The Labor of the Mind: Intellect and Gender in Enlightenment Cultures. By Anthony J. LaVopa

2018 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-608
Author(s):  
Kate E Tunstall
Keyword(s):  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

Mind Cure

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wakoh Shannon Hickey
Keyword(s):  
White Male ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Psychology ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First Americans ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Political Economic

Mindfulness is widely claimed to improve health and performance, and historians typically say that efforts to promote meditation and yoga therapeutically began in the 1970s. In fact, they began much earlier, and that early history offers important lessons for the present and future. This book traces the history of mind-body medicine from eighteenth-century Mesmerism to the current Mindfulness boom and reveals how religion, race, and gender have shaped events. Many of the first Americans to advocate meditation for healing were women leaders of the Mind Cure movement, which emerged in the late nineteenth century. They believed that by transforming their consciousness, they could also transform oppressive circumstances in which they lived, and some were activists for social reform. Trained by Buddhist and Hindu missionaries, these women promoted meditation through personal networks, religious communities, and publications. Some influenced important African American religious movements, as well. For women and black men, Mind Cure meant not just happiness but liberation in concrete political, economic, and legal terms. The Mind Cure movement exerted enormous pressure on mainstream American religion and medicine, and in response, white, male doctors and clergy with elite academic credentials appropriated some of its methods and channeled them into scientific psychology and medicine. As mental therapeutics became medicalized, individualized, and then commodified, the religious roots of meditation, like the social justice agendas of early Mind Curers, fell away. After tracing how we got from Mind Cure to Mindfulness, this book reveals what got lost in the process.

Sachs, Chavafambira, Maggie: Prurience or the Pathology of Social Relations?

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grahame Hayes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Traditional Healer ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
The South ◽  
The Social ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

Black Hamlet (1937; reprinted 1996) tells the story of Sachs's association with John Chavafambira, a Manyika nganga (traditional healer and diviner), who had come to Johannesburg from his home in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Sachs's fascination with Chavafambira was initially as a “research subject” of a psychoanalytic investigation into the mind of a sane “native”. Over a period of years Sachs became inextricably drawn into the suffering and de-humanization experienced by Chavafambira as a poor, black man in the urban ghettoes that were the South Africa of the 1930s and 1940s. It is easy these days to want to dismiss Sachs's “project” as the prurient gaze of a white, liberal psychiatrist. This would not only be an ahistorical reading of Black Hamlet, but it would also diminish the possibilities offered by what Said (1994) calls, a contrapuntal reading. I shall present a reading of Black Hamlet, focusing on the three main characters - Sachs, Chavafambira, and Maggie (Chavafambira's wife) - as emblematic of the social relations of the other, racial(ised) bodies, and gender.

scholarly journals Testing the Truth of Phrenology: Knowledge Experiments in Antebellum American Cultures of Science and Health

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (3) ◽  
pp. 352-374
Author(s):  
Carla Bittel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Natural Knowledge ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Experimental Environment ◽  
Marriage Partner ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

In the first half of the nineteenth century, many Americans visited phrenological practitioners. Some clients were true believers, who consulted phrenology to choose an occupation, select a marriage partner and raise children. But, as this article demonstrates, many others consumed phrenology as an ‘experiment’, testing its validity as they engaged its practice. Consumers of ‘practical phrenology’ subjected themselves to examinations often to test the phrenologist and his practice against their own knowledge of themselves. They also tested whether phrenology was true, according to their own beliefs about race and gender. While historians have examined phrenology as a theory of the mind, we know less about its ‘users’ and how gender, race and class structured their engagement. Based on extensive archival research with letters and diaries, memoirs and marginalia, as well as phrenological readings, this study reveals how a continuum of belief existed around phrenology, from total advocacy to absolute denunciation, with lots of room for acceptance and rejection in between. Phrenologists’ notebooks and tools of salesmanship also show how an experimental environment emerged where phrenologists themselves embraced a culture of testing. In an era of what Katherine Pandora has described as ‘epistemological contests’, audiences confronted new museums, performances and theatres of natural knowledge and judged their validity. This was also true for phrenology, which benefited from a culture of contested authority. As this article reveals, curiosity, experimentation and even scepticism among users actually helped keep phrenology alive for decades.

Conceptualizing an Ethology of Masculinities

2016 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-71 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terrance H. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Western Philosophy ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Gender Fluidity ◽  
Creative Force ◽  
Alternative Conceptualization ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

Rather than a definition or redefinition of masculinity, or masculinities, this article asks what can masculinities do? To explore this question, I map the possibilities that Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of immanence offer masculinities theory. Through a theoretical encounter with Deleuze, Guattari, Spinoza, and Gatens, I seek to open up an alternative conceptualization of masculinities that moves away from morality—transcendent judgments of good or bad—and toward an ethics that privileges our capacities for affecting and being affected. While masculinities studies and gender theory has proposed related notions concerning gender fluidity and resisting gender binaries, this article proposes an alternative through Deleuze’s and Gatens’ readings of Spinoza’s Ethics that radically challenges the mind–body split that informs traditional lineages of Western philosophy. What is at stake for this essay is the ability to conceive of masculinities as creative force with no allegiance to the male body other than its capacity to affect or be affected.

scholarly journals (Non)Religious Diversity and correlation of religious, spiritual and secular in the consciousness of modern man

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 54-78
Author(s):  
Elena D. Rutkevich
Keyword(s):  
Religious Identity ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Religious Consciousness ◽  
Spiritual But Not Religious ◽  
Transnational Religion ◽  
Current Context ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Mind

Non-religious diversity is growing in the world nowadays. In the current context it is understood not as a diversity of faiths, religions, non-religions, etc., but as a variety of types of non-religious consciousness and categories of non-religious identity. The article covers only a few aspects of this vast topic. First, the theoretical prerequisites and substantiations for the change in the Western non-religious identity taking place during the transition from the Westphalian to the post-Westphalian system of religious governance and the emergence of a special type of pluralism that is formed in the process of dedifferentiation of religion, globalization and the transformation of the “religion of place and nation” into a transnational religion “without place and nation”, when the ratio of religious, spiritual and secular in the mind of a postmodern person changes. Second, the author analyses the origins and causes of this transformation of non-religious consciousness in the "long 1960s". Third, the author traces the evolution of such types of non-religious diversity as “spiritual but not religious”, “none” and “post-protestants” and the concept of “spirituality” that connects them. The category "spiritual but not religious", sometimes perceived as dubious and unconvincing, appearing in the context of countercultural spirituality, in the author´s opinion, is very important for understanding Western, especially American irreligiousness in general and the processes taking place today in particular. The processes that are associated with the growth of "none" and the proliferation of "post-Protestants" related to the Woke culture, who claim the role of "saviours of humanity", attaching more importance to the "new post-Protestant ethics" (rather than religion and tradition), seeking to politicise religion, to sacralise politics, race and gender relations. Rejecting the "old religion" and proclaiming a "new ethics", moving from the ideals of diversity, universal tolerance and political correctness to "militant moralism and cruel dogmatism”, they confirm the idea of "complex irreligiousness" in the era of "late modernity", that seems to be a sign of the times and requires close attention of scientists.

scholarly journals Gender as Embedded Social Cognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Diekman ◽  
Toni Schmader
Keyword(s):  
Gender Differences ◽  
Social Cognition ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Social Cognitive ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
The Self ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Gender Categories ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Gendered Expectations

We examine gender as a cultural construct enacted through social cognitive processes that are embedded within the self, social interactions, and societal institutions. The embeddedness perspective elaborates how the binary gender categorization can create quite real gendered outcomes and experiences even if gender differences are not biologically essential. These categories take on a reality outside of the mind of perceivers because the meanings attached to gender categories are shared by others in the culture, enacted in social interactions, internalized into self-views, and maintained by social systems. Societal institutions explicitly and implicitly organize around gender, producing gendered norms, roles, and expectations. These norms, roles, and expectations shape the nature of interpersonal interactions both within and across gender lines and an individual’s self-selected experiences. Critically, these social interactions and personal choices in turn create behavioral and cognitive confirmation of the gendered expectations of others. Gendered expectations and experiences become internalized into the self, including one’s own self-concept and gender identity. We close by examining implications of this perspective for gender differences and similarities in social cognition, as well as malleability and stability in gender cognitions and outcomes.

Gender (im)Material: Teaching Bodies and Gender Education

1997 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erica McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equity ◽  
The Body ◽  
Pedagogical Tools ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Gender Education ◽  
Education Projects ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Feminist Educators

THE purpose of this paper is to insist on the sexed and gendered teaching body as ‘material’ to curriculum for gender education and gender equity in classrooms. It is not simply that the body of the teacher refuses to be excised, despite educational traditions of appealing to the mind as ‘above’ and transcending the body. It is that the sexed and gendered body of the teacher, male as well as female, must be the focus of more than censure if gender education projects are to be effective in generating useful pedagogical tools. In the paper, I give two reasons why the curriculum kit has been so visible and the teaching body so invisible. The first is the propensity of funding institutions to see a tangible ‘project’ such as a kit as the appropriate outcome of curriculum initiatives. The second is the ambivalence of many feminist educators about issues of bodily desire and pleasure in the context of a patriarchal society and culture.

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