Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison

by Pedwell; Carolyn

• ISBN13: 9780415528887
• ISBN10: 0415528887
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2012-07-18
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. 'African' female genital cutting and 'Western' cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practiceexamines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts. This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.