Graphic Embodiments

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Scientific Texts ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
Graphic Narratives ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Visual And Cultural Studies ◽  
Human Embodiment

Comics and other graphic narratives powerfully represent embodied experiences that are difficult to express in language. A group of authors from various countries and disciplines explore the unique capacity of graphic narratives to represent human embodiment as well as the relation of human bodies to the worlds they inhabit. Using works from illustrated scientific texts to contemporary comics across national traditions, we discover how the graphic narrative can shed new light on everyday experiences. Essays examine topics that are easily recognized as anchored in the body as well as experiences like migration and concepts like environmental degradation and compassion that emanate from or impact on our embodied states. Graphic Embodiments is of interest to scholars and students across various interdisciplinary fields including comics studies, gender and sexuality studies, visual and cultural studies, disability studies and health and medical humanities.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hannah Schwadron
Keyword(s):  
Performance Studies ◽  
Female Identity ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Performance ◽  
White Womanhood

This introductory chapter frames the book’s emphasis on the twenty-first-century Sexy Jewess, whose image proliferates in neoburlesque, comedy, mainstream film, and progressive pornography. A review of significant literature in Jewish studies, gender and sexuality studies, and dance and performance studies (1) introduces how performers complicate self-critical jokes of the excessive Jewish female body by playing up their differences, (2) historicizes the techniques that performers employ to mimic and master different ideas of sexiness, and (3) theorizes how performances of Jewish female identity use the body to participate in and parody notions of appropriate femininity as they relate to white womanhood.

Gender, Body, Poetry

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Katie Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Real ◽  
Poetic Inquiry ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Getting Lost ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Presence And Absence

I offer here three poems which engage a feminist approach to gender and the body. They emanate (tangentially) from my ethnographic work in schools and my own embodied experiences as a woman. While I write more conventional academic prose and conduct research in schools on gender and sexuality (Fitzpatrick 2018; Fitzpatrick and Enright 2017; Fitzpatrick and McGlashan in press, 2016; McGlashan and Fitzpatrick 2017, 2018), I offer a poetic exploration of these issues here in an attempt to engage with writing that is both cognitive and sensory (Sparkes and Smith 2014), while evoking emotion, cultural nuance and reflexivity (Faulkner 2009). In so doing, I also bring myself directly into the text (Brkich and Barko 2013) in the hope that a different kind of engagement with issues of body may result. The contemporary moment offers up many challenges to writing about gender, sexuality and the body. As gender binaries are broken down and challenged, and new approaches to the body and sexuality are engaged (e.g. Allen and Rasmussen 2017), new challenges are posed. Engaging in poetic inquiry (Rinehart 2012; Richardson 1994) into gender and sexuality might help reimagine gender and body in aesthetic as well as political ways. Such an engagement is personal, disruptive and uncertain. In this, I am inspired by Patti Lather’s (2007, 6) notion of being lost. She encourages researchers to embrace getting lost, as a process “which shakes any assured ontology of the ‘real,’ of presence and absence, a postcritical logic of haunting and undecidables.” I contend that all ethnographic work is in some ways lost, at the very least in issues of politics, representation and voice (Fitzpatrick in press). Lather (2007, 1) calls such engagement with uncertainty and voice “getting lost at the limits of representation”. She explains that: “At its simplest, getting lost is something other to commanding, controlling, mastery. At its most complex...we spend our lives with language trying to make it register what we have lost, longing for lost wholeness.” (11). Poetry is one way to engage with a methodology of being lost; one way to engage a struggle to communicate what we cannot ever adequately represent (Rinehart, 2012). In this spirit, I offer the following poems, which engage with being lost at the edges of gender sexuality and body, and which can only communicate my own experience, in intersection with what I read, discuss and observe socially and politically.  

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

Novel Relations

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alicia Mireles Christoff
Keyword(s):  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Object Relations ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Victorian Novels ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
Gender And Sexuality Studies ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Impact

This book engages twentieth-century post-Freudian British psychoanalysis in an unprecedented way: as literary theory. Placing the writing of figures like D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, Michael and Enid Balint, Joan Riviere, Paula Heimann, and Betty Joseph in conversation with canonical Victorian fiction, the book reveals just how much object relations can teach us about how and why we read. These thinkers illustrate the ever-shifting impact our relations with others have on the psyche, and help us see how literary figures—characters, narrators, authors, and other readers—shape and structure us too. In the book, novels are charged relational fields. Closely reading novels by George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, the book shows that traditional understandings of Victorian fiction change when we fully recognize the object relations of reading. It is not by chance that British psychoanalysis illuminates underappreciated aspects of Victorian fiction so vibrantly: Victorian novels shaped modern psychoanalytic theories of psyche and relationality—including the eclipsing of empire and race in the construction of subject. Relational reading opens up both Victorian fiction and psychoanalysis to wider political and postcolonial dimensions, while prompting a closer engagement with work in such areas as critical race theory and gender and sexuality studies. The book describes the impact of literary form on readers and on twentieth- and twenty-first-century theories of the subject.

The Resurrection Body

2019 ◽  
pp. 660-674
Author(s):  
Taylor G. Petrey
Keyword(s):  
Radical Change ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Synoptic Gospels ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Approaches To Studying ◽  
Early Christian

This chapter surveys the relevant ancient Christian and Jewish texts on the resurrection that discuss gender and sexuality and the scholarship about these topics. It provides particular emphasis on the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, Paul, and the early Christian reception of their ideas in the second through fourth centuries. The saying of Jesus that those who are resurrected shall be “as angels” is central to early Christian theologies of the body and sexuality. Paul’s discussion of the nature of the resurrected body and the importance of the parts also informs how early Christians developed these ideas. The tension in early Christian writing about the resurrection was between those who emphasized continuity between the mortal and resurrected self, and those who emphasized a radical change between the two. Further, the chapter provides an overview to major scholarly methods and approaches to studying the resurrection, including feminist scholarship.

scholarly journals Caring for affective subjects produced in intimate healthcare examinations

2021 ◽  
pp. 136345932110200
Author(s):  
Jenny Gleisner ◽  
Ericka Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Medical Students ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Digital Rectal Exam ◽  
Discursive Analysis ◽  
Work Spaces ◽  
Pelvic Exam ◽  
Care Practices

This article is about the feelings – affect – induced by the digital rectal exam of the prostate and the gynaecological bimanual pelvic exam, and the care doctors are or are not instructed to give. The exams are both invasive, intimate exams located at a part of the body often charged with norms and emotions related to gender and sexuality. By using the concept affective subject, we analyse how these examinations are taught to medical students, bringing attention to how bodies and affect are cared for as patients are observed and touched. Our findings show both the role care practices play in generating and handling affect in the students’ learning and the importance of the affect that the exam is (or is not) imagined to produce in the patient. Ours is a material-discursive analysis that includes the material affordances of the patient and doctor bodies in the affective work spaces observed.

scholarly journals Turkey’s queer times: an introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Cenk Özbay ◽  
Kerem Öktem
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Queer Culture ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
And Gender

Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.

scholarly journals Heart, Mind and Body: #NoMorePage3 and the Replenishment of Emotional Energy

2021 ◽  
pp. 017084062199450
Author(s):  
Lauren McCarthy ◽  
Sarah Glozer
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Institutional Work ◽  
Emotional Energy ◽  
Online Abuse ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Embodied Experiences ◽  
Feminist Organization ◽  
Online Misogyny

Emotional energy is key to disruptive institutional work, but we still know little about what it is, and importantly, how it is refuelled. This empirical paper presents an in-depth case study of ‘No More Page 3’ (#NMP3), an Internet-based feminist organization which fought for the removal of sexualized images of women from a UK newspaper. Facing online misogyny, actors engage in ‘emotional energy replenishment’ to sustain this disruptive institutional work amid emotional highs and lows. We introduce ‘affective embodiment’ – the corporeal and emotional experiences of the institution – as providing emotional energy in relation to disruptive institutional work. Affective embodiment is surfaced through alignment or misalignment with others’ embodied experiences, and this mediates how actors replenish emotional energy. Alignment with others’ embodied experiences, often connected to online abuse, means emotional energy is replenished through ‘affective solidarity’ (movement towards the collective). Misalignment, surfaced through tensions within the movement, means actors seek replenishment through ‘sensory retreat’ (movement away from the collective). This study contributes to theorization on institutional work and emotional energy by recentring the importance of the body alongside emotions, as well as offering important lessons for online organizing.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Suparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Gender Trouble

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).

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