Embodied Difference

Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse

Edited by Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson - Contributions by Jamie A. Thomas; Christina Jackson; Emily August; Barry R. Furrow; Katrina Richter; Krista K. Thomason; John S. Michael; Paul Wolff Mitchell; Ute Bettray and Dorisa Costello

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

Lexington Books

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6386-4 • Hardback • February 2019 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-6388-8 • Paperback • March 2021 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-6387-1 • eBook • February 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Body Language & Nonverbal Communication, Social Science / Folklore & Mythology, Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / Women's Studies

Embodied Difference

Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 268 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6386-4 • Hardback • February 2019 • $123.00 • (£95.00)

978-1-4985-6388-8 • Paperback • March 2021 • $44.99 • (£35.00)

978-1-4985-6387-1 • eBook • February 2019 • $42.50 • (£35.00)

Subjects: Social Science / Body Language & Nonverbal Communication, Social Science / Folklore & Mythology, Social Science / Feminism & Feminist Theory, Social Science / Popular Culture, Social Science / Women's Studies

Author

Jamie A. Thomas is assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Christina Jackson is assistant professor of sociology at Stockton University.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Approaching the Body Through Public-facing Scholarship in Philadelphia

How To Use This Book

Unit One: The Rational Mind vs. The Criminal Body

Preface to Unit One

Chapter 1 - Our Own Flesh and Blood: Putting the Body at the Center of Violence and Dehumanization - Krista K. Thomason

Chapter 2 - Are We Our Brains? How Early Christianity Shaped Western Ideas About Power, Morality, and Personhood - Jessica Wright

Chapter 3 - Making the Case for Transfeminism: The Activist Philosophies of CeCe McDonald and Angela Davis - Ute Bettray

Unit Two: The Deviant and Undesirable Body

Preface to Unit Two

Chapter 4 - Bias, Brains, and Skulls: Tracing the Legacy of Scientific Racism in the 19th Century Works of Samuel George Morton and Friedrich Tiedemann - Paul Wolff Mitchell and John S. Michael

Chapter 5 - Female Vampires as Embodied Critiques of Heteronormativity, Blood-Mixing, and Patriarchy: From Carmilla to Fledgling - Dorisa Costello

Chapter 6 - Protest Bodies: The Right to Protect Your Own in Environmental Justice and Redevelopment Battles - Christina Jackson

Chapter 7 - Death and the Power of the Young Female Body: Iconic Legal Cases - Barry Furrow

Unit Three: The Beautiful Body and Its Parts

Preface to Unit Three

Chapter 8 - Gray Matters: Social Violence and the Victorian Surgical Textbook - Emily August

Chapter 9 - ‘Tuck in Your Derrière’: Butts and Bodies in Ballet and Tap - Kat Richter

Chapter 10 - The Year is 2093: Reanimation from Frankenstein to Prometheus as Sci-fi Metaphor for (Dis)Embodied Female Futures and Colonization of Space - Jamie A. Thomas

Reviews

Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson's edited volume, Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse, represents an important contribution to this field. . . . Students and scholars interested in corporeal feminism will find the analyses of underresearched modes and contexts of embodiment collected in Embodied Difference to be of great value. . . The volume. . . fulfills its editor's aim to provide an outstanding example of how cross-disciplinary, intersectional feminist research can yield new insights into how policies, practices, and pop culture influence our interpretation of bodies in ways that tend to reinforce the unequal distribution of power and privilege along axes of gender, race, sexuality, class, and ability. Its call for further investigations into the covert operations of the Thing in everyday life sets a fresh agenda for feminist scholarship.

— Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy

Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse is a refreshingly interdisciplinary consideration of embodiment as a site of agency, oppression, and knowledge production. It is all too easy, in the face of Western society’s enculturated somatophobia, to forget that our bodies are a matrix of sense receptors caught in a web of political constructs; that through the body we both experience and are experienced by the world. As such, the body is intrinsic to the formation of self, other, community, and culture. This text incites a welcome and timely discourse, which honors our lived experience, by making explicit the connections between our corporeal flesh and our cultural foundations.
— Catherine Cabeen, Marymount Manhattan College

While intersectional feminist theory has captured the attention of numerous scholar/activists throughout the U.S. academy and beyond, rarely has it been so brilliantly operationalized as is the case in this cross-disciplinary, co-edited anthology. The broad range of themes is breathtaking —scientific racism, transfeminism, American dance, urban development/gentrification, sci-fi films, right-to-die cases, Gray's Anatomy, the relentlessness of racial inequality. Professors Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson have assembled a diverse group of experts whose provocative explorations of the causes and consequences of social inequality over time make visible in new ways the challenges and dangers we now face in the aftermath of a deeply polarizing 2016 Presidential election.
— Beverly Guy-Sheftall, founding director of the Women’s Research & Resource Center and Anna Julia Cooper Professor of Women’s Studies, Spelman College

Embodied Difference

Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse

Edited by Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson - Contributions by Jamie A. Thomas; Christina Jackson; Emily August; Barry R. Furrow; Katrina Richter; Krista K. Thomason; John S. Michael; Paul Wolff Mitchell; Ute Bettray and Dorisa Costello

Embodied Difference

Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse

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