Idealized and Industrialized Labor: Anatomy of a Feminist Controversy

Hypatia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Clare Jones
Keyword(s):  
Medical Intervention ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
New Mothers ◽  
Natural Childbirth ◽  
Feminist Analysis ◽  
Social Discourses ◽  
Childbirth Satisfaction ◽  
Obstetric Intervention ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Prompted by the ever‐increasing cesarean rate, this paper considers the interpretive disjunct between two significant strands of feminist analysis that have arisen in the last four decades as a consequence of the phenomenon of medicalized birth. In contrast to the dominant paradigm of bioethical “Principalism,” both modes of analysis, understood as “the critique of industrialized labor” and “the critique of idealized labor,” are attentive to the way in which social discourses inform bioethical deliberation and practice, but significantly diverge in the nature of their accounts. The “industrialization critique” understands the culture of medical intervention to be impelled by an “obstetric desire” to appropriate women's reproductive potency, whereas the “idealization critique” relates new mothers’ “low childbirth satisfaction” to a pernicious normative ideal propagated by the natural childbirth movement. This paper will explore the anatomy of both critiques and interrogate their fidelity to the phenomenological insight of the body as chiasm between material and ideal. I will argue that while the insights of the idealization critique are well grounded, we must exercise caution about the critique's tendency to reductively understand the embodied experience of labor as entirely discursively produced, a gesture that risks re‐performing the dematerialization of women often effected through obstetric intervention itself.

Hope and anxiety: The study of female embodied experience with assisted reproductive technology

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-170
Author(s):  
Chengpu Yu ◽  
Wanlin Li ◽  
Mingfen Deng
Keyword(s):  
Assisted Reproductive Technology ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Infertility Treatment ◽  
Reproductive Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Experiences Of Women ◽  
Infertile Patients

Assisted reproductive technology (ART) is hailed as “the holy grail” for infertile patients in the mainstream narrative. The existing studies have clearly demonstrated how external social factors shape how ART is to be used, but they ignore the recipients of the technologies, and especially the experiences of women. Based on an investigation conducted in Z hospital’s reproductive center, this article regards embodiment as the methodological orientation for integrating socio-cultural context with female embodied experience in order to show their bio-social entanglement. As fieldwork evidence indicates, ART in practice is far from simple “hope technology”; instead, it throws women into a paradoxical world in which hope and anxiety coexist. Embodied experience, hope, and anxiety are transmitted through the bodies of women, which reveals the inscription of social-cultural context and technical uncertainty on the female body and, meanwhile, women actively learn strategies by which to cope with the technical uncertainty and moral pressures from local culture (including healing the body, folk religion, etc.), so as to hold onto infertility treatment with hope.

Working manifesto/a for rovers

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jodi A. Patterson
Keyword(s):  
Art Education ◽  
Research Field ◽  
The Body ◽  
Educational Tool ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Art Practice ◽  
Arts Based Research

This arts-based exploration offers potentiality and theory to the wider arts-based research field by expanding and naming embodied experience as it relates to mechanical means of transport. The author dubs such a practice of physically moving the body between vast and varied spaces to be a roving art practice. She offers modes of potential, a preliminary list of protocols to contextualize a rover’s manifesto/a and ways to use roving as an educational tool applicable to the field of art education.

scholarly journals An embodied approach to consumer experiences: the Hollister brandscape

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (4) ◽  
pp. 806-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorna Stevens ◽  
Pauline Maclaran ◽  
Stephen Brown
Keyword(s):  
Primary Source ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Consumer Experience ◽  
Sensory Marketing ◽  
Holistic Understanding ◽  
Consumer Experiences ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
On Line ◽  
Sensory Activation

Purpose This paper aims to use embodied theory to analyze consumer experience in a retail brandscape, Hollister Co. By taking a holistic, embodied approach, this study reveals how individual consumers interact with such retail environments in corporeal, instinctive and sensual ways. Design/methodology/approach The primary source of data was 97 subjective personal introspective accounts undertaken with the target age group for the store. These were supplemented with in-depth interviews with consumers, managers and employees of Hollister. Findings The authors offer a conceptualization of consumers’ embodied experience, which they term The Immersive Somascape Experience. This identifies four key touch points that evoke the Hollister store experience – each of which reveals how the body is affected by particular relational and material specificities. These are sensory activation, brand materialities, corporeal relationality and (dis)orientation. These may lead to consumer emplacement. Research limitations/implications The authors propose that taking an “intelligible embodiment” approach to consumer experiences in retail contexts provides a deeper, more holistic understanding of the embodied processes involved. They also suggest that more anthropological, body-grounded studies are needed for the unique insights they provide. Finally, they note that there is growing consumer demand for experiences, which, they argue, points to the need for more research from an embodied experience perspective in our field. Practical implications The study reveals the perils and pitfalls of adopting a sensory marketing perspective. It also offers insights into how the body leads in retail brandscapes, addressing a lack in such approaches in the current retailing literature and suggesting that embodied, experiential aspects of branding are increasingly pertinent in retailing in light of the continued growth of on-line shopping. Originality/value Overall, the study shows how an embodied approach challenges the dominance of mind and representation over body and materiality, suggesting an “intelligible embodiment” lens offers unique insights into consumers’ embodied experiences in retail environments.

scholarly journals Labour Pain, ‘Natal Politics’ and Reproductive Justice for Black Birth Givers

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 22-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Fannin
Keyword(s):  
Labour Pain ◽  
The Body ◽  
Reproductive Justice ◽  
Natural Childbirth ◽  
Maternal Subjectivity ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Justice Movements

The reception of Elaine Scarry’s landmark text, The Body in Pain, focuses in part on exploring how pain might be understood as beneficial or therapeutic. Childbirth is often cited as the paradigmatic instance of this kind of beneficial pain. This essay examines conceptualizations of labour pain in biomedical, natural childbirth and reproductive justice movements that explore the limits of Scarry’s description of pain as ‘unshareable’. Political struggles over pain in childbirth centre on the legibility of pain in labour. Feminist and natural childbirth activists have developed an understanding of pain at birth as central to maternal subjectivity, where pain is a biopolitical force and its management a means of self-transformation. Alongside calls for reproductive justice, the essay considers how the visibility and expressivity of labour pain could contribute to what Imogen Tyler and Lisa Baraitser term a new ‘natal politics’ that addresses concerns for the disproportionate injury and death experienced by Black birth givers.

Becoming militant: embodying the Guinean revolution and Guinea–China relations

Africa ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 90 (4) ◽  
pp. 721-745
Author(s):  
Nomi Dave
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Dance Movement ◽  
Republic Of Guinea ◽  
The Republic ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
Revolutionary Ideology ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Moment

AbstractThis article considers the role of embodied experience in promoting revolutionary ideology in Guinea. The Republic of Guinea has long held close ties with China, and in the 1960s and 1970s the country pursued its own Cultural Revolution. While Chinese songs and aesthetics had little direct artistic influence, the Guinean state embraced Maoist ideals of social and self-transformation and discipline. Such ideals were translated into daily life through the regulation of bodies, including practices of dance, movement and physical gesture that sought to create revolutionary subjects. I show here how embodied practices, including the circulation of dancers and official delegations, cultivated Guinea's relationship with China; and how practices of movement and dance were inwardly experienced within Guinea during its own Cultural Revolution. In so doing, I address some of the contradictions of the Revolution and of Guinea–China relations. While the regime pursued its goals through violence and brutality, former revolutionary subjects today remember the moment for both its pain and its pleasures – for the hardships the body had to endure and for the nationalist pride that many still feel today.

Guarding the Body

2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-72
Author(s):  
Erika Robb Larkins
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Private Security ◽  
The Body ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Basic Training ◽  
Security Guards ◽  
Low Level ◽  
Security Industry ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Private Security Industry

Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the private security industry, this article focuses on the training of low-level guards, examining the centrality of the body and embodied experience to their work in hospitality settings. In a racially stratified society in which lower-class, dark-skinned bodies are oft en equated with poverty and criminality, security guards are required to perform an image of upstanding, respectable, law-abiding citizens in order to do their jobs protecting corporate property. Guards learn techniques of body management at security schools as part of their basic training. They also learn how to subdue the bodies of others, including those of white elites, who represent a constant challenge to their authority. Working from my own experiences as a student in private security schools, I argue for the relevance of an understanding of the body and its significations to private security work.

scholarly journals ‘No Coughing for Me, but I'm Okay!’: A Human Service Worker's Narrative Exploration of Her Own and Other Workers’ Body Stories Told in a Domestic Violence Service

2017 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-92
Author(s):  
Jo Mensinga
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Professional Practice ◽  
Human Service ◽  
Intervention Strategy ◽  
The Body ◽  
Professional Experience ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Service Workers ◽  
Human Service Workers ◽  
Narrative Methodology

Relational, body-oriented and brain-based approaches to recovery and change are increasingly popular modalities for working with traumatised children and adults. However, although these approaches encourage the awareness, and the harnessing of workers’ visceral experiences, there is little in the literature to describe how practitioners navigate their own somatic maps. In a research project undertaken from 2008–16, I invited nine human service workers to tell and explore stories about their own experiences of the body that emerged during, and/or in relation to, their own professional practice. A narrative methodology was used to help facilitate a depth of understanding of how the participants used their own bodies as a source of knowledge and/or as an intervention strategy with those with whom they worked. In this paper, I explore one of many stories told by Coral in which she describes the processes she uses to navigate her own somatic map as she interacts with clients and workers in a domestic violence service. I conclude that creating spaces for workers to explore embodied experience in the professional conversation is important, but is difficult without an acceptable discourse or narrative template. Nonetheless, given the opportunity, including the ‘body as subject’ encourages better outcomes for clients and provides richer accounts of human service workers’ professional experience.

scholarly journals Dancing dress: Experiencing and perceiving dress in movement

Scene ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-80
Author(s):  
Jessica Bugg
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
The Body ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Clothing Design ◽  
Physical Response ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Global Conference

Clothing design for dance is an area that has been little documented, particularly in relation to the experience and perception of the dancer. Contemporary dance and clothing can both be understood as fundamentally phenomenological and as such there is further potential to investigate the lived experience of wearing clothing in dance. This article approaches dress in the context of the moving and dancing body, and it aims to develop an understanding of the role of dress in dance by focusing on the sensory, embodied experience and perception of the performer. It addresses questions of how clothing is perceived in movement by the performer, how and if clothing’s design intention, materiality and form motivate physical response, and what conscious or unconscious cognitive processes may be at play in this interaction between the active body and clothing. The intention is to propose developed methods for designers across clothing disciplines to contribute in a meaningful way to the overall dance work. The article draws on an analysis of my practice-led research that employs embodied experience of dress to inform the design and development of clothing as communication and performance. The research has involved close collaboration with a dancer, analysis of recorded interviews, and visual documentation of design and movement. The research has produced data on the dancer’s experience and perception of garments in performance and this is discussed here in relation to writings on perception, performance, the body and cognition. The research is approached through theory and practice and draws on interviews, observation and lived experience. This article is developed from an earlier conference paper that investigated the role and developed potential of clothing in contemporary dance that was presented at the 4th Global Conference: Performance: Visual Aspects of Performance Practice, Inter-Disciplinary.Net, held in Oxford on 17–19 September 2013.

On the Ideology of Nutritionism

2008 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
gyorgy scrinis
Keyword(s):  
Food Products ◽  
Nutrient Composition ◽  
The Body ◽  
Food Marketing ◽  
Dietary Advice ◽  
Nutrition Science ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Biochemical Level ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

This essay introduces and defines the ideology or paradigm of nutritionism, which is generally characterized by a reductive focus on the nutrient composition of food. More specifically, it is where the nutri-biochemical level of engagement with food and the body becomes the dominant way of understanding the relationship between food and bodily health, and at the expense of other levels and ways of understanding and engaging with food. Nutritionism is the dominant paradigm within nutrition science, informs much dietary advice, and has become a primary means for the engineering and marketing of food products. A number of characteristics of nutritionism are defined, including nutritional reductionism, biomarker reductionism, genetic nutritionism, the functional body, the myth of nutritional precision, the nutritional gaze, and nutritional tinkering, nutri-quantification, the erasure of qualitatative food distinctions, nutrient fetishism, the 'good and bad nutrient' discourses, nutri-commodification, and the nutricentric person. A number of types of foods and types of food marketing are also introduced and defined, including nutritionally engineered foods, transnutric foods, nutritionally marketed foods and functionally marketed foods.

scholarly journals Criteria of medical response to radiological emergencies in the Republic of Belarus

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-55
Author(s):  
C. N. Buzdalkin ◽  
N. G. Vlasova ◽  
A. V. Rozhko ◽  
V. N. Bortnovsky
Keyword(s):  
Radiation Exposure ◽  
Nuclear Power ◽  
Chemical Properties ◽  
Medical Intervention ◽  
The Body ◽  
Emergency Plans ◽  
Specialized Treatment ◽  
Medical Response ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Physical And Chemical

The Republican Research Center for Radiation Medicine and Human Ecology in the Internal and External Emergency Plans of the Belarusian nuclear power plant is specified as an institution that provides specialized treatment for personnel, as well as persons from the population living in the emergency zone of the station. The plant is the first facility in the Republic that used nuclear energy. There is no experience in treating radiation injuries in Belarus. This is the first time that the National Health Service has been assigned the task of ensuring readiness for the reception and specialized treatment of people who have been exposed to emergency or unplanned radiation. The purpose of the work is to establish criteria for radiation exposure for use in a Belarusian specialized medical institution in case of medical response to radiological accidents. As a result of the analysis of publications of international organizations, the criteria of radiation exposure that can be applied in the conditions of Belarusian specialized medical institutions were selected. Assessment of the criteria was made taking into account existing national technical regulations and the available capabilities of emergency response participants. To account for the quality of radiation in relation to deterministic effects “Gy-equivalent” is used. The criteria include both dosimetric values for cases of external and internal accidental and unplanned exposure, and levels of radioactive substances with unknown physical and chemical properties entering the body that require urgent medical intervention. Criteria for cases of surface contamination of skin and wounds require separate consideration.

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