Thinking the Limits of the Body

Edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen & Gail Weiss

Subjects: Body, The
Series: SUNY series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art
Paperback : 9780791456002, 211 pages, January 2003
Hardcover : 9780791455999, 211 pages, January 2003

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Table of contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Bodies at the Limit
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss

PART I: HORIZONS

1. Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies
Elizabeth Grosz

2. The Body as a Narrative Horizon
Gail Weiss

PART II: DERMAL BOUNDARIES

3. Cutups in Beauty School
Linda S. Kauffman

4. Deep Skin
William A. Cohen

PART III: RACIAL EDGES

5. Ontological Crisis and Double Narration in African American Fiction: Reconstructing Our Nig
Laura Doyle

6. Parallaxes: Cannibalism and Self-Embodiment; or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi A-Theology
Sara Castro-KlarĀ“en

PART IV: DIS-ABLING ALLIANCES

7. Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson

8. Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies
Robert McRuer

PART V: LIMINALITIES

9. The Inhuman Circuit
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

10. Mourning the Autonomous Body
Debra B. Bergoffen

About the Contributors

Index

Shows the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in discussions of the body.

Description

This collection maps the very best efforts to think the body at its limits. Because the body encompasses communities (social and political bodies), territories (geographical bodies), and historical texts and ideas (a body of literature, a body of work), Cohen and Weiss seek trans-disciplinary points of resonance and divergence to examine how disciplinary metaphors materialize specific bodies, and where these bodies break down and/or refuse prescribed paths. Whereas postmodern theorizations of the body often neglect its corporeality in favor of its cultural construction, this book demonstrates the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in any discussion of the body.

At The George Washington University, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen is Associate Professor of English and Human Sciences and Gail Weiss is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Human Sciences Program. Cohen is the author of Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. Weiss is the author of Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality and coeditor (with Honi Fern Haber) of Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture.