The Social and Political Body

by Schatzki, Theodore R.; Natter, Wolfgang

• ISBN13: 9781572301399
• ISBN10: 1572301392
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1996-10-25
• Publisher: The Guilford Press

Summary

Beginning with the provocative premise that the body is the anchor of the social order, this unique book delves into the multidimensional relationship between sociopolitical bodies and human bodies. Celebrated authors, including Judith Butler and Emily Martin, explore the ways that prevailing economic and political institutions affect our physical selves and how we experience them, and, in turn, the ways that our bodily senses, energies, activities, and desires reinforce or challenge the societal status quo. Timely and theoretically sophisticated, this book makes a significant contribution to some of the most vital debates of cultural studies and political theory today.

Author Biography

Theordore R. Schatzki and Wolfgang Natter, founding members of the Committee on Social Theory at the University of Kentucky, are coeditors (with John Paul Jones III) of Postmodern Contentions and Objectivity and Its Other. They are also members, respectively, of the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature.

Table of Contents

1. Sociocultural Bodies, Bodies Sociopolitical	1	(28)
Theodore R. Schatzki
Wolfgang Natter
I. Bodies and Selves	29	(74)
2. Performativity's Social Magic	29	(20)
Judith Butler
3. Practiced Bodies: Subjects, Genders, and Minds	49	(30)
Theodore R. Schatzki
4. Montaigne on the Arts of Aging and Dying	79	(24)
John O'Neill
II. Political Bodies, Discursively	103	(42)
5. Gray Matters: Brains, Identities, and Natural Rights	103	(20)
Kathi L. Kern
6. Names, Bodies, and the Anxiety of Erasure	123	(22)
Thomas W. Laqueur
III. Bodies Sociopolitical and Economic	145	(76)
7. The Body at Work: Boundaries and Collectivities in the Late Twentieth Century	145	(16)
Emily Martin
8. Feminism and the History of the Face	161	(20)
Kathy Peiss
9. From "Trained Gorilla" to "Humanware": Repoliticizing the Body-Machine Complex Between Fordism and Post-Fordism	181	(40)
Ernest J. Yanarella
Herbert G. Reid
Index	221