Thinking the Limits of the Body

by Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome; Weiss, Gail

• ISBN13: 9780791456002
• ISBN10: 0791456005
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction: Bodies at the Limit	1	(12)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Gail Weiss
Part I HORIZONS
Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies	13	(12)
Elizabeth Grosz
The Body as a Narrative Horizon	25	(14)
Gail Weiss
Part II DERMAL BOUNDARIES
Cutups in Beauty School	39	(24)
Linda S. Kauffman
Deep Skin	63	(22)
William A. Cohen
Part III RACIAL EDGES
Ontological Crisis and Double Narration in African American Fiction: Reconstructing our Nig	85	(16)
Laura Doyle
Parallaxes: Cannibalism and Self-Embodiment; or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi A-Theology	101	(28)
Sara Castro-Klaren
Part IV DIS-ABLING ALLIANCES
Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana	129	(16)
Rosemarie Garland-Thomson
Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies	145	(22)
Robert McRuer
Part V LIMINALITIES
The Inhuman Circuit	167	(20)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Mourning the Autonomous Body	187	(10)
Debra B. Bergaffen
About the Contributors	197	(2)
Index	199