Volatile Bodies

"Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is subject to the endless rewriting and inscription that constitute all sign systems. Grosz demonstrates that the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan theorize a male body. She then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women--menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause--to lay the groundwork for new theories of sexed corporeality."--Back cover.

Recently the distinguished feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz has turned her critical acumen toward rethinking time and duration. Time Travels brings her trailblazing essays together to show how reconceptualizing temporality transforms and revitalizes key scholarly and political projects. In these essays, Grosz demonstrates how imagining different relations between the past, present, and future alters understandings of social and scientific projects ranging from theories of justice to evolutionary biology, and she explores the radical implications of the reordering of these projects for feminist, queer, and critical race theories. Grosz’s reflections on how rethinking time might generate new understandings of nature, culture, subjectivity, and politics are wide ranging. She moves from a compelling argument that Charles Darwin’s notion of biological and cultural evolution can potentially benefit feminist, queer, and antiracist agendas to an exploration of modern jurisprudence’s reliance on the notion that justice is only immanent in the future and thus is always beyond reach. She examines Henri Bergson’s philosophy of duration in light of the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and William James, and she discusses issues of sexual difference, identity, pleasure, and desire in relation to the thought of Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault, and Luce Irigaray. Together these essays demonstrate the broad scope and applicability of Grosz’s thinking about time as an undertheorized but uniquely productive force.

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

The blindness to ontological questioning in feminist theory has left a lacuna in scholarly study that Touching Thought--a study at the intersection of ontological meditation and feminist theorizing on sexual difference--seeks to fill. Ellen Mortensen's new work critiques the language and theoretical pathways of contemporary feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Theresa de Lauretis, and Donna Haraway to reveal a problematic predilection for technological language at the expense of ontological inquiry. The volume ranges across feminist epistemology and ethics, the politics of performativity, the aesthetics of body/power, and the question of sexual difference and concludes with an examination of the different philosophical and theoretical attempts at undertaking an ontological questioning of sexual difference. This foundational work will serve as preparation for scholars of feminist and queer theory and continental philosophy seeking alternative pathways of feminist thought that encourage fundamental thinking on the subject of individual freedom.

The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.

Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivity, psychological depth and inferiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of the body (Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Schilder, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lingis and Deleuze) who, while freeing the body from its subordination to the mind, are nonetheless unable to accomodate the specificities of women's bodies. Volatile Bodies explores various dissonances in thinking the relation between mind and body. It investigates issues that resist reduction to these binary terms - psychosis, hypochondria, neurological disturbances, perversions and sexual deviation - and most particularly the enigmatic status of body fluids, and the female body.

Treating bodies as more than discursive in social research can feel out of place in academia. As a result, embodiment studies remain on the outside of academic knowledge construction and critical scholarship. However, embodiment scholars suggest that investigations into the profound division created by privileging the mind-intellect over the body-spirit are integral to the project of decolonization. The field of embodiment theorizes bodies as knowledgeable in ways that include but are not solely cognitive. The contributors to this collection suggest developing embodied ways of teaching, learning, and knowing through embodied experiences such as yoga, mindfulness, illness, and trauma. Although the contributors challenge Western educational frameworks from within and beyond academic settings, they also acknowledge and draw attention to the incommensurability between decolonization and aspects of social justice projects in education. By addressing this tension ethically and deliberately, the contributors engage thoughtfully with decolonization and make a substantial, and sometimes unsettling, contribution to critical studies in education.

Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.