding of what counts as political and is based on a notion of gender that highlights masculinities as well as femininities, thereby moving feminist debates in politics beyond the focus on women. It engages with some of the key aspects of political science as well as important themes in gender and feminist research (such as sexuality and body politics), thereby forging a dialogue between gender studies in politics and mainstream political science. The handbook is organized in sections that look at sexuality and body politics; political economy; civil society; participation, representation and policymaking; institutions, states and governance as well as nation, citizenship and identity. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics contains and reflects the best scholarship in its field.

Since 1989, scores of bodies across Eastern Europe have been exhumed and brought to rest in new gravesites. Katherine Verdery investigates why certain corpses—the bodies of revolutionary leaders, heroes, artists, and other luminaries, as well as more humble folk—have taken on a political life in the turbulent times following the end of Communist Party rule, and what roles they play in revising the past and reorienting the present. Enlivening and invigorating the dialogue on postsocialist politics, this imaginative study helps us understand the dynamic and deeply symbolic nature of politics—and how it can breathe new life into old bones.

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice and raised in Paris at the court of Charles V of France. Widowed at the age of twenty-five, she turned to writing as a source of comfort and income, and went on to produce a remarkable series of books, including poetry, politics, chivalry, warfare, religion and philosophy. She is considered to be France's first female professional writer. This was the first translation into modern English of Christine de Pizan's major political work, The Book of the Body Politic. Written during the Hundred Years' War, it discusses the education and behaviour appropriate for princes, nobility and common people, so that all classes can understand their responsibilities towards society as a whole. A product of a time of civil unrest, The Book of the Body Politic offers a medieval political theory of interdependence and social responsibility from the perspective of an educated woman.

Political Economy, Power and the Body is carefully organized to provide an introductory section of three chapters which set out a number of detailed theoretical arguments relevant to the work developed in the next two sections. In this sense the collection should be a major contribution in laying the groundwork in the new area. The strength of the volume lies in the way the individual chapters bring theory and practice together. It could be argued that it represents the maturity of feminist work in international political economy now. The book will be a vital teaching as well as research text, especially in international relations/international political economy/women's studies generally.

This book, first published in 1989, is an analysis of what changed in 1789 with the French Revolution and what contemporary life owes to the event. It was not simply a series of events with worldwide repercussions, but also represented the foundation of the middle-class domination of social, cultural and political space, which survives today and is the site of major crises of public culture. One such site is the body. In spite of its prominence in consumer culture as an object of adornment and beautification, the human body retains none of its historic dignity and authority. The argument of this book is that the French Revolution played a crucial part in this diminution of the body. It traces revolutionary models of behaviour around the body and public life, and explains how such myths as the division between public and private, male and female worlds, and such masculine values as ‘objectivity’ were an integral part of the new public world created by the revolutionary middle class.