Bodily Discursions

Bodily Discursions Synopsis

This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.

Bodily Discursions offers a multiplicity of feminist perspectives on the body, especially the female body, from a variety of disciplines: literary history, social theory, art history, cultural studies, the history of rhetoric, film, and literary criticism among others. Subjects range from public punishment of outspoken women during the English Renaissance to current responses to the AIDS pandemic in the popular media. Contributors include Alice E. Adams, Susanmarie Harrington, Catherine Hobbs, Cynthia Huff, Cathy Peppers, Roberta Schreyer, Julie Shaffer, Torri L. Thompson, Angela Wall, Deborah S. Wilson, and Christine Moneera Laennec.

All of the essays offer variations on the same theme-the idea that the body is a site for the production of political ideologies, particularly in response to social exigencies and cultural crises. However, there is no single, over-arching ideological model here for feminism, much less for reading the body in a specific historical or cultural moment.

Bodily Discursions offers instead a number of individual voices on a variety of issues and phenomena as they determine the configuration of the body. This book demonstrates that society needs to pay attention to how the body is manipulated if we are to work for social progress and political justice, for it is through our bodies that we all must articulate our experience and live our lives.

"This topic is on the cutting edge of scholarship in both feminist and cultural studies. It is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field." - Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western Ontario