Talking Bodies

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment, Gender and Identity

Emma Rees

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9783319637778
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319637785
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

In this collection leading thinkers, writers, and activists offer their responses to the simple question "do I have a body, or am I my body?". The essays engage with the array of meanings that our bodies have today, ranging from considerations of nineteenth-century discourses of bodily shame and otherness, through to arguing for a brand new corporeal vocabulary for the twenty-first century. Increasing numbers of people are choosing to modify their bodies, but as the essays in this volume show, this is far from being a new practice: over hundreds of years, it has evolved and accrued new meanings. This richly interdisciplinary volume maps a range of cultural anxieties about the body, resulting in a timely and compelling book that makes a vital contribution to today's key debates about embodiment.  

Table of contents

• Talking Bodies
• Chapter 1 Varieties of Embodiment and ‘Corporeal Style’
• Chapter 2 Edith Wharton: An Heiress to Gay Male Sexual Radicalism?
• Chapter 3 Losing Face Among the Natives: ‘Something About Tattooing and Tabooing’ in Melville’s Typee
• Chapter 4 What the Body Tells Us: Transgender Strategies, Beauty, and Self-consciousness
• Chapter 5 Tattoos: An Embodiment of Desire
• Chapter 6 Learning Womanhood: Body Modification, Girls and Identity
• Chapter 7 The Construction of a Personal Norm of Physical and Psychological ‘Well-Being’ in Female Discourse
• Chapter 8 No Body, No Crime? (Representations of) Sexual Violence Online
• Chapter 9 Heteronormativity as a Painful Script: How Women with Vulvar Pain (re)Negotiate Sexual Practice
• Chapter 10 Queer Wounds: Writing Autobiography Past the Limits of Language
• Chapter 11 The Trouble with Body Image: The Need for a Better Corporeal Vocabulary
• Index