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Author: Lynda I. A. Birke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
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Book Description
What is a body? What are our perceptions of our inner bodies? How are these perceptions influenced? In recent years, thinking about the body has become highly fashionable. However, the renewed focus, while certainly welcome, seems to always end at the corporeal surface. While recent sociological and feminist theory has made important claims about the process of cultural inscription on the body, and about the cultural representation of the body, what actually appears in this new theory seems to be, ironically, disembodied. If this newly theorized form has interiority, it is one that is explained predominantly through psychoanalysis. The physiological processes remain a mystery to be explained, if at all, only in the esoteric language of biomedicine. As a trained biologist, Lynda Birke was frustrated by the gap between feminist cultural analysis and her own scientific background. In this book, she seeks to bridge this gap using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. Birke rejects the assumption that bodily function is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biology offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Feminism and the Biological Body brings natural science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a new politics that includes, rather than denies, our flesh.
Author: Lynda I. A. Birke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 228
Get Book Here
Book Description
What is a body? What are our perceptions of our inner bodies? How are these perceptions influenced? In recent years, thinking about the body has become highly fashionable. However, the renewed focus, while certainly welcome, seems to always end at the corporeal surface. While recent sociological and feminist theory has made important claims about the process of cultural inscription on the body, and about the cultural representation of the body, what actually appears in this new theory seems to be, ironically, disembodied. If this newly theorized form has interiority, it is one that is explained predominantly through psychoanalysis. The physiological processes remain a mystery to be explained, if at all, only in the esoteric language of biomedicine. As a trained biologist, Lynda Birke was frustrated by the gap between feminist cultural analysis and her own scientific background. In this book, she seeks to bridge this gap using ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. Birke rejects the assumption that bodily function is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biology offers more than just a deterministic narrative of how nature works. Feminism and the Biological Body brings natural science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a new politics that includes, rather than denies, our flesh.
Author: Lynda Birke
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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Book Description
Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture.
Author: Elizabeth A. Wilson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386380
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 137
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Book Description
How can scientific theories contribute to contemporary accounts of embodiment in the humanities and social sciences? In particular, how does neuroscientific research facilitate new approaches to theories of mind and body? Feminists have frequently criticized the neurosciences for biological reductionism, yet, Elizabeth A. Wilson argues, neurological theories—especially certain accounts of depression, sexuality, and emotion—are useful to feminist theories of the body. Rather than pointing toward the conventionalizing tendencies of the neurosciences, Wilson emphasizes their capacity for reinvention and transformation. Focusing on the details of neuronal connections, subcortical pathways, and reflex actions, she suggests that the central and peripheral nervous systems are powerfully allied with sexuality, the affects, emotional states, cognitive appetites, and other organs and bodies in ways not fully appreciated in the feminist literature. Whether reflecting on Simon LeVay’s hypothesis about the brains of gay men, Peter Kramer’s model of depression, or Charles Darwin’s account of trembling and blushing, Wilson is able to show how the neurosciences can be used to reinvigorate feminist theories of the body.
Author: Elizabeth A. Wilson
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822375206
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
In Gut Feminism Elizabeth A. Wilson urges feminists to rethink their resistance to biological and pharmaceutical data. Turning her attention to the gut and depression, she asks what conceptual and methodological innovations become possible when feminist theory isn’t so instinctively antibiological. She examines research on anti-depressants, placebos, transference, phantasy, eating disorders and suicidality with two goals in mind: to show how pharmaceutical data can be useful for feminist theory, and to address the necessary role of aggression in feminist politics. Gut Feminism’s provocative challenge to feminist theory is that it would be more powerful if it could attend to biological data and tolerate its own capacity for harm.
Author: Margrit Shildrick
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
From anorexia, sexuality, skin, pregnancy, the mouth, menstruation, biopsychiatry and male hysteria, to the heart, this work examines the relationships between feminism, the body and biomedicine. The book uses post-conventional/post-modern theory in the area of bio/logical body and the clinic.
Author: Alison M. Jaggar
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 9780813513799
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 392
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Book Description
The essays in this interdisciplinary collection share the conviction that modern western paradigms of knowledge and reality are gender-biased. Some contributors challenge and revise western conceptions of the body as the domain of the biological and 'natural, ' the enemy of reason, typically associated with women.
Author: Susan Wendell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135770476
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
The Rejected Body argues that feminist theorizing has been skewed toward non-disabled experience, and that the knowledge of people with disabilities must be integrated into feminist ethics, discussions of bodily life, and criticism of the cognitive and social authority of medicine. Among the topics it addresses are who should be identified as disabled; whether disability is biomedical, social or both; what causes disability and what could 'cure' it; and whether scientific efforts to eliminate disabling physical conditions are morally justified. Wendell provides a remarkable look at how cultural attitudes towards the body contribute to the stigma of disability and to widespread unwillingness to accept and provide for the body's inevitable weakness.
Author: Londa L. Schiebinger
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198731914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 512
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Book Description
This collection of classic essays in feminist body studies investigates the history of the image of the female body; from the medical 'discovery' of the clitoris, to the 'body politic' of Queen Elizabeth I, to women deprecated as 'Hottentot Venuses' in the nineteenth century. The text look at the way in which coverings bear cultural meaning: clothing reform during the French Revolution, Islamic veiling, and the invention of the top hat; as well as the embodiment of cherished cultural values in social icons such as the Statue of Liberty or the Barbie doll. By considering culture as it defines not only women but also men, this volume offers both the student and the general reader an insight into the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study involved in feminist body studies.
Author: Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479845434
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or ‘naturalizing’ turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences.
Author: Alison M. Jagger
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN: 9780631220671
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 724
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Book Description
Including over 50 newly-commissioned survey articles, this outstanding volume represents the first truly comprehensive guide to feminist philosophy.
