Embodying the Monster

Embodying the Monster PDF Author: Margrit Shildrick
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446236358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as ′monstrous′ or ′vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily ′normality′ and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

Embodying the Monster

Embodying the Monster PDF Author: Margrit Shildrick
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1446236358
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 162

Get Book Here

Book Description
Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as ′monstrous′ or ′vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily ′normality′ and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

Embodying the Monster

Embodying the Monster PDF Author: Margrit Shildrick
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761970149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Exploring the ideas of bodily monstrosity; vulnerablity; normality; and perfection, this book examines the ideologies surrounding these perceptions and considers what this tells us about ourselves.

Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel

Egypt as a Monster in the Book of Ezekiel PDF Author: Safwat Marzouk
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161532450
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. Egypt is portrayed as a monster in the book of Ezekiel because Egypt represents the threat of religious assimilation. Although initially the monstrosity of Egypt is constructed because of the shared elements of identity between Egypt and Israel, the prophet flips this imagery of monster in order to embody Egypt as a monstrous Other. In a combat myth, YHWH defeats the monster and dismembers its body. Despite its near annihilation, Egypt, in Ezekiel's rhetoric, is not entirely obliterated. Rather, it is kept at bay, hovering at the periphery, questioning Israel's identity.

Monstrosity

Monstrosity PDF Author: Alexa Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857733354
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.

Emotion and Social Theory

Emotion and Social Theory PDF Author: Simon Williams
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761956297
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The emotions have traditionally been marginalized in mainstream social theory. This book demonstrates the problems that this has caused and charts the resurgence of emotions in social theory today. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, both classical and contemporary, Simon Williams treats the emotions as a universal feature of human life and our embodied relationship to the world. He reflects and comments upon the turn towards the body and intimacy in social theory, and explains what is important in current thinking about emotions. In his doing so, readers are provided with a critical assessment of various positions within the field, including the strengths and weaknesses of poststructuralism and postmodernism for examinin

The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film

The Unnameable Monster in Literature and Film PDF Author: Maria Beville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135052301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

Night of the Veggie Monster

Night of the Veggie Monster PDF Author: George McClements
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1599900610
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 38

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Book Description
Every Tuesday night, while his parents try to enjoy their dinner, a boy turns into a monster the moment a pea touches his lips.

Time, Space and the Human Body: An Interdisciplinary Look

Time, Space and the Human Body: An Interdisciplinary Look PDF Author: Rafael F. Narváez
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848884923
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 190

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Book Description
This book considers various ways in which the body is, and has been, addressed and depicted overtime while also working to redefine the body and its relation to historical time and social space.

Flesh and Word

Flesh and Word PDF Author: Sarah Künzler
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110455870
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Bodies and their role in cultural discourse have been a constant focus in the humanities and social sciences in recent years, but comparatively few studies exist about Old Norse-Icelandic or early Irish literature. This study aims to redress this imbalance and presents carefully contextualised close readings of medieval texts. The chapters focus on the role of bodies in mediality discourse in various contexts: that of identity in relation to ideas about self and other, of inscribed and marked skin and of natural bodily matters such as defecation, urination and menstruation. By carefully discussing the sources in their cultural contexts, it becomes apparent that medieval Scandinavian and early Irish texts present their very own ideas about bodies and their role in structuring the narrated worlds of the texts. The study presents one of the first systematic examinations of bodies in these two literary traditions in terms of body criticism and emphasises the ingenuity and complexity of medieval texts.

Why We Take Drugs

Why We Take Drugs PDF Author: Tom Yardley
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136446869
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
In older cultures, the use of intoxicant drugs was integrated into the rhythms of social existence and bounded by rituals and taboos that ensured their dangerous forces were contained and channelled. In modern western societies, by contrast, the state and the institutions of society have washed their hands of any responsibility for assimilating the desire for intoxication into social existence, and by doing so have sponsored a free-for-all that has often had disastrous consequences for individuals and communities alike. Why We Take Drugs provides a timely intervention in the growing debate about the wisdom of the ongoing ‘war on drugs’. Rather than adopting the assumption that drug and alcohol use is a problem that poses a threat to society, this book makes a case for the idea that society is a problem for intoxicant drug use and that it is society that poses a threat, by denying those who seek intoxication a legitimate and socially sanctioned space in which to experience these altered states. Scholarly yet approachable, it provides a new understanding of the meaning and role of intoxicant drug use in contemporary society, setting an in-depth phenomenological analysis of intoxication as an embodied experience within a wide sociological, anthropological and historical context. These ideas are brought to life by intimate and revealing accounts of ordinary drug users’ experiences with a wide range of substances. This book will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars throughout the social sciences, particularly in the areas of drug and alcohol studies, body studies, cultural studies, anthropology and philosophy.