This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer cu... more This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: that a person's inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transfor-mative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies.
We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing o... more We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked.-Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1984, 61. (onsider the central problem involved in examining eating disorders from an ethical or political perspective: On the one hand, as feminists, we want to recognize that the personal is political and that eating disorders cannot be explained at the level of individual pathology. An adequate account needs to address the social or ideological domain of representation that in some way helps produce such disorders. This recognition has led to the critique of a representational domain variously described as phallo-centric, phallogocentric, or patriarchal. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to locate women as passive victims in some point of innocence outside representation. Thus, the task for feminists has been conceived of as constructing autonomous women's representations, and this task has appealed to an articulation of the female body. The body is, then, considered as that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine rep-resentational logic. At the same time, the body has been targeted as the redemptive opening for a specifically feminine site of representation. In terms of eating disorders, this ambivalence surrounding representation might be cashed out as follows: the anorexic is the victim of representation, trapped in embodiment through stereotypical and alienating images-but at the same time only representation can cure this malaise; only a realistic, nonrepressive and less regulative form of representation will allow women to see themselves as autonomous subjects. We argue that this tension surrounding representation actually sustains the Cartesian mind/body dualism that it ostensibly criticizes. In what follows, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who has challenged the notion that reason or thought is the negation, repression, or ordering of some
In this article I present an argument for 'embodied ways of knowing' as an alternative epistemolo... more In this article I present an argument for 'embodied ways of knowing' as an alternative epistemological strategy, drawing on feminist research and embodied experience. To present my argument, I begin by considering a number of problematic dualisms that are central to Western knowledge, such as the separation between mind and body and between knowledge and experience. In critique of mind/body dualism, feminists and phenomenologists claimed that Western understandings were based on a profound ignorance about and fear of the body. Mind/body dualism needed to be challenged and articulated differently, potentially through valuing and understanding 'embodiment'. In critique of the knowledge/experience dualism, feminists and phenomenologists have suggested that 'knowing' could be based on lived experience. From lived experience, knowledge could be constructed by individuals and communities, rather than being universal and resulting strictly from rational argument. Research on women's ways of knowing and on movement experience provided valuable insights into alternative ways of knowing. Just as lived experience and movement experience could be ways of knowing, I argue that 'embodied ways of knowing' could also contribute specifically to knowledge. The relevance of understanding 'embodied ways of knowing' for those involved in education and movement studies may be the further appreciation, development and advocacy for the role of movement experience in education.
In her article ‘Sorcerer Love’, Luce Irigaray offers a re-reading of
Plato’s Symposium. Her focus... more In her article ‘Sorcerer Love’, Luce Irigaray offers a re-reading of Plato’s Symposium. Her focus is on Diotima’s speech which, she notes, is “loosely woven but never definitely knotted”.2 There are still spaces for Irigaray to weave her own voice through Diotima’s in order to uncover a forgotten passage within this speech, a crucial shift in Diotima’s teaching. In so doing, Irigaray seeks to turn us back from a metaphysics which devalues the body to a fecund erotic encounter which nourishes both body and soul. However, Diotima’s teaching not only offers a philosophical revaluation of the erotic - it is equally concerned with the relation between the erotic and philosophy, or with the journey towards wisdom as erotic. Thus, in this paper, I will first show how Irigaray reclaims a forgotten wisdom from Diotima’s speech, and then draw out the potential of this recovered teaching for re-thinking the pedagogical relation itself. I will suggest that the key to both elements is Irigaray’s radical revaluation of the erotic encounter as a birthing or engendering of infancy as both the process and condition of learning.
This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer cu... more This article is concerned with the relationship between body, image and affect within consumer culture. Body image is generally understood as a mental image of the body as it appears to others. It is often assumed in consumer culture that people attend to their body image in an instrumental manner, as status and social acceptability depend on how a person looks. This view is based on popular physiognomic assumptions that the body, especially the face, is a reflection of the self: that a person's inner character or personality will shine through the outer appearance. The modification and cosmetic enhancement of the body through a range of regimes and technologies can be used to construct a beautiful appearance and thereby a beautiful self. The article begins by examining body images in consumer culture and their relation to photography and moving images. This is followed by an examination of the consumer culture transfor-mative process through a discussion of cosmetic surgery. The article then questions the over-simplistic logic that assumes that transformative techniques will automatically result in a more positive and acceptable body image. The new body and face may encourage people to look at the transformed person in a new way. But the moving body, the body without image, which communicates through proprioceptive senses and intensities of affect, can override the perception of the transformed appearance. A discussion of the affective body follows, via a closer examination of the body without image, the opening of the body to greater affect and indeterminacy. The affective body image and its potential greater visibility through new media technologies are then discussed through some examples taken from digital video art. The article concludes by examining some of the implications of these shifts within consumer culture and new media technologies.
We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing o... more We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. The Women's Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked.-Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 1984, 61. (onsider the central problem involved in examining eating disorders from an ethical or political perspective: On the one hand, as feminists, we want to recognize that the personal is political and that eating disorders cannot be explained at the level of individual pathology. An adequate account needs to address the social or ideological domain of representation that in some way helps produce such disorders. This recognition has led to the critique of a representational domain variously described as phallo-centric, phallogocentric, or patriarchal. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to locate women as passive victims in some point of innocence outside representation. Thus, the task for feminists has been conceived of as constructing autonomous women's representations, and this task has appealed to an articulation of the female body. The body is, then, considered as that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine rep-resentational logic. At the same time, the body has been targeted as the redemptive opening for a specifically feminine site of representation. In terms of eating disorders, this ambivalence surrounding representation might be cashed out as follows: the anorexic is the victim of representation, trapped in embodiment through stereotypical and alienating images-but at the same time only representation can cure this malaise; only a realistic, nonrepressive and less regulative form of representation will allow women to see themselves as autonomous subjects. We argue that this tension surrounding representation actually sustains the Cartesian mind/body dualism that it ostensibly criticizes. In what follows, we draw on the work of Gilles Deleuze, a philosopher who has challenged the notion that reason or thought is the negation, repression, or ordering of some
In this article I present an argument for 'embodied ways of knowing' as an alternative epistemolo... more In this article I present an argument for 'embodied ways of knowing' as an alternative epistemological strategy, drawing on feminist research and embodied experience. To present my argument, I begin by considering a number of problematic dualisms that are central to Western knowledge, such as the separation between mind and body and between knowledge and experience. In critique of mind/body dualism, feminists and phenomenologists claimed that Western understandings were based on a profound ignorance about and fear of the body. Mind/body dualism needed to be challenged and articulated differently, potentially through valuing and understanding 'embodiment'. In critique of the knowledge/experience dualism, feminists and phenomenologists have suggested that 'knowing' could be based on lived experience. From lived experience, knowledge could be constructed by individuals and communities, rather than being universal and resulting strictly from rational argument. Research on women's ways of knowing and on movement experience provided valuable insights into alternative ways of knowing. Just as lived experience and movement experience could be ways of knowing, I argue that 'embodied ways of knowing' could also contribute specifically to knowledge. The relevance of understanding 'embodied ways of knowing' for those involved in education and movement studies may be the further appreciation, development and advocacy for the role of movement experience in education.
In her article ‘Sorcerer Love’, Luce Irigaray offers a re-reading of
Plato’s Symposium. Her focus... more In her article ‘Sorcerer Love’, Luce Irigaray offers a re-reading of Plato’s Symposium. Her focus is on Diotima’s speech which, she notes, is “loosely woven but never definitely knotted”.2 There are still spaces for Irigaray to weave her own voice through Diotima’s in order to uncover a forgotten passage within this speech, a crucial shift in Diotima’s teaching. In so doing, Irigaray seeks to turn us back from a metaphysics which devalues the body to a fecund erotic encounter which nourishes both body and soul. However, Diotima’s teaching not only offers a philosophical revaluation of the erotic - it is equally concerned with the relation between the erotic and philosophy, or with the journey towards wisdom as erotic. Thus, in this paper, I will first show how Irigaray reclaims a forgotten wisdom from Diotima’s speech, and then draw out the potential of this recovered teaching for re-thinking the pedagogical relation itself. I will suggest that the key to both elements is Irigaray’s radical revaluation of the erotic encounter as a birthing or engendering of infancy as both the process and condition of learning.
This paper argues that Marxist feminism offers a powerful approach to body formation theory. Buil... more This paper argues that Marxist feminism offers a powerful approach to body formation theory. Building on social reproduction theory's key innovations, as well as its recognition that Marx's 'critique' of political economy is unfinished business, I develop my argument through a constructive critique of three manifestations of the fetishism of wage form, respectively problematizing the distinction between labor and labor power, the limits of the concept of labor within production-centered approach, and the embodied nature of labor power. In recovering the centrality of the body for critical social theory, social reproduction theory sheds new light into our understanding of the complex processes by which the contradictions of capital are displaced and ultimately embodied in specific ways, and therefore offers a powerful approach attentive to the ways in which the physical body shapes, and is shaped by, social and material forces.
This paper begins to trace a conceptual progression from interaction as inherently meaningful to ... more This paper begins to trace a conceptual progression from interaction as inherently meaningful to intersubjectivity, and from intersubjectivity as the co-presence of alter egos to intercorporeality. It is an exercise in cultural phenomenology insofar as ethnographic instances provide the concrete data for phenomenological reflection. In examining two instances in which the intercorporeal hinge between participants in an interaction is in the hands, and two in which this hinge is in the lips, I touch in varying degrees on elements of embodiment including language, gesture, touch, etiquette, alterity, spontaneity, body image, sonority, mimesis, and immediacy. The analysis supports the substantive conclusion that intersubjectivity is a concrete rather than an abstract relationship and that it is primary rather than a secondary achievement of isolated egos, as well as the methodological conclusion that cultural phenomenology is not bound by subjective idealism.
This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assist... more This article focuses on the transformation of the female reproductive body with the use of assisted reproduction technologies under neo-liberal economic globalisation, wherein the ideology of trade without borders is central, as well as under liberal feminist ideals, wherein the right to self-determination is central. Two aspects of the body in western medicine—the fragmented body and the commodified body, and the integral relation between these two—are highlighted. This is done in order to analyse the implications of local and global transactions in women's reproductive body parts for their right to self-determination and individual agency and what this means for their embodiment. We conclude by exploring whether women can become embodied subjects by exercising their proprietary right to their bodies through directing technology to achieve their own goals, while at the same time being fragmented into parts and losing their personhood and bodily integrity.
ABstrAct this paper begins with a brief analysis of immanuel Kant's account of perception in the ... more ABstrAct this paper begins with a brief analysis of immanuel Kant's account of perception in the Critique of Pure Reason, and analyses luce irigaray's critique of Kant in Speculum of the Other Woman, in order that we may better understand the position irigaray adopts with regards to the notion of embodied 'perception' – a key theme in her recent text To Be Two. Part ii examines irigaray's argument in An Ethics of Sexual Difference, with particular reference to themes of 'dwelling', 'embodiment' and 'space-time'. By denying the body representation within discourse, irigaray argues that the Kantian transcendental subject conceals sexuate difference and buries the 'feminine'. Hence perception is not conceived as an ethical relationship between two embodied subjects, but as one of knowledge between a transcendental subject and an 'object'. this enterprise is intended to lend clarity to irigaray's vision of embodied subjectivity and alterity in her later works.
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Plato’s Symposium. Her focus is on Diotima’s speech which, she notes, is “loosely woven but never definitely knotted”.2 There are still spaces for Irigaray to weave her own voice through Diotima’s in order to uncover a forgotten passage within this speech, a crucial shift in Diotima’s teaching. In so doing, Irigaray seeks to turn us back from a metaphysics which devalues the body to a fecund erotic encounter which nourishes both body and soul. However, Diotima’s teaching not only offers a philosophical revaluation of the erotic - it is equally concerned with the relation between the erotic and philosophy, or with the journey towards wisdom as erotic. Thus, in this paper, I will first show how Irigaray reclaims a forgotten wisdom from Diotima’s speech, and then draw out the potential of this recovered teaching for re-thinking the pedagogical relation itself. I will suggest that the key to both elements is Irigaray’s radical revaluation of the erotic encounter as a birthing or engendering of infancy as both the process and condition of learning.
Plato’s Symposium. Her focus is on Diotima’s speech which, she notes, is “loosely woven but never definitely knotted”.2 There are still spaces for Irigaray to weave her own voice through Diotima’s in order to uncover a forgotten passage within this speech, a crucial shift in Diotima’s teaching. In so doing, Irigaray seeks to turn us back from a metaphysics which devalues the body to a fecund erotic encounter which nourishes both body and soul. However, Diotima’s teaching not only offers a philosophical revaluation of the erotic - it is equally concerned with the relation between the erotic and philosophy, or with the journey towards wisdom as erotic. Thus, in this paper, I will first show how Irigaray reclaims a forgotten wisdom from Diotima’s speech, and then draw out the potential of this recovered teaching for re-thinking the pedagogical relation itself. I will suggest that the key to both elements is Irigaray’s radical revaluation of the erotic encounter as a birthing or engendering of infancy as both the process and condition of learning.