Thinking of Beauty Transnationally

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alvaro Jarrín
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Global Industry ◽  
Colonial Histories

This concluding chapter reflects on the transnational dimensions of beauty. Beautification can be thought of as a global industry that takes on very different registers depending on the specific histories and the body politics where it emerges. Nonetheless, there are common methodologies and theoretical insights that allow us to think about beauty globally and about the ways it travels, producing certain forms of affect that transcend boundaries and which enable transnational biopolitical operations that are tied to both colonial histories and new forms of empire. The twin concepts of biopolitics and affect can be applied to many different contexts where beauty matters, and they allow us to think beyond the structure/agency or empowerment/disempowerment debates that have long plagued academic discussions of beauty practices.

Personhood and youth-making in contemporary Indigenous Amazonia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen ◽  
Alessandra Severino da Silva Manchinery
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Global South ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Indigenous Youth ◽  
Social Responsibilities ◽  
Brazilian Amazonia ◽  
University Studies ◽  
Social Belonging ◽  
Indigenous Voices

This essay looks at the construction of personhood in Brazilian Amazonia from the perspective of Indigenous youth. In Amazonian sociocosmology, personhood is constructed relationally, a process in which the body is a distinctive factor. Consequently, during schooling and university studies, young people have responded to and resisted representations and policies that have often silenced Indigenous voices and limited their fabrication of bodies. The contemporary social responsibilities of Indigenous youth and the challenges faced in undertaking them shape how their subjectivity, agency, and recognized social belonging are being constantly increased, removed, or even denied. The essay draws from anthropological theories of relational personhood, as well as ideas of geo- and body-politics present in theorizing on the Global South.

The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva

Hypatia ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 104-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Butler
Keyword(s):  
Psychoanalytic Theory ◽  
Julia Kristeva ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Linguistic Practice ◽  
Maternal Instinct ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Maternal Discourse ◽  
Symbolic Speech

Julia Kristeva attempts to expose the limits of Lacan's theory of language by revealing the semiotic dimension of language that it excludes. She argues that the semiotic potential of language is subversive, and describes the semiotic as a poetic-maternal linguistic practice that disrupts the symbolic, understood as culturally intelligible rule-governed speech. In the course of arguing that the semiotic contests the universality of the Symbolic, Kristeva makes several theoretical moves which end up consolidating the power of the Symbolic and paternal authority generally. She defends a maternal instinct as a pre-discursive biological necessity, thereby naturalizing a specific cultural configuration of maternity. In her use of psychoanalytic theory, she ends up claiming the cultural unintelligibility of lesbianism. Her distinction between the semiotic and the Symbolic operates to foreclose a cultural investigation into the genesis of precisely those feminine principles for which she claims a pre-discursive, naturalistic ontology. Although she claims that the maternal aspects of language are repressed in Symbolic speech and provide a critical possibility of displacing the hegemony of the paternal/symbolic, her very descriptions of the maternal appear to accept rather than contest the inevitable hegemony of the Symbolic. In conclusion, this essay offers a genealogical critique of the maternal discourse in Kristeva and suggests that recourse to the maternal does not constitute a subversive strategy as Kristeva appears to assume.

Somatechnologies

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 110-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susanne Lettow ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Philosophy Of Technology ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Politics ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Technological Means ◽  
A Minor ◽  
Body Technologies

Until now, the body has played only a minor role in the philosophy of technology. However, more elaborate reflections on the relation between technology and the body are needed because of the advent of somatechnologies – technologies intentionally geared toward modifying bodies and that use bodily substances as technological means. The article discusses some approaches within the philosophy of technology that prove to be fruitful in this context. The article argues thatsomatechnical modifications of bodies should be understood as elements of ‘body technologies’ and body politics in a broader sense. In such a perspective, concepts of the body developed by Judith Butler and Michel Foucault should be adopted by a praxeological philosophy of technology.

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