Masking and the Social Construct of the Body in Beckett’s Endgame

2007 ◽  
pp. 165-188 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Social

Images of the Female Body in Émile Zola's Novels

2021 ◽  
pp. 301-317
Author(s):  
Irina David
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Social Roles ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
French Society ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
The Social ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
And Behavior

The aim of this chapter is to highlight how the female body and the social practices that it is subject to are depicted in Émile Zola's literary work as indicators of dominating perceptions in 19th century patriarchal French society with regard to social roles in general and women's role in society in particular. Rather than focusing on an anatomic, biological analysis of the body, the discussion will turn to the body as a social construct, as metaphor for the overall treatment of women as beings whose appearance and behavior have to constantly be regulated for them to no longer constitute a threat to the male-centric society they live in.

The Body as an Accumulation Strategy

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Recent Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Major Focus ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Moral Agents ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Site ◽  
Political Economic

The body has become a major focus of attention—both theoretically and politically—over the past twenty years. In much of this literature it is presumed that the body is some kind of social construct at the same time as it is a locus and a measure of both the material and the social world we inhabit. The author situates this idea against the background of Marx's representations—too often by-passed in recent literature—in order to show how Marx's concept of variable capital contains a theory of body formation under capitalism at the same time as it lays the groundwork for understanding how political persons act as moral agents to try to change the conditions under which laboring occurs. The struggle for a living wage in Baltimore is then used as a concrete example of how this form of body politics operates under contemporary conditions, illustrating how the body that is to be the measure of all things is itself a site of political-economic contestation over the very forces that create it.

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

The Alluring Nature of Children's Culture: Fairy Tales, the Carnival and the World Wide Web

2015 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-184
Author(s):  
Željka Flegar
Keyword(s):  
Children's Literature ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Mikhail Bakhtin ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Time Out ◽  
The Social ◽  
Children's Culture ◽  
Language And Ideology

This article discusses the implied ‘vulgarity’ and playfulness of children's literature within the broader concept of the carnivalesque as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World (1965) and further contextualised by John Stephens in Language and Ideology in Children's Fiction (1992). Carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales are examined by situating them within Cristina Bacchilega's contemporary construct of the ‘fairy-tale web’, focusing on the arenas of parody and intertextuality for the purpose of detecting crucial changes in children's culture in relation to the social construct and ideology of adulthood from the Golden Age of children's literature onward. The analysis is primarily concerned with Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes (1982) and J. K. Rowling's The Tales of Beedle the Bard (2007/2008) as representative examples of the historically conditioned empowerment of the child consumer. Marked by ambivalent laughter, mockery and the degradation of ‘high culture’, the interrogative, subversive and ‘time out’ nature of the carnivalesque adaptations of fairy tales reveals the striking allure of contemporary children's culture, which not only accommodates children's needs and preferences, but also is evidently desirable to everybody.

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

The identity policy and its effect in the stability of Middle East after 2010

2019 ◽  
pp. 434
Author(s):  
Ali Hussein Kadhim Alesammi
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Stability And Instability ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Stability ◽  
International Interactions ◽  
Regional Interests ◽  
Political Groups ◽  
Identity Policy

Since 2010 Middle East have many events or what they call "Arab spring events" which it result of overthrow governments and the rise of new political groups, all of this elements was resulting of many international and regional activities and making new regional and international axles, as well as the intersections of the different regional interests, therefore this research will try to study the stability and instability in the region as an independent variable not according to the neorealism or neoliberalism theories, but according to the constructivism theory which it base their assumptions on:  "In the international relations the non-physical structures of international interactions are determined by the identities of the players, which in turn determine the interests that determine the behavior of international players." So the research questions are: 1-What is the identity policy and haw affect in international relations? 2-How the social construct affect in international relations? 3-How the elite's identities for the main actors in the Middle East affect in the regional axles?  

Performing Masculinity and the Crisis of Transclass Man in August Wilson’s Drama

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Khatija Bibi Khan ◽  
Owen Seda
Keyword(s):  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Values ◽  
Social Construct ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
Great Cost ◽  
Social Milieu ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
North End

Feminist critics have identified the social constructedness of masculinity and have explored how male characters often find themselves caught up in a ceaseless quest to propagate and live up to an acceptable image of manliness. These critics have also explored how the effort to live up to the dictates of this social construct has often come at great cost to male protagonists. In this paper, we argue that August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone present the reader with a coterie of male characters who face the dual crisis of living up to a performed masculinity and the pitfalls that come with it, and what Mazrui has referred to as the phenomenon of “transclass man.” Mazrui uses the term transclass man to refer to characters whose socio-economic and socio-cultural experience displays a fluid degree of transitionality. We argue that the phenomenon of transclass man works together with the challenges of performed masculinity to create characters who, in an effort to adjust to and fit in with a new and patriarchal urban social milieu in America’s newly industrialised north, end up destroying themselves or failing to realise other possibilities that may be available to them. Using these two plays as illustrative examples, we further argue that staged masculinity and the crisis of transclass man in August Wilson’s plays create male protagonists who break ranks with the social values of a collectively shared destiny to pursue an individualistic personal trajectory, which only exacerbates their loss of social identity and a true sense of who they are.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

Körpertechniken

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erhard Schüttpelz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Social

The contribution re-establishes Marcel Mauss's concept of body functional techniques: the social-anthropological basis, the theoretical technical position and the systematic programming of this term. According to Mauss, modern body functional techniques and their media inventions can be interpreted in different ways: as strategies for the reduction of the body and as a project of a reciprocal, psychosomatic, ritualistic and medial intensification.

Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Civil Death

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.

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