Body, Sexuality and Crooked Line

APA Handbook of Sexuality and Psychology, 2013

Our bodies are the permeable boundary between our individual sense of self and the society in which we live. From the most banal bodily acts of life - how we dress, the magazines we read, with whom we sleep - to the big questions of social organization regarding marriage, family, sexual morality, and sexual health, the body is always involved in some way. The body is at once our own, something we share with others, and also something that is important to and shaped by the social world. Almost everything about sex is also about the body; sexuality is an intrinsic part of an embodied self. Although there is certainly much research that focuses on particular biological functions of sexual bodily parts and physiological processes associated with, and in some cases considered to comprise, sexuality, this line of research is predicated on the body as fundamentally and exclusively organic and, for the most part, hardwired. We begin the introduction to this chapter by articulating social concepts of "the body" and their relationship to understandings of and research about sexuality.

Lacan and Foucault are often said to be opposed to each other, but this essay explores a connection around ethics, transgression, and sexuality, based on Freud's early work on the body and the hysterical symptom, and the elaboration of that work by Lacan and Foucault. Published in Angelaki.

Social Thought and Research, 2001

There are many ways to approach the complex entity we call "the body." Today I want to look at the body as the point of intersection of the social with the subjective; by that I mean that the body is the site where subjectivity is formed in subjection to sociality, a site at once virtual and concrete, both theoretical and material. I will propose the following thesis: if we become social subjects, it is because we have bodies -or better, because we are bodies; and conversely, it is only insofar as we become subjects, that we acquire a sexed and raced body. To develop this thesis, I will consider the work of three major figures in twentieth century cultural theory, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, and Frantz Fanon, three thinkers who, each in his own way, have changed the terms in which we can think about the body, sexuality, and the social.

Radical Philosophy Review, 2011

T he ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface." 1 Freud's famous claim has sparked a host of responses within psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and queer theory. Gayle Salamon's excellent new book addresses the ways in which these fields speak of the body. In order to highlight the scope and limits of embodiment and sexual difference, she examines how bodies that are not normatively sexed and gendered raise questions about relationships between the psychological and the material and how these relationships may be embodied and lived. Noting that a) the philosophical canon has only rarely addressed the challenge to traditional accounts of embodiment that gender variation poses, and also that b) the nascent field of trans studies does not yet utilize the theories of embodiment that phenomenology and psychoanalytic theory offer, Salamon aims in Assuming a Body to "bring psychoanalytic, phenomenological, and transgendered bodies proximate enough so that their similarities might become more visible and their differences might be brought into productive tension with one another" (10). This is not a book about why one thinker's theories can beat up another thinker's theories. There are not so much winners and losers as there are pieces of a puzzle that fit together 1. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, Inc., 1960), 26.

2024

In this unit of study we will examine the ways in which feminist and queer theories have used bodies and sexualities in order to theorise difference and identity. The body and sexuality have been shown to be a major site for the operation of power in our society. We will look at how bodies and sexualities have given rise to critical understandings of identity. The unit of study will be devoted to working through some of the major theories of sexuality and embodiment and the analysis of cultural practices.

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2015

Current scholarship recognises both physiology and sexuality as central elements of the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility. But scholars have yet really to explore the physiology of sexuality. Through an interdisciplinary approach this article demonstrates the profound resonance of late seventeenth-century physiological discussions about nerves and animal spirits as the basis for understandings about sexuality and sensibility. Those discussions particularly emphasised specific ways that sex affected the sensible body and rational mind. The physiology of animal spirits – and associated ideas about the body and mind – would underpin representations of sexuality in the art and literature of sensibility in the mid-eighteenth century.

Although the history of anthropology shows various shifts in the way sexuality has been theorised, studies of the relation between sexuality and bodily sensations have remained limited. In this article I explore the concept of body-sensorial knowledge to understand the relation between the social significance of sexuality and erotic sensations. I argue that the sensual qualities of sexuality are mediators and shapers of social knowledge that help to understand how causal relations, such as the reconfiguration of culture, gender and sexuality in postcolonial Kenyan society, are registered in people's self-perceptions.