scholarly journals Weaving the Body Politic: The Role of Textile Production in Athenian Democracy as Expressed by the Function of and Imagery on the Éπίνητρον

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Dena Gilby
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Archaic ◽  
Women Consumers ◽  
Athenian Democracy ◽  
Textile Production ◽  
Political Background ◽  
City State ◽  
Targeted Messages

An examination of the historical and political background of Athens, combined with close readings of several Athenian ἐπίνητρα whose dates span the Late Archaic after the institution of democratic rule and Classical Periods, reveals the possibility that the iconography conveys targeted messages to women consumers – who although perhaps not the purchasers of the ἐπίνητρα, are certainly the ones using them – that their their textile contributions to the πόλις (city-state) play a role in the continued success of Athenian democracy.

Receptions of the Past: Commemoration, Racism, Desire

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
White Privilege ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Race And Racism ◽  
Lesbian And Gay ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.

Sex, Work, and the Victorians

2020 ◽  
pp. 61-80
Author(s):  
Nicola J. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Sexual Deviance ◽  
Commercial Sex ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stimulation Of

Focusing on Victorian England, this chapter examines how sex was increasingly constructed as something that was primarily biological in nature, and how this was bound up with discourses of prostitution as a threat to the reproduction of the body politic. In the first section, the author considers how the pathologization of commercial sex as abnormal and unhealthy worked to naturalize the public/private split on which capitalist development rested. In the second section, the author connects the medical, moral, and juridical regulation of sex work to the suppression and stimulation of other modes of sexual deviance including homosexuality. In the final section, the author explores the role of race and empire in constituting white, bourgeois sexuality as natural, privileged, and the antithesis of commercialized sex.

Treating the Body Politic: The Medical Metaphor of Political Rule in Late Medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan

2008 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Shogimen
Keyword(s):  
Medical Treatment ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Cultural Perspective ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Medieval Europe ◽  
George Lakoff ◽  
Medical Metaphors

AbstractThe essay examines medical metaphors in the discourse on government from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's theory of metaphor, a comparison of medical metaphors in the political writings in late medieval Europe (c. 1250–c. 1450) and Tokugawa Japan (1602–1867) demonstrates that the European notion of medical treatment as the eradication of the causes of diseases magnified the coercive and punitive aspects of government, while the Japanese notion of medical treatment as the art of daily healthcare served to accentuate the government's role of preventing conflicts and maintaining stability. These differing images of medical treatment metaphorically structured contrasting conceptions of government in the two historical worlds.

scholarly journals Archives, promises, values: Forensic infrastructures in times of austerity

2020 ◽  
pp. 0308275X2097407
Author(s):  
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo ◽  
Silvia Posocco
Keyword(s):  
Forensic Science ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Differential Impact ◽  
Genetic Sequencing ◽  
Sequencing Technologies ◽  
Forensic Service ◽  
Genetic Science ◽  
Data Objects

This article analyses the role of infrastructures in the ‘bioinformational turn’ in forensic science and examines processes through which evidence is constituted, validated or challenged in and through domains of expertise that engage different techniques, data, objects and knowledges through infrastructural arrangements. While the digitisation of the infrastructures that underpin forensic service delivery promised connectivity, prosperity and wellbeing, in reality it also brought forward new levels of risk and vulnerability, generating new tensions and frictions in the body politic. As genetic science reaches post-archival horizons through new genetic sequencing technologies, forensic science in post-archival times raises questions concerning the differential impact of the fragmentation of analytical and archival infrastructures and increasingly asynchronous bureaucracies whose role is displaced by the relative autonomy of datasets and computational architectures that elude governance, oversight and citizens’ scrutiny.

scholarly journals How to Do Things with Surfaces: The Politics and Poetics of Victorian Surfaces

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Sibylle Baumbach ◽  
Ulla Ratheiser
Keyword(s):  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Surface Culture ◽  
Queen Victoria ◽  
Medical Treatises ◽  
Victorian Literature And Culture

AbstractThe opening chapter introduces and contextualizes the politics and poetics of Victorian surfaces. First, we delineate the increasing interests in both natural and constructed surfaces by taking a closer look at discourses that reflect a growing fascination with surfaces, including (pseudo-)medical treatises on physiognomy. Secondly, we focus on the politics of surface readings by scrutinizing the politics of various visual representations of Queen Victoria and the (self-)fashioning of the body politic at the centre of a growing surface culture. Third, we develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of the poetics of Victorian surfaces by analyzing the attention paid to (or withheld from) surfaces in Victorian literature and culture. By examining the role of surface reading in Victorian texts, we offer an overview of different surface cultures and debates surrounding the challenges attached to surfaces, explore how to do things with surfaces, and thereby outline what can be described as a ‘poetics of surface.’

scholarly journals The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 126-147 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Douglass
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Contract ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Contract Theory ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
Central Purpose

Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.

Whither the Culture War?

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Dombrink
Keyword(s):  
Republican Party ◽  
Millennial Generation ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Culture War ◽  
Strategic Plans ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Social Conservatives

This chapter concludes the book by looking at his re-election four years later, on November 6, 2012. I present data on the impact of the millennial generation and the rise of the progressive “ascendant majority” (and issues such as contraception); the suggestion of strategic plans and “rebranding” of the Republican Party, and the internecine struggles that has produced; an analysis of the role of polarization in the body politic; and the conclusion, which analyzes these elements and predicts the complications of populism (including “libertarian populism”), the reduced salience and role of social conservatives, and the end, finally, of the potency and relevance of “Reagan Democrats.”

Imperial Receptions

2019 ◽  
pp. 187-232
Author(s):  
Hunter H. Gardner
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Traditional Role ◽  
Good Government ◽  
Silius Italicus ◽  
The Status ◽  
Latin Epic ◽  
Punic Wars

Chapter 6 explores the appropriation of late Republican and Augustan treatments of pestilence in Imperial literature. Seneca’s version of Oedipus’ tragedy turns to Latin epic, rather than Sophocles, to articulate conditions of pestilence in Thebes. This language reflects upon Oedipus’ traditional role as φαρμακός‎, both infected “carrier” and saviour to the civic body, clarifying how competing claims of individuality and collectivity have determined the pathology of earlier literary treatments of plague. By inscribing plague within a text that questions standards of good government, Seneca secures the role of contagion as a tool for examining the health of the body politic in Neronian Rome. The epics of Silius Italicus and Lucan also invoke the plagues of their predecessors in contexts of Roman civil discord, and use the plague’s power to enact the dissolution of individual identity as a way of indicting competition for political distinction. Lucan relies on the symptomology of his predecessors in his account of pestilence afflicting Pompey’s soldiers, but emphasizes the link between contagion and internal conflict by casting both the disease and the fervour for civil war as rabies. Silius, in the Punica, describes an outbreak of pestilence during the Punic Wars that brings about widespread destruction. But in answer to the status-leveling and dehumanizing effects characterizing preceding plague narratives, he depicts the Roman general Marcellus escaping the plague and recovering distinction or “exemplarity” in a way that does not threaten the health of the body politic.

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