scholarly journals Aesthetic surgery and the expressive body

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-112 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Alsop ◽  
Kathleen Lennon
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Surgery ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
Anatomical Features ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Social ◽  
Individual Decisions ◽  
Bodily Difference ◽  
Feminist Work

In this article, we explore the relation between bodies and selves evident in the narratives surrounding aesthetic surgery. In much feminist work on aesthetic surgery, such narratives have been discussed in terms of the normalising consequences of the objectifying, homogenising, cosmetic gaze. These discussions stress the ways in which we model our bodies, under the gaze of others, in order to conform to social norms. Such an objectified body is contrasted with the subjective body; the body-for-the-self. In this article, however, we wish to make sense of the narratives surrounding such surgery by invoking the expressive body, which fits on neither side of this binary. We wish to explore how the modification of the body’s anatomical features (physiology) is taken to be a modification of its expressive possibilities, and therefore a modification of possibilities for inter-subjective relations with others. It is such expressive possibilities that, we suggest, underlie decisions to undergo surgical procedures. The possibility of modification of the expressive possibilities of the body, by the modification of its anatomical features, rests on the social imaginaries attached to anatomical features. In the context of such imaginaries, individual decisions to undergo or promote surgery can be both intelligible and potentially empowering. However, the social consequences of such acts are an increasing normalisation of the ‘body under the knife’ and an intolerance of bodily difference. This, we suggest, can only be changed by a re-visioning of bodily imaginaries so that expressive possibilities can be experienced across bodies with a range of physiological features.

scholarly journals Conceptualising and researching the body in digital contexts: towards new methodological conversations across the arts and social sciences

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-53 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carey Jewitt ◽  
Sara Price ◽  
Anna Xambo Sedo
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Research Groups ◽  
The Gaze ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Social

The turn to the body in social sciences has intensified the gaze of qualitative research on bodily matters and embodied relations and made the body a significant object of reflection, bringing new focus on and debates around the direction of methodological advances. This article contributes to these debates in three ways: 1) we explore the potential synergies across the social sciences and arts to inform the conceptualization of the body in digital contexts; 2) we point to ways qualitative research can engage with ideas from the arts towards more inclusive methods; and 3) we offer three themes with which to interrogate and re-imagine the body: its fragmenting and zoning, its sensory and material qualities, and its boundaries. We draw on the findings of an ethnographic study of the research ecologies of six research groups in the arts and social sciences concerned with the body in digital contexts to discuss the synergetic potential of these themes and how they could be mobilized for qualitative research on the body in digital contexts. We conclude that engaging with the arts brings potential to reinvigorate and extend the methodological repertoire of qualitative social science in ways that are pertinent to the current re-thinking of the body, its materiality and boundaries.

scholarly journals Social Inequalities in a Time of Economic Crisis in Greece

2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Papa
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Social Transformation ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Social Protection ◽  
Social Inequalities ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Full Time ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Impact

The study maintains the focus at the economic crisis in Greece, in real social terms. The research highlights the evidence between the level of education and poverty, and the impact that children of poor families are facing. The authors are focusing on the lack of social protection in single parent families, as well as the significant increase in the number of unemployed in Greece during the period of the memorandum. Moreover, the lack of an effective social state and the collapse of informal support networks increases the chances of tearing the social fabric and more families going into poverty. The study also underlines the social consequences of the economic crisis that are geared towards issues of social inclusion in societies organized in relation to values and the development of skills logic, and the inability to secure full-time jobs. The absence of social protection factors, coupled with the impact of vulnerability and risk factors, are causing poverty, unemployment, loss of rights and social support, social exclusion, discrimination, deinstitutionality, migration combined with effects on personality, developmental experiences, health of the body and soul. In Greek society, at the time of the economic crisis, there is a lack of a social protection network, and the weakening of the institution of the family. In Greece, it is necessary to approach the "new poor" in terms of politics and economy, so that they can be considered as indispensable social partners of democracy. Unprivileged social groups have to claim their rights, become part of their liberation process, and become faces of a change of personnel and social level with the ultimate goal of social transformation.

Beth Miqdash Me’at: The Synagogues of Medieval England

1993 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe Hillaby
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Community ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
The Body ◽  
Medieval England ◽  
Social Lives ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Temple

Since the destruction of the Temple the synagogue has been at the heart of every Jewish community. Here the individual could affirm his obedience to the laws (kalakkot) through prayer and ceremony. In this way he sought the salvation of the soul and the resurrection of the body in the messianic age. In addition the community, through the offices of the synagogue, was able to exercise close control over the social lives of all its members, by excommunication if necessary but this was rarely required for ‘the social consequences of nonconformity brought irresistible pressure to bear upon the transgressor’.

Turning disability into a business: Disabled entrepreneurs’ anomalous bodily capital

Organization ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 135050842110323
Author(s):  
Eline Jammaers ◽  
Jannine Williams
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Complex Structure ◽  
Economic Value ◽  
The Body ◽  
Disabled People ◽  
Entrepreneurship Research ◽  
Organizational Contexts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Bodily Difference

In a time and place where being impaired is equated to being of lesser economic value, some disabled people take matters into their own hands by creating their own job and converting their bodily difference into bodily capital. This paper uses a Bourdieuan lens to discover what sets apart disabled entrepreneurs who build their business around disability and those who do not. Building on the experiences of 40 entrepreneurs, we outline the existence of certain bodily and mental schemata that lead to a body habituated to run a business centred around one’s impairment and experience of living as a disabled person in an ableist world. We specify such ‘anomalous’ bodily capital and discuss the constraints to its conversion related to the social environment and impairment effects. This study speaks back to the literature on disability in organizational contexts by extending the ‘value in disability’ debate whilst remaining cognizant of the danger of ‘supercrip’ stereotyping and disability ghettoization. In addition, the complex structure/agency interplay inherent to the practice of leveraging anomalous bodily capital offers a contribution to entrepreneurship research that tends to adhere to a simplistic view of the body.

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

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.

D?r al-?arb as the Motherland? The Muslim Tatars of (the Grand Duchy of) Lithuania and Social Contract

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-177
Author(s):  
Egdūnas Račius
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Consequences ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The Social ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Muslim Minority ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Grand Duchy

Muslim presence in Lithuania, though already addressed from many angles, has not hitherto been approached from either the perspective of the social contract theories or of the compliance with Muslim jurisprudence. The author argues that through choice of non-Muslim Grand Duchy of Lithuania as their adopted Motherland, Muslim Tatars effectively entered into a unique (yet, from the point of Hanafi fiqh, arguably Islamically valid) social contract with the non-Muslim state and society. The article follows the development of this social contract since its inception in the fourteenth century all the way into the nation-state of Lithuania that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century and continues until the present. The epitome of the social contract under investigation is the official granting in 1995 to Muslim Tatars of a status of one of the nine traditional faiths in Lithuania with all the ensuing political, legal and social consequences for both the Muslim minority and the state.

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.

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