Bodily Discursions

Genders, Representations, Technologies

Edited by Deborah S. Wilson & Christine Moneera Laennec

Subjects: Cultural Studies
Series: SUNY series in Postmodern Culture
Paperback : 9780791431887, 273 pages, December 1996
Hardcover : 9780791431870, 273 pages, December 1996

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Table of contents

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Deborah S. Wilson and Christine Moneera Laennec

I. The Disciplined Body

1. Female Bodies Misbehaving: Mortification in Early Modern English Domestic Texts
Torri L. Thompson

2. Romance, Finance, and the Marketable Woman: The Economics of Femininity in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century English Novels
Julie Shaffer

II. The Body Beautiful

3. Molding Women's Bodies: The Surgeon As Sculptor
Alice E. Adams

4. The "Assembly-Line Love Goddess": Women and the Machine Aesthetic in Fashion Photography, 1918–1940
Christine Moneera Laennec

III. The Maternal Body

5. Technologies of Misogyny: The Transparent Maternal Body and Alternate Reproductions in Frankenstein, Dracula , and Some Selected Media Discourses
Deborah S. Wilson

6. Sexual Silencing: Anesthetizing Women's Voices in Childbirth, 1910–1960
Cynthia Huff

IV. The Body-Mind Connection

7. Locke, Disembodied Ideas, and Rhetoric That Matters
Catherine Hobbs

8. "I've Got You Under My Skin": Cyber(sexed) Bodies in Cyberpunk Fictions
Cathy Peppers

9. Will the Reel Woman in Body Double Please Stand Up?
Roberta Schreyer

V. Disease in the Body Politic

10. Women and AIDS: Bodily Representations, Political Repercussions
Susanmarie Harrington

11. Conflicts in AIDS Discourse: Foucault, Surgeon Generals, and the [Gay Men's] Healthcare Crisis
Angela Wall

Contributors

Bibliography

Name Index

Subject Index

This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.

Description

Bodily Discursions offers a multiplicity of feminist perspectives on the body, especially the female body, from a variety of disciplines: literary history, social theory, art history, cultural studies, the history of rhetoric, film, and literary criticism among others. Subjects range from public punishment of outspoken women during the English Renaissance to current responses to the AIDS pandemic in the popular media. Contributors include Alice E. Adams, Susanmarie Harrington, Catherine Hobbs, Cynthia Huff, Cathy Peppers, Roberta Schreyer, Julie Shaffer, Torri L. Thompson, Angela Wall, Deborah S. Wilson, and Christine Moneera Laennec.

All of the essays offer variations on the same theme—the idea that the body is a site for the production of political ideologies, particularly in response to social exigencies and cultural crises. However, there is no single, over-arching ideological model here for feminism, much less for reading the body in a specific historical or cultural moment.

Bodily Discursions offers instead a number of individual voices on a variety of issues and phenomena as they determine the configuration of the body. This book demonstrates that society needs to pay attention to how the body is manipulated if we are to work for social progress and political justice, for it is through our bodies that we all must articulate our experience and live our lives.

"This topic is on the cutting edge of scholarship in both feminist and cultural studies. It is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field." -- Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario

Deborah S. Wilson teaches in the English Department at Illinois Central College. Christine Moneera Laennec is a lecturer in the French Department of Aberdeen University, Scotland.

Reviews

"This topic is on the cutting edge of scholarship in both feminist and cultural studies. It is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field." — Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario