The Republican Body Politic

2020 ◽  
pp. 7-26
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Valerius Maximus

Chapter 1 explores the legendary fable in which Menenius Agrippa (or Manius Valerius Maximus) compared the Roman state to a body to win over the sympathies of the rebellious plebs. The fable is read as offering a pattern for nearly all surviving discourse of the republican body politic, in which perceptions of crisis provoke an account of a dysfunctional political body. The fable is also shown to embed a number of central assumptions and anxieties about harmony, order, and discord that are common to references to the body politic. Bodily anatomy and composition and historiographic commonplaces about moral and physical degeneration are also examined. Observations provide a foundation for the discussions of subsequent chapters.

The Deaths of the Republic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Oratory

This book examines imagery of the body politic in the works of Cicero and his contemporaries and explores its impact on the politics of Rome in the first century BCE. Emphasis throughout is on the ideological underpinnings of such images and their uses as a means of persuasion. Chapter 1 reads the well-known fable of Menenius Agrippa as a paradigm for late-republican invocations of the embodied state. Chapter 2 examines imagery of disease and healing, focusing especially on connections with political violence. Chapter 3 considers claims of wounding and mutilating the republic. Chapter 4 explores references to the body politic’s demise in invective and consolations. Political oratory provides much of the evidence of these chapters, but is everywhere supplemented by other sources. Chapter 5 historicizes prior discussions by focusing on a single controversial image, that of murdering the fatherland, in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination.

scholarly journals From the King’s Two Bodies to the People’s Two Bodies: Spinoza on the Body Politic

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-71
Author(s):  
Marin Terpstra
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Composite Body ◽  
Political Body ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Traditional Representation

Abstract In this article, using Spinoza’s treatment of the image of the political body, I aim to show what happens to the concept of a healthy commonwealth linked to a monarchist model of political order when transformed into a new context: the emergence of a democratic political order. The traditional representation of the body politic becomes problematic when people, understood as individual natural bodies, are taken as the starting point in political theory. Spinoza’s understanding of the composite body, and the assumption that each body is composed, raises the question of the stability or instability of this composition. This has implications for the way one looks at the political order’s conditions of possibility, I argue, and at the same time reveals the imaginary nature of the political body.

‘Good enough for a spot of lippy anyway’: Rape and the Body Politic in My Brother Tom

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 358-373
Author(s):  
Louise Wilks
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Violation ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
British Cinema ◽  
Hollywood Movies ◽  
Contemporary Cinema ◽  
Rape Narratives

The representation of rape continues to be one of the most highly charged issues in contemporary cinema, and whilst many discussions of this topic focus on Hollywood movies, sexual violation is also a pervasive topic in British cinema. This article examines the portrayal of a female's rape in the British feature My Brother Tom (2001), a powerful and often troubling text in which the sexual violation of the teenage female protagonist functions as a catalyst for the events that comprise the plot, as is often the case in rape narratives. The article provides an overview of some of the key feminist academic discussions and debates that cinematic depictions of rape have prompted, before closely analysing My Brother Tom's rape scene in relation to such discourses. The article argues that the rape scene is neither explicit nor sensationalised, and that by having the camera focus on Jessica's bewildered reactions, it positions the audience with her, and powerfully but discreetly portrays the grave nature of sexual abuse. The article then moves on to examine the portrayal of sexual violation in My Brother Tom as a whole, considering the cultural inscriptions etched on the female body within its account of rape, before concluding with a discussion of the film's depiction of Jessica's ensuing methods of bodily self-inscription as she attempts to disassociate her body from its sexual violation.

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.

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