The Sex of the Body Politic: Questioning the Legal Constraints on Genderism between Law and Literature

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-20
Author(s):  
Alessandra Cordiano
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Open Approach ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Gender History ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Legal Constraints

Abstract The acknowledgement of the concept of gender identity is a somewhat recent conquest that has come about thanks mainly to the accomplishments of science and modern technology. The Italian system outlines the generally dominant judicial categories and gives only a partial idea of the historical and judicial evolution of the story of gender. History shows that past societies were more tolerant, or simply more accepting of issues of sexuality. Their more relaxed attitude was reflected in culture and literature and in their more open approach towards matters regarding homosexuality, transsexuality, intersexuality and even transvestism. But it was with Shakespeare that the supremacy of heterosexuality and the sexual canons of the dominant culture saw a major shake-up. Shakespeare used devices like the feminization of the male and women playing male parts as narrative pretexts to comment on themes such as the rivalry between the sexes in the contention for power, conflicts that give rise to a symbiosis between genders and disfigurements of the body that overturn the social order that is shaped by gender binary.

All for the Union

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clifton Hood
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
The Social ◽  
Democratic Nation ◽  
The City

For all the social chaos that phenomenal economic growth and heavy immigration had produced earlier in the century, upper-class New Yorkers had generally been optimistic that hoi polloi possessed enough self-control and independence to take direction from their betters and accept their proper place in the body politic. But the New York City draft riots of 1863 – the worse urban disorder in American history – seemed to show that entire communities lacked the self-discipline and orderliness required of the citizenry of a democratic nation and instead were prone to a savagery that had ripped the city apart. Drawing on their memories of the draft riots and on Victorian cultural values, the upper class utilized the Civil War to counter the blurring of class boundaries and social credentials caused by urban growth of the first half of the century. They came to classify came to classify many workers and immigrants as dangerous classes that threatened the social order- and themselves as a community of heritage and feeling that provided leadership in government, the economy, and society. At bottom these representations involved social control, and upper-class people used them to help harden class lines and gain an understanding of themselves and the rest of urban society that was coherent and compelling.

All Aboard the Louis Vuitton Train!

Pólemos ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-195
Author(s):  
Leif Dahlberg
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
The Social ◽  
Continuous Running

Abstract The article discusses fashion advertising as a means to access and understand contemporary social imaginary significations of the body politic, focusing on an advertising for Louis Vuitton. The article suggest that one can read advertising as a form of continuous, running commentary that society makes of itself, and through which one can unearth the social imaginary. The article finds a plethora of meanings in the selected advertising for Louis Vuitton, but the central finding is that the fashion advertising represents community as an absence of community; in other words as a deficit that the brand somehow is able to rectify.

scholarly journals Humour in Sports Coaching: ‘It’s a Funny Old Game’

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 744-762 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Nicholas Edwards ◽  
Robyn L Jones
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Role ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Ethnographic Film ◽  
The Social ◽  
Field Notes ◽  
Sports Coaching

The primary purpose of this article was to investigate the use and manifestation of humour within sports coaching. This was particularly in light of the social significance of humour as a critical component in cultural creation and negotiation. Data were gathered from a 10-month ethnographic study that tracked the players and coaches of Senghenydd City Football Club (a pseudonym) over the course of a full season. Precise methods of data collection included participant observation, reflective personal field notes, and ethnographic film. The results demonstrated the dominating presence of both ‘inclusionary putdowns’ and ‘disciplinary humour’, particularly in relation to how they contributed to the production and maintenance of the social order. Finally, a reflective conclusion discusses the temporal nature of the collective understanding evident among the group at Senghenydd, and its effect on the humour evident. In doing so, the work contributes to the body of knowledge regarding the social role of humour within sports coaching.

scholarly journals Approaches to the World

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gesa Lindemann
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Temporal Order ◽  
The Body ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Linguistic Turn ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
The Social ◽  
Material Turn ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Responding to the critique of methodological ethnocentrism, Lindemann develops a new general social theory that is also highly sensitive to socio-cultural differences. Drawing on Helmuth Plessner’s theory of excentric positionality, social order is understood as a symbolically and technically mediated spatio-temporal order that is integrated by an order of violence. Lindemann hereby brings together three significant aspects of recent debates: the debates on the necessity of a theoretical turn (such as the linguistic turn, the material turn, the body turn, the pictorial turn and the spatial turn); second, the debates on the actor status of non-humans and the borders of the social world, and third, the discussions about the role of violence in structuring social processes.

Inclusions: Concerning a Theory and Aesthetics of Police

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Vogl
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
The Body ◽  
Friedrich Schiller ◽  
The Social ◽  
New Form

AbstractSince the eighteenth century what is known as the ›body politic‹ has duplicated itself in a very specific way. Alongside the models of the social contract we can observe, under the label ›police‹, the emergence of political knowledge dealing with the regulation of social, economic, medical and moral spheres. This tension between sovereign representation and the empirical ›body politic‹ became critical after the French Revolution. The works of Friedrich Schiller may serve as an example of the intense exchange between aesthetic and police-theoretical problems: a quest to mediate between the laws of reason and the scope of empirical forces; and to grasp the economics of a political power which converts the inclusion of the excluded into a new form of degenerate life.

Out of touch, out of tune: the social-political construction of atmospheric walls during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kandida Purnell
Keyword(s):  
Constitutive Relation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Uk

This article contributes to knowledge on the co-constitutive relation between emotions and bodies by describing the mechanisms enabling the social-political construction of ‘atmospheric walls’ (Ahmed, 2014) during the COVID-19 pandemic first wave of spring-summer 2020. Using auto- and digital ethnographies this article underlines gendered, raced and classed angles of arrival into the spring-summer ‘first wave’ and describes the social-political implications of individual bodies and parts of the body politic losing touch through the pandemic. In particular, this article highlights three mechanisms – angles of arrival, discord and losing touch – leading to the containment of grief within parts of the UK body politic, which, through the COVID-19 pandemic first wave worked to build up atmospheric walls segregating parts of the body politic and allow the continued circulation of some bodies while facilitating the continued circulation, use and using up of others.

scholarly journals Risk as Moral Danger: The Social and Political Functions of Risk Discourse in Public Health

1993 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Lupton
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Social ◽  
Divine Retribution ◽  
Multiple Meanings ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Risk Discourse

Risk is a concept with multiple meanings and is ideologically loaded. The author reviews the literature on risk perception and risk as a sociocultural construct, with particular reference to the domain of public health. Pertinent examples of the political and moral function of risk discourse in public health are given. The author concludes that risk discourse is often used to blame the victim, to displace the real reasons for ill-health upon the individual, and to express outrage at behavior deemed socially unacceptable, thereby exerting control over the body politic as well as the body corporeal. Risk discourse is redolent with the ideologies of mortality, danger, and divine retribution. Risk, as it is used in modern society, therefore cannot be considered a neutral term.

Manhood, Femaleness, and Power: A Cultural Analysis of Prehistoric Images of Reproduction

1992 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 579-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Uli Linke
Keyword(s):  
Social Order ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Social Facts ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Hierarchies ◽  
Collective Representations

Ideologies of reproduction are social facts, collective representations, of the dramatic ways in which human beings construct and appropriate gender for the imaging of social reality. Such symbolic universes are often centered on the body (Foucault 1980; Martin 1989; Turner 1984; Douglas 1973). As a template of cultural signification, the body becomes a model through which the social order can be apprehended. For instance, gender hierarchies are sometimes envisioned by means of an anatomical or physiological paradigm (Needham 1973; Hugh-Jones 1979; Theweleit 1987). However, the operation of societal power is generally focused on women's bodies and bodily processes. Women, according to a widespread (and controversial) paradigm, are grounded in nature by virtue of the dictates of their bodies: menstruation, pregnancy, birth (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 1969; Ortner 1974; Ardener 1975; Mac-Cormack and Strathern 1986).

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