The Body

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-116
Author(s):  
Katie Lauve-Moon

Chapter 4 illustrates how congregants’ perceptions of women’s bodies prove incongruent with their preferred conceptions of authority and leadership. It then draws on interview data to show how women pastors are simultaneously expected to conceal and accentuate their femininity, are sexualized by male congregants as they engage in leadership tasks, and face organizational expectations about their weight and appearance that are often contradictory. Moreover, this chapter demonstrates how gendered congregational perceptions related to the body create impossible and additional expectations for women pastors that are not applied in the evaluation of male pastors’ performances. Finally, this chapter highlights how women maneuver through these organizational barriers in ways that are perhaps necessary to succeed but ultimately reinforce the inequitable gender structure of these congregations.

Somatechnics ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kalindi Vora

This paper provides an analysis of how cultural notions of the body and kinship conveyed through Western medical technologies and practices in Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ART) bring together India's colonial history and its economic development through outsourcing, globalisation and instrumentalised notions of the reproductive body in transnational commercial surrogacy. Essential to this industry is the concept of the disembodied uterus that has arisen in scientific and medical practice, which allows for the logic of the ‘gestational carrier’ as a functional role in ART practices, and therefore in transnational medical fertility travel to India. Highlighting the instrumentalisation of the uterus as an alienable component of a body and subject – and therefore of women's bodies in surrogacy – helps elucidate some of the material and political stakes that accompany the growth of the fertility travel industry in India, where histories of privilege and difference converge. I conclude that the metaphors we use to structure our understanding of bodies and body parts impact how we imagine appropriate roles for people and their bodies in ways that are still deeply entangled with imperial histories of science, and these histories shape the contemporary disparities found in access to medical and legal protections among participants in transnational surrogacy arrangements.


Paragraph ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSALYN DIPROSE

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendt's claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’ (innovation or the birth of the new), is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Women's bodies are thus caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendt's political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios.


Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.


Author(s):  
Pauline Henry-Tierney

In this paper I examine how transgressive references to gender, sexuality and the body are translated in two texts by the Québécoise writer Nelly Arcan, her debut autofictional narrative Putain (2001) and her final (retroactively auto)fictional title Paradis, clef en main (2009). Throughout her oeuvre, Arcan seeks to liberate women from stereotypical frameworks of reference by asserting women’s gendered, sexual and corporeal subjectivities in previously taboo discourses on prostitution, incest, sexuality, anorexia, matrophobia and suicide. Through her candid and explicit writing style, Arcan elaborates her own specific écriture au féminin which incorporates a linguistic, thematic and physical visualization of women within her texts.These two novels have been translated into English as Whore (2005) by Bruce Benderson and Exit (2011) by David Scott Hamilton respectively. However, analysis of the target texts suggests that neither translator adopts a gender-conscious approach which compromises the specificity of Arcan's idiolect in the Anglophone context. Through a comparative analysis of examples from the source texts and translations under the categories of gender, sexuality and the body, I discuss how the translation practices work counterproductively to obfuscate Arcan’s textual visualisations of women. In terms of references to gendered identity, by removing or neutralising Arcan's grammatically feminised language in Putain, the translator obfuscates Arcan's idea of the importance gender plays in shaping maternal relationships. Similarly, in Exit, Arcan's subversive feminist wordplay is distorted resulting in women being reinserted into patriarchal frameworks of reference. My analysis on Arcan's portrayal of sexuality underlines how sexual euphemisms in the translation downplay the narrator's potential for sexual agency in Whore, while misleading translation choices for feminist neologisms relating to women's sexuality in Exit eschew Arcan's efforts to verbalise women's lived sexual realities. Lastly, inconsistency in the translation of female corporeal vocabulary distorts the neutral tone Arcan employs in Putain to ensure women's bodies are not eroticised and the translator's decision to condense references to the female body in Exit undermines the significance Arcan places on corporeal connections between women. Thereafter, I move on to consider the wider implications of the translative process such as how paratextual elements also have an impact upon Arcan's reception in the target culture. I argue that in both Whore and Exit, the paratranslators intentionally sensationalise the autofictional elements of Arcan's texts. In short, my analysis contends that through a non-gender conscious translation practice, the celebrity of Arcan is promoted in the Anglophone context but to the detriment of Arcan’s écriture au féminin.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (02) ◽  
pp. 216-239
Author(s):  
Laila Nurul hidayah

In Islam, clothing does not only function as jewelry and body armor from heat and cold, but more importantly is to cover the nakedness. Al-Qur'an al-Karim shows the obligation of women to cover their bodies in His words, "And let them not show their jewels, except those which (normally) appear from them,". Parts of female limbs that are not allowed to be seen by others are aurat. Islamic scholars agree that all women's bodies are aurat, in addition to the face and two palms. What is meant by the jewelry that appears is the face and two palms. While what is meant by khimar is a headgear, not a face covering like a veil, and what is meant by jaib is chest. The women have been ordered to put a cloth over his head and spread it to cover her chest. By doing library research, that is, research whose main object is books or other sources of literature, meaning that data is sought and found through literature review of books relevant to the discussion, a minimum limit of aurat according to Muhammad Shahrur is that dress cover the juyub, while the maximum limit is dressing which covers all parts of the body besides the face and palms.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alanna M. M. McKnight

In amplifying the contours of the body, the corset is an historical site that fashions femininity even as it constricts women’s bodies. This study sits at the intersection of three histories: of commodity consumption, of labour, and of embodiment and subjectivity, arguing that women were active participants in the making, selling, purchasing and wearing of corsets in Toronto, a city that has largely been ignored in fashion history. Between 1871 and 1914 many women worked in large urban factories, and in small, independent manufacturing shops. Toronto’s corset manufacturers were instrumental in the urbanization of Canadian industry, and created employment in which women earned a wage. The women who bought their wares were consumers making informed purchases, enacting agency in consumption and aesthetics; by choosing the style or size of a corset, female consumers were able to control to varying degrees, the shape of their bodies. As a staple in the wardrobe of most nineteenth-century women, the corset complicates the study of conspicuous consumption, as it was a garment that was not meant to be seen, but created a highly visible shape, blurring the lines between private and public viewing of the female body. Marxist analysis of the commodity fetish informs this study, and by acknowledging the ways in which the corset became a fetishized object itself, both signaling the shapeliness of femininity while in fact augmenting and diminishing female bodies. This study will address critical theory regarding the gaze and subjectivity, fashion, and modernity, exploring the relationship women had with corsets through media and advertising. A material culture analysis of extant corsets helps understand how corsets were constructed in Toronto, how the women of Toronto wore them, and to what extent they actually shaped their bodies. Ultimately, it is the aim of this dissertation to eschew common misconceptions about the practice of corsetry and showcase the hidden manner in which women produced goods, labour, and their own bodies in the nineteenth century, within the Canadian context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 30-54
Author(s):  
Caroline Wilson-Barnao ◽  
Alex Bevan ◽  
Robyn Lincoln

In this article, we explore smart deterrents and their historical precedents marketed to women and girls for the purpose of preventing harassment, sexual abuse and violence. Rape deterrents, as we define them, encompass customs, architectures, fashions, surveillant infrastructures, apps and devices conceived to manage and protect the body. Online searches reveal an array of technologies, and we engage with their prevention narratives and cultural construction discourses of the gendered body. Our critical analysis places recent rape deterrents in conversation with earlier technologies to untangle the persistent logics. These are articulated with reference to the ways that proto-digital technologies have been imported into the realm of ubiquitous computing and networks. Our conceptual framework offers novel pathways for discussing feminine bodies and their messy navigation of everyday life that include both threats to corporeal safety and collective imaginings of empowerment.


Somatechnics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-111
Author(s):  
Jen Rinaldi ◽  
Kate Rossiter

Frequently missing from histories of forced institutionalisation are close readings of the enduring impact on survivors' corporeality. In this article the authors analyse interview data featuring people who survived the Huronia Regional Centre: a total institution designed to warehouse people with intellectual disabilities that operated in Canada from 1876 to 2009. These interviews reveal the impact of institutional technologies on the bodies of the institutionalised, and how institutional survivors resisted those technologies. Institutional rituals meant to organise and cleanse residents, resulted in the reification of institutional subjects as inescapably contaminated. Drawing from Mary Douglas's theory of dirt and Julia Kristeva's interpretation of dirt as abjection, the authors engage with interview data on daily institutional care routines, particularly dressing, eating, showering, and the administration of medication, to show how these rituals produced for the institutionalised subject meanings around gender and disability as markers of defilement. The authors argue that the kinds of deeply oppressive and often violent rituals central to lived experiences of institutionalisation are grounded in the assumption that disabled gendered bodies are already-abject, hence the institutional demand for the institutionalised to be brought under control.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-572
Author(s):  
Kimberly Kay Hoang

Engaging with the work of C. Wright Mills and Eve Sedgwick, in this article I theorize how homoerotic relations facilitate the flow of global capital into risky market economies. Drawing on interview data with more than 60 financial professionals managing foreign investments in Vietnam, I examine the co-constitution of gender and global capital by identifying three categories of deal brokers. System maintainers are men and women who accept that women’s bodies are necessary for male homosocial bonding between political and economic elites. System transformers are men and women who disrupt the status quo and develop alternative ways of deal brokering outside of erotic spaces. System defectors are those break the triangle altogether and work to create new markets.


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