Refiguring the Ordinary

by Weiss, Gail

• ISBN13: 9780253219893
• ISBN10: 0253219892
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-07-01
• Publisher: Indiana Univ Pr

Summary

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009

Author Biography

Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Human Sciences graduate program at The George Washington University. She is author of Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. 1
Figuring the Ground
Context and Perspective	p. 11
Ambiguity, Absurdity, and Reversibility: Three Responses to Indeterminacy	p. 26
Narrative Horizons
Reading/Writing between the Lines	p. 41
The Body as a Narrative Horizon	p. 62
(Re)Grounding the Figure
Can an Old Dog Learn New Tricks? Habitual Horizons in James, Bourdieu, and Merleau-Ponty	p. 75
Imagining the Horizon	p. 98
Urban Perspectives
City Limits	p. 115
Urban Flesh	p. 127
Constraining Horizons
Death and the Other: Rethinking Authenticity	p. 147
Challenging Choices	p. 161
Mothers/Intellectuals: Alterities of a Dual Identity	p. 181
Notes	p. 203
Bibliography	p. 231
Index	p. 241
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