scholarly journals How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Surfaces

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach ◽  
Ulla Ratheiser
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Surface Culture ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture

AbstractThe opening chapter introduces and contextualizes the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces. First, we delineate the increasing interests in both natural and constructed surfaces by taking a closer look at discourses that reflect a growing fascination with surfaces, including (pseudo-)medical treatises on physiognomy. Secondly, we focus on the politics of surface readings by scrutinizing the politics of various visual representations of Queen Victoria and the (self-)fashioning of the body politic at the centre of a growing surface culture. Third, we develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of the poetics of Victorian surfaces by analyzing the attention paid to (or withheld from) surfaces in Victorian literature and culture. By examining the role of surface reading in Victorian texts, we offer an overview of different surface cultures and debates surrounding the challenges attached to surfaces, explore how to do things with surfaces, and thereby outline what can be described as a ‘poetics of surface.’

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

Sex, Work, and the Victorians

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Nicola J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stimulation Of

Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 661-670
Author(s):  
David W. Kling
Keyword(s):  
Gender Identity ◽  
Socioeconomic Factors ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
Divine Presence ◽  
A Site ◽  
Autobiographical Impulse

The concluding chapter provides summary observations of the book’s themes that highlight the complex, multifaceted dimension of conversion throughout twenty centuries of Christian history. These include the convert’s cognizance of divine presence; the crucial importance of historical context (political, religious, institutional, and socioeconomic factors); continuity and discontinuity (how much of the new displaces the old in conversion?); nominal, incomplete, and “true” conversions; personal testimonies and narratives (the autobiographical impulse attests to the converted life); the role of gender; identity and the self; agency (are converts actors or are they being acted upon?); the mechanisms behind and the motivations for conversion; the body as a site of conversion; the role of music; conversion as event and process; coercive practices; and forms of communication in the converting process.

Treating the Body Politic: The Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan

2008 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Shogimen
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
George Lakoff ◽  
Medical Metaphors

AbstractThe essay examines medical metaphors in the discourse on government from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor, a comparison of medical metaphors in the political writings in late medieval Europe (c. 1250–c. 1450) and Tokugawa Japan (1602–1867) demonstrates that the European notion of medical treatment as the eradication of the causes of diseases magnified the coercive and punitive aspects of government, while the Japanese notion of medical treatment as the art of daily healthcare served to accentuate the government's role of preventing conflicts and maintaining stability. These differing images of medical treatment metaphorically structured contrasting conceptions of government in the two historical worlds.

Invisible no more

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-129
Author(s):  
Ruth Anna Spooner ◽  
Rachel Sutton-Spence ◽  
Miriam Nathan Lerner ◽  
Kenny Lerner
Keyword(s):  
Sign Language ◽  
Language Translation ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Asl Literature

Abstract We report here on strategies used in the art of literary translation between ASL and English through the self-reflections of three ASL-English “translators” as they grapple with the varying degrees of translator visibility that push them beyond the traditional expectations of faceless translators into becoming performers of the translated texts. During translation, their faces, hands, and/or voices embody the text, becoming an integral part of the piece, which adds layers of complexity to the ways we think about the translator’s role and the process of translation. We hope that our reflections will challenge prevailing notions about creating, performing, and translating ASL literature, as well as raise questions about recasting the role of the translator and the body in sign language translation.

scholarly journals Archives, promises, values: Forensic infrastructures in times of austerity

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308275X2097407
Author(s):  
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo ◽  
Silvia Posocco
Keyword(s):  
Forensic Science ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Differential Impact ◽  
Genetic Sequencing ◽  
Sequencing Technologies ◽  
Forensic Service ◽  
Genetic Science ◽  
Data Objects

This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and wellbeing, in reality it also brought forward new levels of risk and vulnerability, generating new tensions and frictions in the body politic. As genetic science reaches post-archival horizons through new genetic sequencing technologies, forensic science in post-archival times raises questions concerning the differential impact of the fragmentation of analytical and archival infrastructures and increasingly asynchronous bureaucracies whose role is displaced by the relative autonomy of datasets and computational architectures that elude governance, oversight and citizens’ scrutiny.

The Bodily Self

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Luis Bermúdez
Keyword(s):  
Sense Of Self ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Behavioral Sciences ◽  
Significant Contributor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Physical Objects ◽  
Selection Of

How can we be aware of ourselves both as physical objects and as thinking, experiencing subjects? What role does the experience of the body play in generating our sense of self? What is the role of action and agency in the construction of the bodily self? These questions have been a rich subject of interdisciplinary debate among philosophers, neuroscientists, experimental psychologists, and cognitive scientists for several decades. José Luis Bermúdez been a significant contributor to these debates since the 1990’s, when he authored The Paradox of Self-Consciousness (MIT Press, 1998) and co-edited The Body and the Self (MIT Press, 1995) with Anthony Marcel and Naomi Eilan. The Bodily Self is a selection of essays all focused on different aspects of the role of the body in self-consciousness, prefaced by a substantial introduction outlining common themes across the essays. The essays have been published in a wide range of journals and edited volumes. Putting them together brings out a wide-ranging, thematically consistent perspective on a set of topics and problems that remain firmly of interest across the cognitive and behavioral sciences.

Bringing Gender into the Emerging Adulthood Literature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara J. Risman
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Adulthood ◽  
Social Structure ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Gendered Identities ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter begins with an overview of the thematic trends that emerged across chapters in these analyses including the relationship between gendered identities and sexuality and the subjective negativity most respondents feel toward their bodies. The analyses are summarized to help understand contemporary meanings attached to masculinities and femininities, as well as to the powerful role of culture to frame understandings about the self, even the materiality of the body. This chapter ends by returning to a discussion of gender as a social structure at this historical moment and how the Millennials wrestle with it as they emerge into adulthood. Conceptualizing gender as a social structure helps us better understand the complex reality of these young people’s lives.

Pulpy Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-298
Author(s):  
Ella Mershon
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Hill

Taking a long view of mycological history, this essay considers how studies of fungal life have modeled fugitive, cryptic, and queer forms of belonging that open the body and the body politic to modes of collectivity that trouble the equation of ecology with holistic closure. Turning to Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams, this essay shows how the geographies of desire and belonging created through fungal intimacies make it impossible to speak of either the self-contained individual or ecology in the singular. Open and plural, selves and worlds proliferate, contaminate, and interpenetrate through the infectious touch of fungal relations.

Sexual Purity, White Men, and Slavery: Emerson and the Self-Reliant Body

Prospects ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 193-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russ Castronovo
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Sexual Behaviors ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Political Inequality ◽  
White Males ◽  
Self Reliance ◽  
Wide Range

As white men surrendered to carnal impulses and lost control of their bodily flows, they became slaves. Such sensational conclusions were standard fare in a 19th-century rhetorical universe where self-reliance as a corporeal principle was also an issue of political gravity. Far from signaling a breakdown of the body's potential to analogize the body politic, the representational slide from Southern bondage to white corporeality is of tremendous national use. The “natural” body – especially in “aberrant” manifestations that violate ethical, hygienic, and democratic codes broadly classed under the dictum of self-reliance – is an enabling construction that allows white men to concentrate on disruptions in their own bodies while overlooking disruption in the body politic. The linguistic inequality that reads the white male's private body as the public's collective body acts in tandem with political inequality by misrepresenting the scope and character of African-American servitude. American liberal reformers participated in a political distortion by talking about the body as though it had the same valence as the body politic. Equipped with a catachrestic sensibility that (mis)understood the citizen's sexuality via national policies on race, a wide range of cultural critics including medical crusaders, abolitionists, educators, and transcendentalists reconceived of the abstract body politic in fairly specific, highly personal, and ultimately privatizing terms. But what happened when that abstract body became culturally particular, when, for instance, the transparency of white males became li bidinally bound to castigated representations of blackness? As an analogy for certain sexual behaviors, slavery plainly suggested the dire consequences of improper corporeal conduct.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document