"First Published in 1998, Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.".

"The location of the author’s investigations, the body itself rather than the sphere of subjective representations of self and of function in cultures, is wholly new.... I believe this work will be a landmark in future feminist thinking." —Alphonso Lingis "This is a text of rare erudition and intellectual force. It will not only introduce feminists to an enriching set of theoretical perspectives but sets a high critical standard for feminist dialogues on the status of the body." —Judith Butler Volatile (...) Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is not opposed to or in conflict with culture. Human biology is inherently social and has no pure or natural "origin" outside of culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is "incomplete" and thus subject to the endless rewriting and social inscription that constitute all sign systems. Examining the theories of Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, etc. on the subject of the body, Elizabeth Grosz concludes that the body they theorize is male. These thinkers are not providing an account of "human" corporeality but of male corporeality. Grosz then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause. Her examination of female experience lays the groundwork for developing theories of sexed corporeality rather than merely rectifying flawed models of male theorists. (shrink)

The experience is her own—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—but it is an experience determined by the institution, imposed on all women everywhere. She draws on personal materials, history, research, and literature to create a document of universal importance.

Christine Battersby rethinks questions of embodiment, essence, sameness and difference, self and "other", patriarchy and power. Using analyses of Kant, Adorno, Irigaray, Butler, Kierkegaard and Deleuze, she challenges those who argue that a feminist metaphysics is a a contradiction in terms. This book explores place for a metaphysics of fluidity in the current debates concerning postmodernism, feminism and identity politics.

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, OncoMouse. (...) Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

Moira Gatens investigates the ways in which differently sexed bodies can occupy the same social or political space. Representations of sexual difference have unacknowledged philosophical roots which cannot be dismissed as a superficial bias on the part of the philosopher, nor removed without destroying the coherence of the philosophical system concerned. The deep structural bias against women extends beyond metaphysics and its effects are felt in epistemology, moral, social and political theory. The idea of sexual difference is contextualised in _Imaginary (...) Bodies_ and traced through the history of philosophy. Using her work on Spinoza, Gatens develops alternative conceptions of power, new ways of conceiving women's embodiment and their legal, political and ethical status. (shrink)

Who or what counts as a feminist subject? This article considers the place of the child, in particular, within the framework of feminist theories of the subject. Locating these theories in a framework of ‘oppositional’ theory, the article asks how and when the child appears in this field of theory. Although children’s oppression and representations of the child in culture have been continuously addressed in contemporary feminism at least since the 1970s, it is simultaneously the case that the child appears (...) in feminism as well as other theories of the subject as the other to the presumed adult subject, even – and sometimes especially – when that subject is being retheorized in oppositional terms, that is, against a hegemonic order of things. The article focuses on instances of the child’s appearance as a resource in feminist theories of the subject, and particularly in feminist uses of psychoanalysis. After considering male poststructuralist or postmodern uses of the child, this article contrasts their generic use of the child with feminist uses of psychoanalysis in the work of Valerie Walkerdine, Judith Butler and Teresa de Lauretis. Psychoanalysis, even in its feminist guises, emerges as a technology of childhood that figures the child as the adult’s ontological origin, and as such an origin that the adult theorist can claim to know by way of psychoanalysis itself. Frequently constituted as a not-yet subject, the child stands in for this ontological origin, from which theorists of the subject, both feminist and not, refashion theories of subjective resistance to the very forms of power that make us subjects in the first place. Working both with and against feminist and other appropriations of the child by way of its ontological positioning, this article attempts to offer an alternative theorization of subjects that accounts for the differences between children and adults. While undercutting the claims to knowledge of the child as the site of human ontology, this alternative theorization also makes a claim to the transformative possibilities that have been located in ontology itself. In addressing feminist uses of the child together with theories of the feminist subject, this article speaks not only to questions of the child, but to the possibility of a feminist politics that begins from a position of privilege – that is, one that does not require subordination as a condition of its own possibility. (shrink)

A wide range of images of women are considered in the context of currrent debates which centre around the body.

Celia Lury describes the body's ability to act outside itself both mechanically and perceptually. She draws on a wide range of examples including phototherapy, accounts of false memory syndrome, family albums and Benetton adverts.