Abstract
What a ‘body’ is has become unshackled from what may appear to be inviolably natural ‘truths’ about it. In my opening chapter I consider the ways in which bodies have produced—and been produced by—bodies of work. Whether we have bodies or are bodies is a question which has been asked by human beings for millennia, and the idea of what ‘embodiment’ is, and does, is key when it comes to formulating answers for it. In introducing the essays that make up Talking Bodies, I reflect on how the body has been framed by numerous different discourses, from the anatomical to the sociological, and from the sexual to the epistemological. It is on and in the body that the major questions about human beings being human are asked and answered: questions of death, sex, community, cruelty, or religion. Put simply, the body needs to be put back into writing about the body, but since writing on the body always necessitates approximation due to the insufficiency and contingency of language, this is an enterprise that is simultaneously bewildering and worthwhile.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Ahmed, Sara, 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed, Sara, 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bartky, Sandra Lee, 1998. ‘Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power’, in Rose Weitz (ed.), The Politics of Women’s Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–45.
Bate, Walter Jackson, 1963. John Keats. Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone, 1996. The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’ Brian. New York: Norton.
Bordo, Susan, 2003. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre, 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: University of Harvard Press.
Butler, Judith, 1997. ‘How can I deny that these hands and this body are mine?’. Qui Parle, 11:1, 1–20.
Butler, Judith, 2007. Gender Trouble. Abingdon: Routledge.
Bynum, Caroline, 1995. ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’. Critical Inquiry, 22:1, 1–33.
Crosby, Christina, 2016. A Body, Undone: Living on after Great Pain. New York: New York University Press.
De Saussure, Ferdinand, 2011. Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin and eds. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy. New York: Columbia University Press.
Deleuze, Guy, and Félix Guattari, 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum.
DeMello, Margo, 2000. Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Durham: Duke University Press.
Foucault, Michel, 1991. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage.
Grosz, Elizabeth, 1994. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Halberstam, J., 2011. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna, 1991. ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, pp.149–81.
Judovitz, Dalia, 2001. The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Katz, Stephen, and Barbara Marshall, 2003. ‘New Sex for Old: Lifestyle, Consumerism, and the Ethics of Aging Well’. Journal of Aging Studies, 17: 3–16.
Keats, John, 2007. Selected Poems, ed. John Barnard. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kristeva, Julia, 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 2012. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes. London: Routledge.
Plath, Sylvia, 2005. The Bell Jar. London: Faber and Faber.
Probyn, Elspeth, 2004. ‘Shame in the habitus’. The Sociological Review, 52:2, 224–48.
Sanders, Clinton R., with D. Angus Vail, 2008. Customizing the Body: The Art and Culture of Tattooing. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Scarry, Elaine, 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare, William, 2010. The Winter’s Tale, ed. John Pitcher. London: Methuen (Arden Shakespeare).
West, Candace, and Don H. Zimmerman, 1987. ‘Doing Gender’. Gender and Society, 1:2, 125–51.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rees, E. (2017). Varieties of Embodiment and ‘Corporeal Style’. In: Rees, E. (eds) Talking Bodies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63778-5_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63778-5_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63777-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63778-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)