“The Juices of the Body”: Ecomasculine Fluidification in Two Stories by Isak Dinesen

2021 ◽  
pp. 1097184X2110255
Author(s):  
Peter Mortensen
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Karen Blixen ◽  
Human World ◽  
Isak Dinesen

Gender is a key factor in shaping perceptions of environmental relationships, and moving toward sustainability requires that we rethink dominant ideas about both femininity and masculinity. Danish bilingual author Karen Blixen (1885–1962) wrote cryptic and convoluted stories under the male pseudonym Isak Dinesen, and while there is an abundance of feminist scholarship on Dinesen, her critique of masculine identity and her relevance to the emergent field of ecomasculinity studies have so far gone unnoticed. In this essay, I draw on feminist scholarship and cultural histories of male embodiment, as I analyze fluid masculine corporeality in “The Monkey” (1934) and “Ehrengard” (1962). In both her early and late narratives, I argue, Dinesen pushes back against the 20th century “metallization” of male bodies with baroque narratives and characters whose trajectories begin to produce novel and fruitful understandings of masculinity and the male body in relation to other bodies and the more-than-human world. More specifically, what I label “fluidification” designates recurring moments in Dinesen’s writing when corporeal boundaries are breached and male characters find themselves re-manned and re-environed by their bodies’ all-too-human participation in “transcorporeal” flows. The male bodies that populate Dinesen’s fiction, I find, diverge strikingly from the seamlessly solid, statuesque, and self-enclosed men of steel fantasized by contemporary fascists, communists, futurists, militarists, and machine-age modernists. While the hegemonic ideal of hard, dry, anti-ecological masculinity has persisted and even flourished to the present day, I approach Dinesen’s fictions as counterhegemonic sites where alternative earth-friendlier meanings of masculinity can become visible.

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 Governing Nonconformity: Gender Presentation, Public Space, and the City in New Order Indonesia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Benjamin Hegarty
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Gender Nonconformity ◽  
The Body ◽  
New Order ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
Femininity And Masculinity ◽  
Gender Presentation ◽  
The Right ◽  
The City

The regulation of public space is generative of new approaches to gender nonconformity. In 1968 in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, a group of people who identified as wadam—a new term made by combining parts of Indonesian words denoting “femininity” and “masculinity”—made a claim to the city's governor that they had the right to appear in public space. This article illustrates the paradoxical achievement of obtaining recognition on terms constituted through public nuisance regulations governing access to and movement through space. The origins and diffuse effects of recognition achieved by those who identified as wadam and, a decade later, waria facilitated the partial recognition of a status that was legal but nonconforming. This possibility emerged out of city-level innovations and historical conceptualizations of the body in Indonesia. Attending to the way that gender nonconformity was folded into existing methods of codifying space at the scale of the city reflects a broader anxiety over who can enter public space and on what basis. Considering a concern for struggles to contend with nonconformity on spatial grounds at the level of the city encourages an alternative perspective on the emergence of gender and sexual morality as a definitive feature of national belonging in Indonesia and elsewhere.

scholarly journals Exploring the Effects of Problematic Internet Use on Adolescent Sleep: A Systematic Review

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 760
Author(s):  
Ioulia Kokka ◽  
Iraklis Mourikis ◽  
Nicolas C. Nicolaides ◽  
Christina Darviri ◽  
George P. Chrousos ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Internet Use ◽  
Educational Interventions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Problematic Internet Use ◽  
Affecting Factors ◽  
Physical And Mental Health ◽  
Adolescent Sleep ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Parental Educational Level ◽  
The Impact

Adolescent suse internet via several devices to gather information or communicate. Sleep, as a key factor of adolescents’ development, contributes to their physical and mental health. Over the past decades insufficient sleep among adolescents has been wide spread, and one of its attributing factors is the increased availability of technology. This review aims to investigate the body of evidence regarding the impact of problematic internet use on adolescent sleep. Extensive search of databases was performed according to PRISMA guidelines for studies published within the last decade, regarding subjects aged 10–19. The final step of the search yielded 12 original studies. The quality of extracted data was evaluated with the AXIS tool, in order to estimate the risk of bias. All studies showed a negative correlation between adolescent sleep and problematic internet use. It was found to affect sleep quality and quantity and provoke insomnia symptoms. Interestingly, adolescent’s sex, parental educational level, type of family and use for leisure or academic reasons appeared as affecting factors of the problematic internet use-sleep relationship. Problematic internet use has several effects on adolescents’ sleep. Results of relevant studies should be embedded in educational interventions addressed to adolescents as well as parents, to eliminate the negative outcomes of problematic internet use on sleep and adolescence’s health in general.

Metabolic adjustments to breath holding in higher vertebrates

1989 ◽  
Vol 67 (12) ◽  
pp. 3024-3031 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Marine Mammals ◽  
Lactate Production ◽  
Weddell Seal ◽  
Specific Dynamic Action ◽  
The Body ◽  
Breath Holding ◽  
Reduced Body ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Reduced Rate ◽  
Anaerobic Production

There is substantial behavioural and physiological evidence to suggest that most feeding dives by aquatic birds and mammals are aerobic in nature, with no net production of lactate. Any increase in lactate production is matched by increased removal. This does not mean, however, that there are no cardiovascular adjustments associated with such dives. Nonactive parts of the body (including the large pectoral muscles in diving ducks) may be hypoperfused and consume oxygen at a reduced rate. For example, in marine mammals, such as the Weddell seal, reduced perfusion of the gut during a feeding period (which can last for up to 12 h) would reduce the energy expenditure associated with the digestion and assimilation of food (specific dynamic action). Reperfusion during the nonfeeding period would contribute to an unusually high "resting" oxygen uptake. Although some tissues in seals at least can tolerate periods of ischaemia, there is no evidence to suggest that enhanced anaerobic production of ATP is a key factor in the survival of marine mammals during unusually long periods underwater. There may, in fact, be an overall reduction in the ATP requirements of certain tissues, possibly as a result of a reduction in the permeability of cell membranes to some ions, but most certainly as a result of reduced body temperature. During relatively long dives, lactate production eventually exceeds its rate of removal and it accumulates. Precisely what occurs in the muscles is not known. One suggestion is that periods of vasoconstriction are interrupted by vasodilatation, when the oxygen stores are replaced.

scholarly journals Idrott och genus: Kroppens materialisering

2005 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 55-72
Author(s):  
Håkan Larsson
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Track And Field ◽  
The Other ◽  
Biological Entity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Male Discourse ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The One ◽  
Cultural Effect

Håkan Larsson: Sport and gender This article concerns bodily materialisation as it occurs in youth sport. It is based on interviews with teenagers 16 to 19 years of age doing track and field athletics. The purpose of the article is to elucidate how the notion of a “natural body“ can be seen as a cultural effect of sports practice and sports discourse. On the one hand, the body is materialised as a performing body, and on the other as a beautiful body. The “performing body“ is a single-sexed biological entity. The “beautiful body“ is a double-sexed and distinctly heterosexually appealing body. As these bodies collide in teenager track and field, the female body materialises as a problematic body, a body that is at the same time the subject of the girl’s personality. The male body materialises as an unproblematic body, a body that is the object of the boy’s personality. However, the body as “(a problematic) subject“ or as “(an unproblematic) object“ is not in itself a gendered body. Rather, these are positions on a cultural grid of power-knowledge relations. A girl might position herself in a male discourse, and a boy might position himself in a female discourse, but in doing so, they seem to have to pay a certain price in order not to be seen as queer.

scholarly journals Male Infertility: Pathogenetic Significance of Oxidative Stress and Antioxidant Defence (Review)

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 107-116
Author(s):  
Vsevolod Koshevoy ◽  
Svitlana Naumenko ◽  
Pavlo Skliarov ◽  
Serhiy Fedorenko ◽  
Lidia Kostyshyn
Keyword(s):  
Oxidative Stress ◽  
Male Infertility ◽  
Nitrosative Stress ◽  
Antioxidant Properties ◽  
Malonic Dialdehyde ◽  
The Body ◽  
Redox Activity ◽  
Enzymatic System ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Mitochondrial Potential

The basis of the pathogenesis of male infertility is the processes of peroxide oxidation of biological substrates, especially lipids and proteins. By destroying the sperm membrane, toxic peroxidation products reduce its motility and ability to fertilize the egg, which is determined by a decrease in the number of motile sperm in the ejaculate. These changes lead to complete or partial male infertility. The authors of the review found that is accompanied by a damaging effect on the structural and functional activity of the gonads and is manifested, in particular, by an imbalance in the hormonal background of the male body. Similar effects are characteristic of an increase in the content of reactive Nitrogen species and its metabolites, which cause nitrosative stress, which is also the cause of male hypofertility and is inseparable from the state of oxidative stress. In scientific work it is determined that the accumulation of harmful peroxidation products leads to damage and destruction of sperm DNA, reduced activity of acrosomal enzymes and mitochondrial potential of sperm, reduced overall antioxidant activity. This makes it impossible for an adequate response of the body. Multi component antioxidant defense system resists stress. It is represented by enzymatic and non-enzymatic links, which can neutralize harmful radicals and peroxidation products. It contributes to the full manifestation of reproductive function. The presence of powerful antioxidant properties of catalase, superoxide dismutase, and enzymes of the thiol-disulfide system, which form the enzymatic system of antioxidant protection, as well as selenium, zinc, copper, other trace elements, retinol, tocopherol, ascorbic acid, and vitamins as parts of the non-enzymatic system is shown. The efficiency of registration is substantiated thin biochemical shift detectors or complex methods, such as total antioxidant status of sperm or sperm plasma, mitochondrial membrane potential, etc along with simple markers of oxidative stress, such as diene conjugates, malonic dialdehyde, and metabolites of the Nitrogen Oxide cycle. Given the leading role of oxidative stress in the development of male hypofertility, the prospect of further research is the search for modern means for correction, especially among substances with pronounced redox activity

scholarly journals A Novel Body Plan Alters Diversification of Body Shape and Genitalia in Live-Bearing Fish

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Brian Langerhans ◽  
Eduardo Rosa-Molinar
Keyword(s):  
Complex Traits ◽  
Body Shape ◽  
Body Plan ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sperm Transfer ◽  
Body Region ◽  
Adaptive Divergence ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Correlated Evolution ◽  
Anterior Transposition

Major evolutionary innovations can greatly influence subsequent evolution. While many major transitions occurred in the deep past, male live-bearing fishes (family Poeciliidae) more recently evolved a novel body plan. This group possesses a three-region axial skeleton, with one region—the ano-urogenital region—representing a unique body region accommodating male genitalic structures (gonopodial complex). Here we evaluate several hypotheses for the evolution of diversity in this region and examine its role in the evolution of male body shape. Examining Gambusia fishes, we tested a priori predictions for (1) joint influence of gonopodial-complex traits on mating performance, (2) correlated evolution of gonopodial-complex traits at macro- and microevolutionary scales, and (3) predator-driven evolution of gonopodial-complex traits in a post-Pleistocene radiation of Bahamas mosquitofish. We found the length of the sperm-transfer organ (gonopodium) and its placement along the body (gonopodial anterior transposition) jointly influenced mating success, with correlational selection favoring particular trait combinations. Despite these two traits functionally interacting during mating, we found no evidence for their correlated evolution at macro- or microevolutionary scales. In contrast, we did uncover correlated evolution of modified vertebral hemal spines (part of the novel body region) and gonopodial anterior transposition at both evolutionary scales, matching predictions of developmental connections between these components. Developmental linkages in the ano-urogenital region apparently play key roles in evolutionary trajectories, but multiple selective agents likely act on gonopodium length and cause less predictable evolution. Within Bahamas mosquitofish, evolution of hemal-spine morphology, and gonopodial anterior transposition across predation regimes was quite predictable, with populations evolving under high predation risk showing more modified hemal spines with greater modifications and a more anteriorly positioned gonopodium. These changes in the ano-urogenital vertebral region have facilitated adaptive divergence in swimming abilities and body shape between predation regimes. Gonopodium surface area, but not length, evolved as predicted in Bahamas mosquitofish, consistent with a previously suggested tradeoff between natural and sexual selection on gonopodium size. These results provide insight into how restructured body plans offer novel evolutionary solutions. Here, a novel body region—originally evolved to aid sperm transfer—was apparently co-opted to alter whole-organism performance, facilitating phenotypic diversification.

scholarly journals On the effects of castration and ovariotomy upon sheep

1912 ◽  
Vol 85 (576) ◽  
pp. 27-32 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Complete Removal ◽  
Reproductive Organs ◽  
Fallow Deer ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Characters ◽  
Game Birds ◽  
Male Plumage ◽  
The Face

It is well known that castration, when performed in early life and before sexual maturity has been reached, has a marked effect not only in inhibiting the development of the accessory male organs, but in changing the general conformation of the body. Thus in castrated guinea-pigs, oxen, and capons, as well as in eunuchs, the bones of the limbs tend to be abnormally long, this result depending upon an arrest in the ossification of epiphyses. The secondary male characters are also in many cases suppressed, so that there is an apparent approximation to the female type. Thus in red deer if the testes are removed in quite immature animals the antlers fail to make their appearance, and in fallow deer castration at birth limits the horn formation to the development of single dugs. Secondary sexual characters, however, are not always correlated with the presence of the essential reproductive organs, even in mammals. Thus the withers in the gelding resemble those of the horse rather than those of the mare, in which the witheres are lower. Moreover, in certain varieties of cattle in Italy, the horns in the ox, if castraction has been carried out young, are far longer than those of either the bull or the cow. Ovariotomy in the female is often said to lead to the assumption of male characters, but there is little experimental evidence that this is actually the case. In the human female complete removal of the ovaries, if carried out in early life, besides preventing the onset of puberty and the occurrence of menstruation, produces effects on the general form and appearance, individuals so operated upon being said, in some cases, to show resemblances to men. Abnormalities in the ovaries have been described as producing similar results. Thus, Rörig records three cases in which female deer possessed horns, and were shown on dissection to have had abnormal ovaries. Darwin states that female deer in old age have been known to acquire horns. It Wallace says that in old mares the neck tends to acquire an arch as in the stallion. The occasional growth of hair on the face in old women is a phenomenon of the same kind. Similar observations have been made upon birds, especially ducks, poultry, and game birds. Darwin mentions the case of a duck which, when 10 years old, acquired the plumage of the drake. Other cases are those of hens which in old age assumed secondary male characters and started to crow. Hunter mentions a hen pheasant which had male plumage associated with an abnormal ovary. Numerous other instances have been described, but it is not apparent that such an acquirement of male characters by female individuals is always correlated with an abnormality in the reproductive organs. According to Gurney the assumption of male plumage is generally associated with sterility in female gallinaceous birds, but not, as a rule, in female passerine birds. Thus Gurney describes a hen chaffinch with male plumage and a number of developing eggs.

The Body Breached: Post-Soviet Masculinity on Screen

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Goscilo
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
Male Body ◽  
Human Form ◽  
Soviet Cinema ◽  
Material Values

Whereas the utopian male body of the Soviet Imaginary hyperbolized and recast in steel or bronze the anatomical ideals of classical antiquity (Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘closed body’), post-Soviet cinema typically has featured a male corporeality resembling the open body of apertures and protruberances posited by Bakhtin, but as degraded, marred, and vulnerable (Kenneth Clark) rather than celebratory or regenerative. Thus the indomitable heroes of hypertrophied bulk, brawn, and beauty in Stalinist films such as Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936), Mikhail Kalatozov’s Valerii Chkalov (1941), and Mikheil Chiaureli’s Fall of Berlin (1949) have been superseded by the dramatically violated and traumatized physiques of protagonists in recent films confronting war—Aleksandr Nevzorov’s Purgatory (1998 ), Valerii Todorovskii’s My Stepbrother Frankenstein (2004), Aleksandr Veledinskii’s Alive (2006)—and those reassessing the Stalinist era: Aleksei German’s Khrustalev, the Car (1998) and Pavel Livnev’s Hammer and Sickle (1994). Indeed, the latter explicitly deconstructs the forcible transformation of Soviet citizenry into fantastic icons of Stakhanovite virility and its tragic consequences. Similarly, post-Soviet onscreen crime devastates the male body, and nowhere more vividly than in Filipp Iankovskii’s Lermontov-indebted Sword Bearer (2006), which violently imprints all contemporary experience, most of it lethal, on the human form in a world ruled by material values and devoid of communal ideals.

From factory gardens to ‘connected gardens’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helena Chance
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
First Century ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Socially Responsible ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Office Space ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Corporate Clients

From the 1950s until the end of the century, American architects and landscape architects were driving innovation in design for corporate clients, while in Britain differing economic and social conditions shaped some alternative strategies for designing office space. By the 1970s, with an increasing diversity and accessibility of leisure attractions outside the workplace, workplace recreation declined. In the twenty-first century digital age, the domesticated corporate garden of the early twentieth century industrial age has been reaffirmed; as companies strive to be socially responsible and sustainable, workplace gardens are promoted as sites for self-improvement. Providing gardens and physical exercise in the workplace is a response to the rapidity of technological change where nature’s redeeming powers become an antidote first to the machine age and then to the digital age and the corporate lives they construct. Corporate landscape design today has become a key factor in the promotion of responsible capitalism and at the same time, these landscapes play a vital role in the greening of our cities and suburbs and in embedding the principle that access to open green space is a human right.

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