Bodies and Culture

This thesis is an investigation into the legitimacy and limits of the term “body art” in its vernacular sense, wherein it refers to methods of decorating or ornamenting the body, such as tattooing or piercing. Though the term is widely used and widely understood, it has rarely appeared in any writing which takes an explicitly arthistorical or art‐critical approach, and has never been subjected to any sustained analysis which uses the methodologies deployed by specialists when engaging with other forms of art. If tattooing and its coincident technologies are “body art”, they have not as yet been understood as such by art historians.

The arguments made over the course of this work thus amount to a case for the applicability of art‐historical and art‐theoretical methodologies to body modification practice. The thesis first establishes the existence of a rhetorical yet broadly undefended case for the artistic status of practices which alter the form of the body. This claim is to be found amongst both the contemporary subcultural body modification community and amongst plastic surgeons. With particular reference to theories of art and aesthetics by John Dewey, Richard Shusterman, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the work investigates whether such claims are tenable. In light of these investigations, the thesis then presents a number of problems which immediately arise from such a claim – problems of authorship, ownership, objectivity and value – and attempts to resolve them through detailed analysis of a number of case‐studies.

(The full thesis can be downloaded from the British Library's EThos Service at http://ethos.bl.uk by searching "Lodder" or the thesis' persistent ID, 525734 - registration required)

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

Neste trabalho nos propomos a investigar o uso da nudez masculina na arte funerária paulista, a partir do acervo dos Cemitérios da Consolação, Araçá e São Paulo. Fruto da pesquisa de doutoramento junto ao PPGH/UFG, em desenvolvimento, sob a orientação da Profª Dra. Maria Elizia Borges, consideramos a produção artística referente à belle époque. A partir do inventário das ocorrências de imagens masculinas, parcial ou completamente despidas, vimos que estas se utilizam de representações que ora destacam a sensibilidade perante a morte, ora deixam em relevo a virilidade em associação ao mundo do trabalho; opções nem sempre em consonância com a moral burguesa e o ideal de masculinidade do período. Vimos que o uso da nudez enquanto linguagem simbólica remete ao mundo grego, e assumiu diversos sentidos ao longo da história. Em especial, a nudez corporal masculina comumente ocupou lugar de destaque, sendo temática relevante em diferentes momentos históricos e artísticos, desde a Antiguidade Clássica, até a contemporaneidade, passando pelo Renascimento e o Neoclassicismo. Em face disso, buscamos construir uma leitura iconográfica e iconológica das mesmas, esperando que a investigação da composição das esculturas permita recuperar parte dos devaneios dos escultores e sua expressividade estética, os significados do uso da nudez corporal na arte funerária do período e explicar porque os cemitérios a céu aberto permitiram a exposição das imagens de uma masculinidade sensível e/ou viril com maior liberdade expressiva.

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

This article is a reflection on empirical data gathered in an ethnographic study of masculinity in a designated slum in urban Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala. This gestures towards possible new scholarly projects for those interested in gender, development, or otherwise critically analysing the well-being of those marginalised in Kerala. This paper seeks to draw attention to processes of gendering specifically located in a slum. I put into dialogue “Kerala-specific” cultural studies, with its emphasis on the state’s political history, and masculinities studies at the interface of a liberalising state. I used the Kudumbashree development programme as an entry point to discuss development in Kerala, the quotidian experiences
of men in the slum and greater questions of value and ethics, all entangled with ideals of masculinity.
Examining masculinity in Kulamnagar brings to light facets of development, while liberalisation
informs new practices of embodying masculinity.

The United States has long grappled with the question of how to maintain an appropriate combination of religion and politics in the public sphere. The current electoral cycle is no different, as Presidential candidates attempt to negotiate both the political and religious landscapes. This essay introduces a special forum on rhetoric and religion in contemporary politics and touches on some recent instances of how religious differences have played out in the current political environment. Some of the issues discussed include the separation of church and state, Mitt Romney’s membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons), Rick Santorum’s conception of the “war on religion,” and the controversy over contraceptives at religious institutions and Rush Limbaugh’s attacks on a Georgetown law student.

Breathing and politics are not usually considered relevant to one another. Is it therefore possible to engage with breathing as a force of social justice? What kinds of atmospheres can corpomaterial dynamics of breathing help envision for the possibility for individuals and social groups to live breathable lives?

It is my aspiration here to argue that politics can take place not only in terms of governance, social movements, identity politics, and biopolitics but also in terms of quotidian bodily actions—such as breathing. By working with breath as a force that is common to all living and breathing (in this chapter, human) beings yet differential in its enactments, I propose a rethinking of politics in which corpomaterial actions matter—politics not based on universalizing, homogenizing, or essentializing understandings of embodiment or subjectivity but conceptualized and enacted intersectionally in their specific situatedness and dispersal in the individual and structural dynamics of power relations. This chapter of the volume, therefore, explores the possibility of such politics in relation to the quotidian practices of breathing.

This essay was published in 2019 as a contribution to an anthology at the intersection of food insecurity and the climate crisis: Food, Environment, and Climate Change. Ed Gilson and Kenehan, Rowman and Littlefield (Lexington Books), 2019.

While the majority of scholarly as well as public discourse concerning food security makes its primary focus human welfare, questions about whether nonhuman animals figure into that discourse in any significant way beyond the implications of animal agriculture for human health and atmospheric stability remain undertheorized. I'll argue that nonhuman animals should matter greatly to anyone who works at the thorny intersections of structural inequality and environmental justice, especially feminists and antiracism theorists, activists, and policymakers. Why? • The very ways in which we conceive nonhuman animal bodies as food reinforces a social and economic order whereby the commodifiability of sex, gender, race, and class is made possible. Nonhuman animals are not invisible in this order, but they are also not visible as living creatures capable of pleasure and suffering. This state of affairs advantages the beneficiaries of capitalism, themselves disproportionately white, Western(ized) men, and cannot be corrected without taking every intersection-sex, gender, race, indigenous status, species, and ecology-into account. • As food sets the precedent for the conversion of living sentient entities into commodifiable exchange value, thereby reinforcing a structural inequality not only heteropatriarchal and racialized, but essentially human chauvinistic. On this view, human beings are presumed to be the arbiter of all value, and some human beings, namely some men, determine not only social place but also existential condition. As food means as instrument, consumable, disposable according to a hierarchically ordered worldview that systemically privileges a very few at the expense of the very many. • While the causes of food insecurity include natural events like drought, flood, and disease, its primary (though often elided) cause is structural

In this unique approach to the field of body studies, author, scholar, and educator Victoria Kannen explores what it means to exist in a body that is constantly on display and subjected to public scrutiny. Kannen examines the interplay of many ways our bodies express identity, such as gender, race, body size, sexuality, disability, body modification, and age, and how public scrutiny of those expressions can impact our public and private selves.

Intertwining personal narratives of self-identified “odd and awed” women with theoretical chapters that help to elucidate the role of social power, this volume tackles the stares, comments, and questions that are directed towards bodies in public space through original research, personal narratives, and artistic expression. As readers encounter the narratives and images throughout the book, they will be supported by scholarly chapters on embodiment, identity, resistance, and power to help analyze, reflect on, and critically engage with the content.

Through stories, theory, and art, this timely new resource will engage students and scholars of women’s and gender studies, sociology, critical disability studies, and body studies.

The links between social constructions of sexuality and gender are theoretically and politically problematic. A contemporary social movement understanding of violence against gay men and lesbians as ‘homophobic’ suggests a solid basis for coalitionist action. But important aspects of the imposition of gender conformity are a common thread in the experience of female, male and transsexual victims and the motives

Il volume, che si compone di tre parti – Visioni, Rappresentazioni e Incursioni –, analizza le dinamiche di normalizzazione/assimilazione, così come di esclusione/incorporazione, della disabilità e della diversità, proponendo un percorso che attraversa visioni, rappresentazioni e interpretazioni dei corpi diversi da uno standard definito e riconosciuto come normale. I corpi altri (deformi, disabili, mutanti, devianti, alieni, trasgressivi, cyborg) portano, infatti, su di sé – in alcuni casi inciso nella carne – lo stigma delle interpretazioni e delle rappresentazioni che la disabilità e la diversità hanno subìto, e tuttora subiscono, nelle diverse epoche della storia occidentale. La convinzione che attraversa il volume è che sia lo sguardo di chi osserva i corpi diversi a favorire forme di discriminazione e di esclusione nei confronti delle persone con disabilità o classificate dal sistema sociale come atipiche o non ordinarie.
Il volume è scaricabile gratuitamente dal sito dell'editore
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This book, which consists of three parts – Visions, Representations and Incursions –, analyzes the dynamics of normalization/assimilation, as well as exclusion/ incorporation, of disability and diversity, proposing a path that crosses visions, representations and interpretations of different bodies compared to a standard defined and recognized as normal. The different bodies (deformed, disabled, mutant, deviant, alien, transgressive, cyborg) carry on themselves – in some cases engraved in the flesh – the stigma of the interpretations and representations that disability and diversity have suffered, and still suffer, in the different periods of Western history. The conviction that runs through this book is that it is the gaze of those who observe the different bodies that favors forms of discrimination and exclusion against people with disabilities.
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This paper examines uses of theatre for practice-based, collaborative, research. It brings a review of existing work and reflections on my own practice into dialogue with participatory geographies, studies of affect and geographies of bodily difference. This demonstrates in-depth and well-justified relationships between forms of practice and the spatial ways of knowing they engage; the surfacing of otherwise background conditions for critique and intervention; and relations between doing and thinking, as well as collaborating partners, that can open a field of possibilities. This is significant for the broader development and assessment of 'creative' or 'artful' collaborations in human geography, as I summarise in conclusion.

Originally published in "I Ink, Therefore I Am," Wiley-Blackwell, ed. Robert Arp, 2012 (http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-0470672064.html)

In this paper, I’ll explore tattooing not merely as a form of expression—it is that—but as a practice of writing or inscription, that is, as a praxis or creative labor that tells aspects or parts of the story of the person whose body is inscribed by/through the tattooing. Such practices, I’ll argue, are not rightly conceived in terms of the (dualistic) view that the body/skin is best conceived as that “text” upon which such a practice is performed, or even as a “canvas” upon which meanings are “painted.” Both, I think, offer an inadequately static view of tattooing as a practice. Tattoos, in other words, are never merely “there.” Rather, in telling their stories (stories partly told—however inadequately or incompletely—just in seeing them), they come to inform and are informed by a particular form of life. Like writing, tattooing is animated in being “read” by oneself or others; hence, the having of tattoos is more like engaging in an activity than claiming a possession, their meaning (s) subject to change in light of on-going experience. Tattooing tells a story, I’ll argue, whether we (can) see them, we “forget” them, are embarrassed by them, lie about them, flaunt them, or even have them removed. It’s not just that their stories are our stories, it’s that through them we take up a certain practice of writing, a certain way of inscribing who we are for ourselves and for others.

Connections have been drawn between masculinity, muscularity and physical or social status in sport. Not only are sporting bodies often related to masculinity but also to whiteness, leading to the devaluing of Asian boys' bodies and sporting experiences. This paper draws on three British Asian teenage boys' visual and verbal narratives to enquire how they negotiate these connections in their physical education and recreational sport experiences. Bourdieu's notion of capital is used to make sense of boys' ways of investing in their bodies to manage their status in school. Drawing from focus-group interviews which used participant-driven photography and photo elicitation techniques, the research indicates how three boys invested in their bodies by doing particular types of physical activity that would enable them to develop muscularity, fitness and/or motor competence, to attain or retain physical and social capital in school. Along the way, they add pertinent comments on the intersections of masculinity and ethnicity in constructing and performing a sporting body.

This special issue of Body & Society explores critical issues arising from enactments of blood donation and transfusion in different parts of the world. With articles focusing on Brazil, China, India, the Navajo Nation, Papua New Guinea, Sri Lanka, the United States and elsewhere, description and analysis is presented of a modal and mobile constellation of practices and knowledges, transnational in distribution, but also situationally enacted in particular instances. What comes across is the scope of blood donation: its extraordinary emotive force, the complex methodologies it requires for the mobilization of populations, its ability to stimulate imaginative thought among diverse constituencies, its variations of transactional form, the ways in which it reproduces controversies globally. The scope of blood donation – the remarkable heterogeneity of its enactments and of the associations condensed therein – can perhaps only begin to be captured with the bringing together of such a wide-ranging set of ethnographic accounts as is presented in this special issue.

This article explores figures of visibility and otherness in H.G. Wells’s novel 'The Invisible Man', discussing the relevance of such figures to the historical paradigm of the Victorian period in which the text was written.

Through an analysis of the text, the human body and skin are considered as mediums invested with personal and social meaning; modification through acts of dress and undress can be seen to have ramifications that impact both the individual and their social setting. The Invisible Man is discussed as a literary figure that comes to represent how the human body may be read as a metaphorically laden site.

Il saggio di Raffaella Perna documenta la ricerca fotografica del barone tedesco Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856-1931) attraverso una rilettura delle fonti d'epoca, documenti inediti e scritti autografi, per mettere in luce gli aspetti innovativi di una delle personalità più interessanti e originali tra la fine del XIX e l'inizio del XX secolo.

Most contemporary scholarly work on posthumanism and transhumanism rests on the idea that both perspectives are part of an ontological continuum. This article, however, acknowledges and explores the differences between them. In order to prove that evident theoretical –and, therefore, practical– differences exist between both positions, a genealogy of their development from the 1980s is proposed. The definition of the two different ontologies associated to each of the discussed positions is followed by an analysis of the consequences that this theoretical separation would have for research. This paper also lays out a revision of their epistemologies and their ethical and practical implications. To conclude, we offer a contextualized justification of why the two discussed positions are actually antithetic, and how considering them as such would be useful for future research in the field.

In this blog post, I attempt to define the feelings that impress binary gender expectations in place with the concept of hetero-comfortability from my ongoing ethnographic work in VRChat. Hetero-comfortability is a process of recognition, where feelings of familiarity — historically established through hetero-conditioning — create impressions that allow one to find comfort in the continuing appearance of hetero-signifiers. As Sara Ahmed (2004b) notes, “To follow the rules of heterosexuality is to be at ease in a world that reflects back the couple form one inhabits as an ideal.”

Based on an examination of news coverage from 2013 to mid-2018, this article analyzes rhetoric in favor of school dress code policies. I illustrate how women’s bodies are problematized in order to manifest
grounds for regulating female attire. By employing pragmatic lines of argument, pro-dress code rhetors foster what I term consequential transference. Because pragmatic arguments rely on identifying consequences, questions of agency are implicit, as presuppositions of who is responsible for the consequences are embedded into the fabric of the discourse. In this case, dress code defenders paint female immodesty as responsible for several harmful potentialities, including negative social judgments, sexual harassment, and the distraction of male students in the classroom. I assert that pragmatic argumentation is a serviceable tool for underwriting misogynistic culture because consequential transference warrants female regulation and punishment by diminishing the accountability of other actors.

CALL FOR PAPERS. 5TH AIBR INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF ANTHROPOLOGY. 
9 -12 July 2019. Madrid, Spain.

Panel:
Being with discomfort: Exploring ethnographic unsettling as conceptual and political praxes.

Attention to emotions and affects as ways of knowing has been widely discussed and firmly established in feminist and poststructuralist scholarship (e.g. Jaggar 1989, Behar 1996, Fischer 2016, Gregg & Seigworth 2010), as well as in in the context of ethnographic research (Navaro-Yashin 2003, Abu-Lughod & Lutz 1990). Nevertheless, few scholars have paid sustained attention to discomfort. The potential that the shift discomfort can produce for questioning set ways of knowing, privileges, and encounters with ‘others’ (Zembylas, 2013; Slater, 2016) are recognised in philosophy and pedagogy. However, discomfort is not always transformative (Applebaum 2017), and can have a negative influence on bodies. In this panel we would like to explore discomfort as a concept, praxis, emotion and/or affective assemblage.

We call for interrogating discomfort, disturbances, troubles, that we may encounter from fieldwork design to writing, performance and representations of our research. We would like to examine these both in methodological terms as well as in relation to conceptual work, to examine together what an analysis of discomfort can offer for questioning socio-cultural matrices that our research is part of, and to politicize our practices. How is discomfort experienced, by which/what bodies and in what context? How do we work with relationships in the field that are overwhelming, unpleasant, unsettling? How might we navigate this unsettling and transform it into methodological and political power? Can an analysis that attends to discomfort contribute to questioning methodological practices based in empathy (Hamilton, 2008; Cavarero 2014)? How might such analyses open conceptual frames for vulnerability, silence(s), or the performativity of our research? How can discomfort and related concepts give meaning to questions of power, memory, conflict, recognition or commoning? This panel invites contributions from different perspectives and conceptual starting points to jointly reflect on and work through ways of navigating, analysing and being with discomfort as a political and theoretical wager.

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.

This study is situated in current social-political conversations in Canada about how to do gender and sexuality education, and what content should and should not be included in Ontario’s Health and Physical Education curriculum. This research documents a 2 and a 1⁄2 month study in which a queer folk song pedagogy was used to conduct gender and sexuality education with 13 students, ages 16-20 years old, in an alternative secondary school classroom in Ontario. Using a practitioner research methodology, the students, the classroom teacher, and the researcher listened to a set of queer folk songs previously composed from interviews with LGBTQ2S+ families and queerspawn; wrote journal reflection responses to each song; and then participated in sustained, engaged dialogue with one another about a wide range of subject matter related to gender and sexuality. Analysis focused on three main themes. The first key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals and queerspawn are often not expected in certain spaces and have to explain their identities, bodies, and relationships to others. The second key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals often begin making sense of and orient toward their own queer identities in relation to queer and trans others they encounter. The third key theme was that LGBTQ2S+ individuals also make sense of themselves and navigate their own identities in relation to various ideas and discourses about gender, sexuality, bodies, and relationships, whether these ideas and discourses are positive or harmful. Overarching conclusions from this study include the following: a queer folk song pedagogy opens up generative dialogic spaces creating an effective learning environment; students seek and construct much of the knowledge they have related to gender and sexuality outside of schools; queer teachers make a difference in delivering queer pedagogy; and queer curriculum and pedagogy can help orient LGBTQ2S+ students and queerspawn in schools. This research makes a case for listening as an important pedagogical strategy in classrooms, and a queer folk song pedagogy as an example of queer caring that has the potential to move students toward alternate possibilities for learning, relating, and living. The Queer Across Canada Resource Kit can be downloaded for free from Kate Reid's website at: https://www.katereid.net/queer-across-canada-2013

Resumo: Este trabalho tem como finalidade discutir o uso de elementos da arte clássica na tessitura da arte funerária paulista, tendo como horizonte orientador aspectos emergentes da investigação de doutoramento. Investiga-se a nudez masculina na arte funerária paulista, no período da belle époque, a partir do acervo dos cemitérios Consolação, Araçá e São Paulo, todos em São Paulo/SP. A partir do inventário das ocorrências de imagens masculinas, apresentadas parcial ou completamente despidas, vimos que estas se utilizam de representações que ora destacam a sensibilidade perante a morte, ora deixam em relevo a virilidade em associação ao mundo do trabalho; opções nem sempre em consonância com a moral burguesa e o ideal de masculinidade do período. Estas diferentes representações de masculinidades fazem ampla utilização da estética clássica, enquanto linguagem plástica, que pode ser percebida nos seguintes elementos: a nudez, o corpo idealizado, poses heroicas, narrativas mitológicas, etc. Este diálogo entre a nudez corporal e a arte remonta à arte grega clássica, quando o escultor, ao retratar o nu humano, buscava expressar a nudez do homem em si, ou seja, colocava-se diante do próprio ser, porque para o artista o corpo não é um modelo, mas antes um módulo, representativo da harmonia absoluta. Tratar de nu na arte grega é falar da relação com o divino. Em nossa investigação, observou-se que a tessitura da arte funerária em questão parece apresentar um projeto moralizador, de adequação do homem ao ideal da civilidade moderna, desse modo guardando alguns dos sentidos originais do lócus artístico clássico.

1 Tabooed, worshipped, and sometimes exploited, the female breast is a visible, tangible and beautiful feature of the female body. Although it is a secondary sexual organ, and not necessary for reproduction, the female breast has an aesthetic and a functionality that makes it distinctly female. While the breast is physiologically a mammary gland designed to provide nourishment to newborn babies its physical feature, its sensitivity, and its oral practicality have created a fascination that influences the value placed on it both by men and women (Jones, 15). To understand contemporary attitudes about the female breast, it is necessary to analyze traditional and persistent symbolism, and imagery, around the concept of breastfeeding, and providing natural substance that has influenced modern Western culture. In monotheistic cultures such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the breast manifested sacredness and was believed to be the "spiritual nurturance of all Christian souls" (Yalom, 5). This tradition harkens back to the Paleolithic period where archaeologists found female figurines sculpted out of bone, stone, or clay, with prominent breasts, and a voluptuous female figure believed to be a symbolism of fertility, and healthy offspring. This paper will examine the primordial, exhilarating, and monstrous image of the multi-breasted goddess Artemis Ephesia, through the continued exhibition and overlapping influence of art and sculpture, and the discourse of mothering roles and identities reflected in Mother Goddess ritual and tradition.

This article examines the constitution of gay male identity through embodied performances in Steamworks, a gay male bathhouse in Chicago. Motivated by Buddhist conceptualizations of catastrophe and mindfulness, I reflectively track the ways in which desirability influences disconnection and identity negotiation as it occurs within a pervasive, generalized, and highly influential conceptualization of the idealized gay male body. Personal narratives scan experiences at Steamworks in which my body-less than the "ideal"-matters to me and to others culturally. I use notion of performativity to propose stylized and normative ways in which subjectivity comes to be through uses of the body.

"Recently, educators have begun to consider what is required in literacy curricula and best teaching practices given the demands placed on the educator sector and on literacy in general.

Multiliteracies and Technology Enhanced Education: Social Practice and the Global Classroom features theoretical reflections and approaches on the use of multiliteracies and technologies in the improvement of education and social practices. Assisting educators at different teaching levels and fostering professional development and progress in this growing field, this innovative publication supports practitioners concerned with teaching at both a local and global level."

Premios:
Nicolás Guillén Award to Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature by the Caribbean Philosophical Association, 2016.
Honorable Mention, Premio Iberoamericano Award, LASA, 2016
Premio Montserrat Ordóñez to Outstanding Book in Feminist Studies, LASA Sección Colombia, 2016
Un estudio de la representación de la infancia femenina en novelas de escritoras del Caribe hispano, La Rebelión es también un ensayo sobre la multifacética relación de los cuerpos y el poder en el Caribe. Desafiando la interpretación común de las narrativas de infancia como reflejo de una nostalgia por la “inocencia”, Celis ilumina las expresiones de deseo y rabia, y las reacciones corporales de niñas y adolescentes ante las variadas estrategias de apropiación patriarcal de su sexualidad. Las batallas de las niñas por “un cuerpo propio”, inspiran la conceptualización de la “conciencia corporal” como fuerza y vehículo de prácticas liberatorias que niñas, mujeres y caribeños siguen oponiendo a los parámetros normativos del género, en la ficción y en el mundo real.

“Un libro poderoso e innovador… que hace sustanciales aportes al campo no solo de los estudios del Caribe hispano, sino a los de la cultura de género latinoamericana” (BEATRIZ GONZÁLEZ-STEPHAN, Rice University).


A study of the representation of girlhood in the work of Hispanic Caribbean women writers, The Rebellion is also a critique of the multifaceted relation of power and gendered bodies in Caribbean cultures. Challenging dominant associations of childhood narratives with nostalgia or lost innocence, Celis sets the spotlight on the desire, anger, and the bodily expressions girls deploy to contest the patriarchal appropriation of their sexuality. The girls’ battles for a body "of their own” inspire the conceptualization of "corporeal consciousness" as a force and the means of emancipatory practices that girls, women and Caribbean subjects continue to oppose to the parameters governing gender, in fiction and in the real world.

“A powerful and innovative work (…) that makes substantial contributions not only to the field of Caribbean studies but also to the study of Latin American gender culture,” (Beatriz Gonzalez-Stephen, Rice University).

This paper lays out the terms of inquiry for my Spring 2016 seminar at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, “Embodied Writing and Rhetoric.” It grows out of release time granted by UPRM for “A Comparative Inquiry on the Role of University GE Courses.” While giving grad students an overview of rhet-comp debates, I want to facilitate embodied learning, and integration of non-academic genres into their FYW courses. I also aspire to move with students towards a more philosophical overview, a la Lyotard’s “report on knowledge.” The turn towards the body, and embodied knowledge, is a dominant feature of current-day scholarship (and its epistemic crisis), I argue, as “incredibility towards metanarratives” was in Lyotard’s era.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

"RE/Search Publications' 'Modern Primitives' (1989) changed countless lives, bringing what had been a localised and niche set of body modification practices, aesthetics and philosophies out of San Fransisco to a global audience, dominating scholarly and popular discourse around body modification subculture for more than a decade afterwards. The voice of Fakir Musafar, dominates the book. This paper argues that modern primitives as Fakir defines them never really existed (and never could have existed) in the terms he suggests, and address an important sub-strand within Modern Primitives almost entirely ignored by critics and commentators: contributors who do not frame their practice in "primitive" terms."

The accepted version of this paper is now in Open Access, via the Centaur repository at the University of Reading. (See link below)

A filosofia no Brasil não tem um apelo popular: poucas pessoas se interessam pela filosofia oficial. Mas será que os brasileiros que não se interessam por filosofia ou é uma filosofia feita entre nós que não tem muito interesse pelos brasileiros?

This paper discusses the development of ION Orchard as an exclusive mall in Singapore as a route to re- considering the performative politics of bodies within urban built environments. In particular, this paper question the reasons behind the curious existence of ION Orchard as an upscale, spectacular mall in a city where malls are seen to be the sine qua non of the urban landscape and part of the everyday mundane lives of Singaporeans. Drawing on academic research, field observations, and interviews, this paper illustrates that while readings of state policies and the exploration of built environments essential to investigate the politics of social exclusions within ION Orchard, the mall also functions very much in a quotidian way. By using the phenomenological lens and emplacing the role of shoppers and their experiences engaging with the planned space of ION Orchard in this study, it is argued that ION Orchard is a space where the perceived exceptional/ordinary dualism is broken down. This oscillation of ION Orchard as a spectacular and mundane landscape is characterized by how the bodies of the shoppers transgress, negotiate, and/or conform the planned environment of the mall.

Cada vez son más las mujeres que utilizan el sentido político del cuerpo en una doble
dirección: como encarnación de la violencia (herramienta de denuncia) y como territorio en
emancipación de las moralidades corporales y sexuales a las que se ha relegado lo femenino.
Este uso va desde la aberración a la tiranía que se ejerce sobre las mujeres hasta el cambio
de paradigma que ha propuesto que la sexualidad de las mujeres no puede seguir
“enclosetada” en la “Narnia moral” de quienes asumen el control de reglas eróticas, sexuales
y corporales para ellas. A la luz de estas dos paradigmáticas connotaciones difundidas con
furor en el siglo XX, se discutirán algunas estrategias del movimiento de mujeres del siglo
XXI para continuar posicionando la agenda por la igualdad en el marco del fenómeno de la
globalización y la era digital instaurados. En este sentido, de manera general, retomaremos
dos aspectos: la relación de sentidos políticos entre el cuerpo y el performance feminista y,
algunas ideas sobre la igualdad.
Palabras Clave: Cuerpo, performance, igualdad, feminismos, política.

In this chapter I look at how Denim Jean are deployed for ordinary body sexualization. Despite their codification as potentially sexy, jeans remain mundane, almost ubiquitous items, perceived as remarkably versatile for all practical purposes in ordinary life. They are subject to fashion dynamics, and indeed represent an important segment in the fashion industry. They thus provide an excel-lent spot for the exploration of sexualization as an ordinary practice that emerges from – and aside to – normal daily rounds, as much as it is performed in specialized places or choreographed in a myriad of glamorized symbolic forms. I ntroduce my discussion by initially considering how Denim’s relationship to fashion illu-minates its relation to embodied subjectivity and individuality more generally. Rather than developing a semiotic approach, considering how the fashion system plunders fetishism or sexual subcultures for inspiration, I explore how the expression of sexuality (attraction and gender) is mediated by a particular clothing, denim jeans, which enjoys a particular status within the actualization of fashion in everyday life. In other words, I start naturalistically from reported practices of meaningful ordinary use of an ordinary item such as jeans, interrogating the chains of meanings that link identity, embodiment and sexuality. The mediating role of denim is revealed as subjects perform what I define as ‘mirror work’ - or actually looking at oneself and working on one's own ensuing emotions - to negotiate their own body perception in relation to normative ideals of beauty and sexuality. Based on ethnographic interviews, I show that denim jeans afford a perception of ‘fitness’ or appropriateness that articulates comfort with compliance as well as authenticity with adaptability. This dynamic is crucial to feeling sexy: something that is articulated via gendered notions of seduction.

The body is the fundamental condition of human existence. From the nineteenth century onward the bodily nature of the human being became important in the philosophical discourse about many questions of humanity. The rise of sport as a cultural phenomenon was linked to debates about the body. Sport focuses on the body and its functions and thus sport is one of the cultural areas where national, ethnic, religious or gender-related body images are constructed. In a bibliographical introduction the article covers the research on the topic body and sports with regard to four different body images constructed within the framework of East European sports: Gender images, the Jewish body, Slavic bodies and Muslim bodies. Focusing on three different examples the text aims at an overview on the history of body and sports in Eastern Europe from the late nineteenth century onwards. The first example is the rivalry of German " Turnen " and sports among East European Jews before and after World War I. The analysis shows how the idea of " Muskeljudentum " is transformed within East European Jewry. The second example deals with equal opportunity ideas and women's sports in the Soviet Union in the inter-war period, while the third example features the media debates on sex tests and the female body of East European athletes at international sport events during the cold war. Finally the perspectives for future research are laid out. Zusammenfassung Körperlichkeit ist eine fundamentale Grundbedingung des Menschseins. Seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert ist Sport einer der wichtigsten Bereiche, in dem sich wissenschaftliche und populäre Debatten über den Körper spiegeln. Mehr noch: Die Konzentration von sportlicher Betätigung und sportlichen Diskursen auf den Körper macht den Sport zu ei-nem der Bereiche, in dem geschlechtlich, national, religiös oder ethnisch konnotierte Kör-perbilder sozial konstruiert werden. Ein Forschungsüberblick fasst die wissenschaftlichen Beiträge anhand von vier unter-schiedlichen Körperbildern zusammen, die im östlichen Europa mithilfe von Sport kon-struiert worden sind: Geschlechterbilder, der jüdische Körper, slawische und muslimische Körper. Daran schließt sich ein Überblick über die Körpergeschichte des Sports im östlichen Europa anhand von drei Fallbeispielen an: Das erste Beispiel ist die Diskussion über die konkurrierenden Konzepte Turnen und Sport innerhalb der osteuropäischen jüdischen Tur-nerbewegung und der Blick der deutschen auf die osteuropäischen Juden, der dabei im Rahmen der Debatten über das " Muskeljudentum " deutlich wird. Das zweite Beispiel ana-lysiert die Gleichstellungsutopien im Frauensport in der Sowjetunion und damit verbunde-ne Körperbilder in der Zwischenkriegszeit. Das dritte Beispiel schließlich stellt die media-le Diskussion über angeblich " männliche " Frauen dar, welche die sogenannten Ost

Resumen Este artículo ofrece un acercamiento a la genealogía histórica de los estudios antropológicos que abordaron la temática del cuerpo, especialmente en contextos religiosos. A continuación, en el marco de una tradición científica atenta a la diversidad religiosa en Argentina, examinamos algunas prácticas y representaciones corporales de los grupos devotos de Sai Baba argentinos. En esta dirección, analizamos sus costumbres alimentarias y una de sus actividades rituales más importantes, los cantos devocionales (bhajans) considerados " alimento para el espíritu ". Finalmente, concluimos que las mismas responden a la representación que del cuerpo, la persona y el macrocosmos impera en este movimiento religioso. Abstract This article provides an historical approach of anthropological studies addressing the theme of the body, especially in religious contexts. Then, under scientific tradition attentive of religious diversity in Argentina, we analyze some of the practices and bodily representations of Argentine Sai Baba groups. In this direction, we analyze your eating habits and one of its most important ritual activities, devotional singing (bhajans) considered a " food for the spirit ". Finally, we conclude that they respond to the representation of the body, the person and the macrocosm that prevails in this religious movement.

The weight-centred health paradigm is an important contributor to the broader cultural paradigm in which corpulence is eschewed in favour of leanness. The desirability to reduce body fat or weight or
to prevent gaining ‘excess’ fat is driven by both aesthetic and health ideals. The ‘war on obesity’ is a broad health based
set of policies and programs designed to problematise ‘excess’ body fat and create solutions to the ‘problem’. There is a substantial body of literature that claims to demonstrate the harmful effects of ‘excess’ body fat. Recent critiques of ‘obesity prevention’ programs have highlighted the importance of focusing on environmental changes rather than individuals due in part to the risk of harmful consequences associated with
individualistic, victim-blaming approaches. Beyond this, there are suggestions that framing body weight as the source of health problems – known as the weight-centred health paradigm – is in itself a harmful approach. The range of harms includes body dissatisfaction, dieting, disordered eating, discrimination and death. Health promotion policies and programs that operate within the weight-centred paradigm have the potential to have a
negative impact on the health and well-being of individuals and communities.

Aktuelle Beispiele (Fitness, Wellness, Self-Tracking, Arbeit am Glück) zeigen, dass Selbstoptimierung heute vor allem das Erreichen eines bestmöglichen Zustandes unter gegebenen Voraussetzungen bedeutet. Die so erreichte Selbstbestimmung erweist sich als Kontaktpunkt zwischen Selbst- und Fremdführung.