‘Beside myself’: touch, maternity and the question of embodiment

This article uses the surprising bodily effects of a period following birth to unsettle the reproductive narrative that circumscribes the maternal relation. Drawing on scholarship on skin and touch within philosophy and feminist and queer theory, ‘Beside myself’ demonstrates how an intensely intimate relationship can throw into relief modes of embodiment that trouble the temporality and space presumed of reproduction. Doing so, it calls attention to the limits of materialist discourses of embodiment. With reference to Gayle Salamon’s Assuming a Body, it describes an embodied subjectivity that exceeds the material contours of the body. A sense of being ‘beside’ oneself and ‘beside’ another stretches the time and space of the body, not only creating fractures within the reproductive frame, but also putting pressure on matter and possession as conditions for subjectivity.

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Some Things are Worth Losing to Become./? Trans Masculinity|Queer Autoethnography|Where Theory and the Body Collide

Irish University Review ◽

10.3366/iur.2020.0432 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 50 (1) ◽

pp. 39-50

Author(s):

Matt Kennedy

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

Knowledge Production ◽

The Body ◽

Trans People ◽

Family Home

This essay seeks to interrogate what it means to become a legible man as someone who held space as a multiplicity of identities before realising and negotiating my trans manhood. It raises the question of how we as trans people account for the shifting nature of our subjectivity, our embodiment and, indeed, our bodies. This essay locates this dialogue on the site of my body where I have placed many tattoos, which both speak to and inform my understanding of myself as a trans man in Ireland. Queer theory functions as a focal tool within this essay as I question family, home, transition, sexuality, and temporality through a queer autoethnographic reading of the tattoos on my body. This essay pays homage to the intersecting traditions within queer theory and autoethnography. It honours the necessity for the indefinable, for alternative knowledge production and representations, for the space we need in order to become, to allow for the uncertainty of our becoming.

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What makes It Difficult to keep an Intimate Relationship: Evidence From Greece and China

Evolutionary Psychology ◽

10.1177/1474704920987807 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 19 (1) ◽

pp. 147470492098780

Author(s):

Menelaos Apostolou ◽

Yan Wang

Keyword(s):

Factor Structure ◽

Intimate Relationship ◽

Work Hours ◽

Common Source ◽

Time And Space ◽

Cultural Contexts ◽

Personal Time ◽

Long Work Hours ◽

The Difference ◽

Relationship Strain

Keeping an intimate relationship is challenging, and there are many factors causing strain. In the current research, we employed a sample of 1,403 participants from China and Greece who were in an intimate relationship, and we classified 78 difficulties in keeping an intimate relationship in 13 factors. Among the most common ones were clinginess, long work hours, and lack of personal time and space. Clinginess was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by women, while bad sex was reported as a more common source of relationship strain by men. Fading away enthusiasm, bad sex, infidelity and children were reported as more important by older participants, while lack of personal time and space, and character issues were reported as more important by younger participants. The factor structure was similar in the Greek and in the Chinese cultural contexts, but there were also differences. In addition, there were significant interactions between the sample and the sex. For instance, for the non-monogamous factor, men gave higher scores than women in both samples, but the difference was much more pronounced in the Greek sample.

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The Body in Theory

Environment and Planning D Society and Space ◽

10.1068/d160387 ◽

1998 ◽

Vol 16 (4) ◽

pp. 387-400 ◽

Cited By ~ 56

Author(s):

Felicity J Callard

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

20Th Century ◽

The Body ◽

The Other ◽

Industrial Capitalism ◽

Late 20Th Century ◽

The Social ◽

Theoretical Investigations ◽

The One ◽

Do So

Geographers are now taking the problematic of corporeality seriously. ‘The body’ is becoming a preoccupation in the geographical literature, and is a central figure around which to base political demands, social analyses, and theoretical investigations. In this paper I describe some of the trajectories through which the body has been installed in academia and claim that this installation has necessitated the uptake of certain theoretical legacies and the disavowal or forgetting of others. In particular, I trace two related developments. First, I point to the sometimes haphazard agglomeration of disparate theoretical interventions that lie under the name of postmodernism and observe how this has led to the foregrounding of bodily tropes of fragmentation, fluidity, and ‘the cyborg‘. Second, I examine the treatment of the body as a conduit which enables political agency to be thought of in terms of transgression and resistance. I stage my argument by looking at how on the one hand Marxist and on the other queer theory have commonly conceived of the body, and propose that the legacies of materialist modes of analysis have much to offer current work focusing on how bodies are shaped by their encapsulation within the sphere of the social. I conclude by examining the presentation of corporeality that appears in the first volume of Marx's Capital. I do so to suggest that geographers working on questions of subjectivity could profit from thinking further about the relation between so-called ‘new’ and ‘fluid’ configurations of bodies, technologies, and subjectivities in the late 20th-century world, and the corporeal configurations of industrial capitalism lying behind and before them.

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The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190628925.001.0001 ◽

2021 ◽

Keyword(s):

Critical Race Theory ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Postcolonial Theory ◽

The Body ◽

Feminist Philosophy ◽

Comprehensive Overview ◽

Rich Diversity ◽

Trans Studies ◽

Feminist Perspectives ◽

The Rich

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field. The editors’ introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy’s contributions to with numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field’s engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers.

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Cuerpo indeterminado: La precariedad del cuerpo en el discurso feminista

Revista de la Academia ◽

10.25074/0196318.0.47 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 20 ◽

pp. 47

Author(s):

María Isabel Peña Aguado

Keyword(s):

Feminist Theory ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Female Body ◽

The Body ◽

Philosophical Tradition ◽

Font Size ◽

Feminist Discourse ◽

Feminist Movements ◽

Cuerpo Femenino

La teoría feminista heredó de una tradición filosófica hostil la identificación de cuerpo y mujer. Partiendo de esta identificación de mujer y cuerpo es comprensible que un cuestionamiento del concepto ‘mujer’ influya asimismo en el lugar que va a encontrar el cuerpo dentro del movimiento y teoría feministas. Ese lugar será diferente dependiendo de las diversas reivindicaciones que marcan las diferencias entre los distintos feminismos y teorías queer. La pregunta que se plantea es hasta qué punto la precariedad del cuerpo femenino dentro de la misma teoría feminista es consecuencia del cuestionamiento del concepto de mujer o si, por el contrario, no será más bien el rechazo a una realidad corporal concreta lo que ha permitido y ayudado a desarmar los conceptos de ‘mujer’ y ‘mujeres’ hasta el punto de considerarlos como innecesario para el mismo discurso y políticas feministas contemporáneos.Palabras claves: cuerpo, mujeres, feminismo, Teoría Queer Indeterminacy of the body: precariousness of body in the feminist discourseFeminist theory inherited the identification of woman and body from a hostile philosophical tradition. Given this identification, it is understandable that a questioning of the concept ‚woman‘ also influences the place that the body will find in the feminist movements and theories. The question that arises is how far the precariousness of the female body within feminist theory itself is the result of a questioning of the concept of ‘woman’ or whether, on the contrary, it is the rejection of a concrete corporal reality which has enabled and helped to disarm the concepts of ‚woman‘ and ‚women‘ to the point of considering them unnecessary for contemporary feminist discourse and politics. Keywords: body, women, feminism, Queer Theory

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Dying Politically

Last Acts ◽

10.5422/fordham/9780823284269.003.0003 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 54-86

Author(s):

Maggie Vinter

Keyword(s):

Queer Theory ◽

The Body ◽

Political Order ◽

Relative Ease ◽

Political Opportunities ◽

Edward Ii

Most readers of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II locate the play’s radicalism in the sexualized challenge that Edward’s homoerotic relations with Gaveston and the Spensers pose to dynastic monarchy and aristocratic governance. This chapter replaces erotics with necrotics to argue that royal sodomy and homoerotic friendship can be accommodated by the play’s political order with relative ease; royal death, by contrast, exposes fundamental weaknesses within dominant conceptions of sovereignty. While recent queer theory has aligned queerness with mortality, Edward II pointedly detaches sexuality from death, offering Edward political opportunities in dying that are unavailable through queer eroticism. In prison, Edward subsumes regimes of dynastic sovereignty within the biological existence of the body. Even once dead, Edward is not superseded because the theater suggests he may still be minimally present, in the slippage between bodies and in props, in the presence of an actor offstage, and in the violence carried out in his name. Rather than supporting a particular structure of power, Edward’s death indicates the range of political potentialities inherent in exposure to mortality, which might alternatively support republican, absolutist, bureaucratic, or tyrannical regimes.

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For the body: a new kind of time and space

Digital Currents ◽

10.4324/9780203005279-16 ◽

2004 ◽

pp. 98-104

Keyword(s):

The Body ◽

Time And Space

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Erotismo y homofobia en "El Apando" (1969) de José Revueltas

Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos ◽

10.2307/1052201 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 16 (2) ◽

pp. 347-366 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Francisco Manzo-Robledo

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Queer Theory ◽

Sexual Desire ◽

The Body ◽

Narrative Discourse ◽

Drug Consumption ◽

Jose Revueltas ◽

El Sistema ◽

The Erotic

In José Revueltas' novel El apando (1969), the possibility for transgression is greatly diminished by the system. In such circumstances, the only possibility of transgression by means of the body is through drug consumption and erotic acts. This article examines the lack of literary criticism regarding the erotic, the homoerotic and the expression of sexual desire, other than in the sense of the society's values. The notion of act-space, together with concepts from cultural and queer theory serve as a critical instrument for this analysis. This essay evaluates critically the narrative discourse, clearly tinted with homophobia and a patriarchal patronage incapable of dealing with the most intimate aspects of self-expression. Under the patriarchy, that self-expression is occluded and controlled by the same ideologies, which again, are signs of homophobia. / En la novela El apando (1969) de José Revueltas, la posibilidad de transgredir se reduce a base los parámetros impuestos por el sistema. Ante tal situación, la única posibilidad de transgredir corporalmente que permanece se presenta a través del consumo de droga y la expresión erótica. El presente ensayo examina por qué existe una carencia de crítica en relación al erotismo, al homoerotismo y a la expresión del deseo sexual si no se estudian estos tres puntos de interés exclusivamente a base de los valores sociales que imperan. Una lectura que va contracorriente, en combinación con la noción de acto-espacio, se integra a conceptos culturales y de teoría queer para forjar un instrumento de investigación. Este análisis evalúa críticamente el discurso narrativo que está teñido por sentimientos de homofobia que sustancian a un patriarcado incapaz de aceptar los aspectos más íntimos de la auto-expresión. Esta auto-expresión bajo el patriarcado se ve controlada y obstruida por las mismas ideologías que ejemplifican, una vez más, la homofobia dentro de dicho sistema.

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