Results by title

102 books match the query 'Human body' and 9 start with c

Sort by

Chinese Surplus

Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body

Ari Larissa Heinrich

Duke University Press, 2018

What happens when the body becomes art in the age of biotechnological reproduction? In Chinese Surplus Ari Larissa Heinrich examines transnational Chinese aesthetic production to demonstrate how representations of the medically commodified body can illuminate the effects of biopolitical violence and postcolonialism in contemporary life. From the earliest appearance of Frankenstein in China to the more recent phenomenon of "cadaver art," he shows how vivid images of a blood transfusion as performance art or a plastinated corpse without its skin—however upsetting to witness—constitute the new "realism" of our times. Adapting Foucauldian biopolitics to better account for race, Heinrich provides a means to theorize the relationship between the development of new medical technologies and the representation of the human body as a site of annexation, extraction, art, and meaning-making.

[more]

Closet Devotions

Richard Rambuss

Duke University Press, 1998

Religion and sex, body and soul, sacred and profane: In Closet Devotions, Richard Rambuss traces the relays between these cultural formations by examining the issue of “sacred eroticism,” the literary or artistic expression of devotional feelings in erotic terms that has repeatedly occurred over the centuries. Rather than dismissing such expression as mere convention, Rambuss takes it seriously as a form of erotic discourse, one that gives voice to desires that, outside the sphere of sacred rapture, would otherwise be deemed taboo.
Through startling rereadings of works ranging from the devotional verse of the metaphysical poets (Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Traherne) to photographer Andres Serrano’s controversial “Piss Christ,” from Renaissance religious iconography to contemporary gay porn, Rambuss uncovers the highly charged erotic imagery that suffuses religious devotional art and literature. And he explores one of Christian culture’s most guarded (and literal) closets—the prayer closet itself, a privileged space where the vectors of same-sex desire can travel privately between the worshiper and his or her God.
Elegantly written and theoretically astute, Closet Devotions illuminates the ways in which sacred Christian devotion is homoeroticized, a phenomenon that until now has gone unexplored in current scholarship on religion, the body, and its passions. This book will attract readers across a wide array of disciplines, including gay and lesbian studies, literary theory and criticism, Renaissance studies, and religion.

[more]

Clothing and Difference

Embodied Identities in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa

Hildi Hendrickson, ed.

Duke University Press, 1996

This volume examines the dynamic relationship between the body, clothing, and identity in sub-Saharan Africa and raises questions that have previously been directed almost exclusively to a Western and urban context. Unusual in its treatment of the body surface as a critical frontier in the production and authentification of identity, Clothing and Difference shows how the body and its adornment have been used to construct and contest social and individual identities in Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and other African societies during both colonial and post-colonial times.
Grounded in the insights of anthropology and history and influenced by developments in cultural studies, these essays investigate the relations between the personal and the public, and between ideas about the self and those about the family, gender, and national groups. They explore the bodily and material creation of the changing identities of women, spirits, youths, ancestors, and entrepreneurs through a consideration of topics such as fashion, spirit possession, commodity exchange, hygiene, and mourning.
By taking African societies as its focus, Clothing and Difference demonstrates that factors considered integral to Western social development—heterogeneity, migration, urbanization, transnational exchange, and media representation—have existed elsewhere in different configurations and with different outcomes. With significance for a wide range of fields, including gender studies, cultural studies, art history, performance studies, political science, semiotics, economics, folklore, and fashion and textile analysis/design, this work provides alternative views of the structures underpinning Western systems of commodification, postmodernism, and cultural differentiation.

Contributors. Misty Bastian, Timothy Burke, Hildi Hendrickson, Deborah James, Adeline Masquelier, Elisha Renne, Johanna Schoss, Brad Weiss

[more]

Conspicuous Bodies

Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie

Jean Kane

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

In Conspicuous Bodies: Provincial Belief and the Making of Joyce and Rushdie, Jean Kane re-examines the literature of James Joyce and Salman Rushdie from a post-secularist perspective, arguing that their respective religions hold critical importance in their works. Though Joyce and Rushdie were initially received as cosmopolitans, both authors subsequently reframed their public images and aligned themselves instead with a provincial religious identity, which emphasized the interconnections between religious devotion and embodiment. At the same time, both Joyce and Rushdie managed to resist the doctrinal content of their religions.

Conspicuous Bodies presents Joyce as a founder and Rushdie as an inheritor of a distinctive discourse of belief about the importance of physical bodies and knowledge in religious practice. In doing so, it moves the reception of Joyce and Rushdie away from what previous critics have emphasized—away from questions of aesthetics and from a narrow understanding of belief—and instead questions the assumption that belief should be segregated from matters of physicality and knowledge. Kane reintroduces the concept of spiritual embodiment in order to expand our understanding of what counts as spiritual agency in non-western and minority literatures.

[more]

Constructions of the Classical Body

James I. Porter, Editor

University of Michigan Press, 2002

Classical scholarship has traditionally neglected the prominence of the body in antiquity. Constructions of the Classical Body theorizes that the study of antiquity is necessarily a study of the body, and that attention to this fact can lead to a much-needed shift in the way in which classical studies are approached today. This volume aims to reestablish the relevance of the problem of the body at the perimeters of several different kinds of inquiry, and, in this way, to help open up a field of possibilities for future study. The range covered by the essays in this volume is sweeping: from Corinthian vaseware to Athenian and Roman politics, poetry from Homer to Ovid, medical writers from the Hippocratic corpus to the diary of Aelius Aristides (second century c.e.), philosophy (Seneca, Porphyry), the Greek novel, Christian apocrypha, Ovid's medieval reception, and twentieth century film. This range is a consequence of the multidisciplinarity that any study of the body requires, and it attests to the particular richness of the body in classical antiquity and as an object for study today. The volume illustrates that body is located between traditional borders, not within them; the body dissolves traditional objects of study and joins areas usually kept apart. Retracing the fate of the body is thus a way of rendering antiquity truly strange again -- it allows us to see the past afresh, with open eyes. This volume includes essays by Carlin A. Barton, Anne Carson, Eric Downing, Catherine Edwards, Maud W. Gleason, John Henderson, Ralph Hexter, S. C. Humphreys, Helen King, Leslie Kurke, Robert Lamberton, David S. Potter, Amy Richlin, Giulia Sissa, Maria Wyke, and Froma I. Zeitlin, along with an introduction by James I. Porter. ". . . a superb collection, one that I know will be most welcome not only in the field of classical studies, but in the libraries of all those interested in the history and historicity of the body." --Page duBois, University of California, San Diego

[more]

Controlling Corporeality

The Body and the Household in Ancient Israel

Berquist, Jon L.

Rutgers University Press, 2002

Human bodily existence is at the core of the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures—from birth to death. From God’s creation of Adam out of clay, to the narratives of priests and kings whose regulations governed bodily practices, the Hebrew Bible focuses on the human body. Moreover, ancient Israel’s understanding of the human body has greatly influenced both Judaism and Christianity. Despite this pervasive influence, ancient Israel’s view of the human body has rarely been studied and, until now, has been poorly understood.

In this beautifully written book, Jon L. Berquist guides the reader through the Hebrew Bible, examining ancient Israel’s ideas of the body, the unstable roles of gender, the deployment of sexuality, and the cultural practices of the time. Conducting his analysis with reference to contemporary theories of the body, power, and social control, Berquist offers not only a description and clarification of ancient Israelite views of the body, but also an analysis of how these views belong to the complex logic of ancient social meanings. When this logic is understood, the familiar Bible becomes strange and opens itself to a wide range of new interpretations.

[more]

Coyote Nation

Sexuality, Race, and Conquest in Modernizing New Mexico, 1880-1920

Pablo Mitchell

University of Chicago Press, 2005

With the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s came the emergence of a modern and profoundly multicultural New Mexico. Native Americans, working-class Mexicans, elite Hispanos, and black and white newcomers all commingled and interacted in the territory in ways that had not been previously possible. But what did it mean to be white in this multiethnic milieu? And how did ideas of sexuality and racial supremacy shape ideas of citizenry and determine who would govern the region?

Coyote Nation considers these questions as it explores how New Mexicans evaluated and categorized racial identities through bodily practices. Where ethnic groups were numerous and—in the wake of miscegenation—often difficult to discern, the ways one dressed, bathed, spoke, gestured, or even stood were largely instrumental in conveying one's race. Even such practices as cutting one's hair, shopping, drinking alcohol, or embalming a deceased loved one could inextricably link a person to a very specific racial identity.

A fascinating history of an extraordinarily plural and polyglot region, Coyote Nation will be of value to historians of race and ethnicity in American culture.

[more]

Crip Authority

Disability and the Art of Consolation in the Renaissance

Elizabeth B. Bearden

University of Michigan Press, 2025

Crip Authority explores how Renaissance writers and artists with disabilities drew on consolatory literature to enhance their authority and create a sense of disability community across the centuries. Elizabeth B. Bearden considers how Renaissance writers and artists understood their lived experiences of disability by drawing on the ancient genre of consolation, which aims to comfort people for a variety of hardships, including mental and physical disability. Renaissance writers used the art of consolation to resignify the mental and physical disabilities that their society frequently scorned into an expression of their military, spiritual, political, and most importantly for this study, writerly authority. Bearden names this kind of defiant authorial self-representation crip authority, thereby transgressively cripping our society’s ableist notions of who has the ability and authority to write.

Disabled authors include Francesco Petrarca, Teresa de Cartagena, Giovani Paolo Lomazzo, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Robert Burton, and John Milton. They all explore their experiences of disability, but their work has rarely or never been considered from a disability studies perspective. Bearden thus brings today’s models of disability studies and crip theory together with early modern articulations of disability based on ancient and Renaissance models of military, political, biblical, and literary authority. In sum, Crip Authority makes a significant contribution to the growing field of early modern disability studies and invites us to rethink the extent of crip history and the endurance of disability gain.

[more]

Cybering Democracy

Public Space And The Internet

Diana Saco

University of Minnesota Press, 2002

Reconceptualizes the relationship between participatory democracy, technology, and space

The Internet has been billed by some proponents as an "electronic agora" ushering in a "new Athenian age of democracy." That assertion assumes that cyberspace’s virtual environment is compatible with democratic practice. But the anonymous sociality that is intrinsic to the Internet seems at odds with theories of democracy that presuppose the possibility, at least, of face-to-face meetings among citizens. The Internet, then, raises provocative questions about democratic participation: Must the public sphere exist as a physical space? Does citizenship require a bodily presence?

In Cybering Democracy, Diana Saco boldly reconceptualizes the relationship between democratic participation and spatial realities both actual and virtual. She argues that cyberspace must be viewed as a produced social space, one that fruitfully confounds the ordering conventions of our physical spaces. Within this innovative framework, Saco investigates recent and ongoing debates over cryptography, hacking, privacy, national security, information control, and Internet culture, focusing on how different online practices have shaped this particular social space. In the process, she highlights fundamental issues about the significance of corporeality in the development of civic-mindedness, the exercise of citizenship, and the politics of collective action.

[more]

Publisher Login