Heidegger is often attacked for his failure to offer a thematic account of the body in his Being and Time (Aho, 2005). The general misunderstanding of Heidegger’s negation of body arises from the different meanings associated with the term ‘body’. Body can be understood from two perspectives: body in terms of corpse and body in terms of lived-body. Doctors study body as corpse or object because that is required in their training and education. Heidegger’s Being in his Being and Time (...) ruled out all dichotomy of the body. The aim of this paper is to understand the Heideggerian perspective on Dasein as not a negation of bodilyness but a phenomenological understanding of Dasein body, and as such to highlight the dimension of lived-body in Heidegger’s Being and Time. The paper will re-examine how Heidegger’s philosophy of Dasein contributed to the phenomenology of lived-body in terms of his analysis of habitual body. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , September 2008, Volume 8, Edition 2. (shrink)

This study will focus on the differences in the way that Roman Paganism and Christianity organize systems of beliefs. It rejects the theory that “beliefs” have no place in the Roman religion, but stresses the differences between Christian orthodoxy, in which mandatory dogmas define group identity, and the essentially polythetic nature of Roman religious organization, in which incompatible beliefs could exist simultaneously in the community without conflict. In explaining how such beliefs could coexist in Rome, the study emphasizes three main (...) conceptual mechanisms: polymorphism, the idea that gods could have multiple identities with incompatible attributes, orthopraxy, the focus upon standardized ritual rather than standardized belief, and pietas, the Roman ideal of reciprocal obligation, which was flexible enough to allow Romans to maintain relationships simultaneously with multiple gods at varying levels of personal commitment. (shrink)

This article traces the multiple and rapid changes that have occurred during the past fifteen years, in theorizing "sex/gender arrangements". A secondary aspect is the reception, application and above all modification of these theories by some scholars of European medieval cultural production, in which varieties of difference are found that do not apply in modern societies. Deconstruction of the binary m/f (whether thought of as sexual or gender difference) erupted among feminist thinkers in the 1990s and eventually "queered" academic discourses (...) by destabilizing labels that had been naturalized, including a consistent gender identity for the individual in medieval or modern society. The author claims that queer and post-colonial theory, far from being antithetical to feminist theory, are out-growths of it, and exist in parallel; the proponents of each are concerned with the societal forces, including our own discourses, that maintain difference, and create communities of oppression Yet it is also necessary to raise the question, when will the next radical departure occur, and how will new theories be generated? (shrink)

The past 20–30 years have provided plenty of new empirical data on women’s sexuality, a topic often theorised as puzzling and unexplainable. In recent discussions, a controversial issue has been the phenomenon of sexual concordance, i.e. the correlation between the self-reported, subjective assessment of one’s sexual arousal and the simultaneous bodily response measured directly on the genitals. In laboratory-based assessments, sexual concordance has been observed to be on average substantially lower in women than in men, although the reasons for the (...) considerable gender difference are still open to debate. Drawing on a phenomenological approach to culture-dependent meaning-formation and on feminist social theory of everyday sexuality, I argue that the reasons behind women’s low sexual concordance can be found neither in their minds nor their bodies but in the way meaning-making processes function in human sexual experiences. Women’s first-person perspectives on their own sexuality have historically played only a marginal role in the creation of socially endorsed sexual meanings, yet these shared meanings have a profound influence on how individuals make sense of their bodily experiences in sexual situations. (shrink)

Résumé Cet article retrace les changements multiples et rapides apparus au cours des quinze dernières années dans la théorisation des rapports entre sexe et genre. Il porte, en deuxième lieu, sur la réception, l’application et par-dessus tout la modification de ces théories par certains spécialistes de la production culturelle dans l’Europe médiévale, où la différence s’exprime sous des formes variées qui n’existent pas nécessairement dans les sociétés modernes. La déconstruction du système binaire masculin/féminin (qu’il soit considéré comme une différence sexuelle (...) ou de genre) fit son apparition parmi les penseuses féministes dans les années quatre-vingt dix et aboutit à la « queerisation » des discours universitaires en déstabilisant les étiquettes qui avaient été naturalisées, notamment l’identité genrée systématiquement attribuée à l’individu dans la société médiévale ou moderne. Nous montrerons que les théories queer et post-coloniale, loin d’être aux antipodes de la théorie féministe, en émanent et existent parallèlement à elle. Les partisans de chacune de ces théories s’intéressent aux forces sociétales, y compris notre propre discours, qui maintiennent la différence et créent des communautés d’oppression. Cependant, il est également nécessaire de soulever une question, à savoir quand se produira la prochaine rupture radicale et comment elle engendrera de nouvelles théories. (shrink)

As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay stresses Bynum's commitment to the methods and questions of history but also the unparalleled impact of her work on adjacent fields, including and perhaps even especially art history. Furthermore, her body of scholarship registers a consistent engagement with art historians. Weaving together personal memoir and historiography, this article sketches the manifold ways in which Bynum's publications have responded to and shaped the contours of medieval (...) art history in America since the early 1990s — particularly with respect to questions of gender, body, identity, violence, and materiality — and the formative role that her mentorship and pedagogy have played in the author's development as an art historian. (shrink)

As a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Caroline Walker Bynum across the Disciplines,” this essay traces the origins and development of Bynum's interest in the material artifacts of late medieval Christian spirituality. The author narrates these evolutions through analyses of a single object, the Louvain beguine cradle from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The essay begins by treating Bynum's research from the 1980s to the early 1990s as moving toward a “visual theology” and then charts her (...) movement from an interest in matter to an interest in materiality over the second half of the 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century. Finally, the author uses the Louvain cradle's appearance in Bynum's most recent book, Dissimilar Similitudes, to articulate and reflect upon her contribution to material culture studies. (shrink)