Health and Illness, The Self and the Body

Author(s):  
Willemijn Ruberg
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirta Suquet

Resumen: A través de la lectura de las crónicas sobre el VIH/sida de Marta Dillon y Joaquín Hurtado, analizo cómo estos autores narran la convivencia crónica con el VIH que les impone el aprendizaje de nuevas formas de gestionar la vida y de autorrepresentarse. Estudio las crónicas no solo como estrategias terapéuticas para lidiar con los profundos cambios corporales y emocionales que trae consigo el diagnóstico, sino también como estrategias políticas para incidir en la normalización y percepción social de la enfermedad como entidad crónica. La reescritura del cuerpo, consustancial al devenir crónico de la enfermedad, enfrenta a los autores a cuestionar la improductividad o incapacidad de los sujetos afectados por el VIH, y los límites entre el yo y el otro (virus); la salud y la enfermedad, todo ello en el contexto de la medicalización contemporánea de los cuerpos y las subjetividades. Palabras Clave: VIH/sida, representación, crónicas, enfermedad crónica, cuerpo, subjetividad Abstract: Through the reading of the chronicles on HIV / AIDS by Marta Dillon and Joaquín Hurtado, I analyze how these authors narrate the chronic coexistence with the HIV that imposes on them the learning of new ways of managing life and self-representation. I study the texts by Dillon and Hurtado not only as therapeutic strategies to deal with the impacts on bodies and emotions that the diagnosis brings but also as political strategies in order to change the social perception of the disease as a chronic condition. Through the rewriting of the body, inherent to the chronic evolution of the disease, the authors question the unproductivity or incapacity of the subjects affected by HIV and the limits between the self and the other (virus), health and illness, all in the context of the contemporary medicalization of bodies and subjectivities. Key words: HIV/AIDS, representation, chronic disease, chronicle, body, subjectivity


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-66
Author(s):  
Monika Szuba

The essay discusses selected poems from Thomas Hardy's vast body of poetry, focusing on representations of the self and the world. Employing Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts such as the body-subject, wild being, flesh, and reversibility, the essay offers an analysis of Hardy's poems in the light of phenomenological philosophy. It argues that far from demonstrating ‘cosmic indifference’, Hardy's poetry offers a sympathetic vision of interrelations governing the universe. The attunement with voices of the Earth foregrounded in the poems enables the self's entanglement in the flesh of the world, a chiasmatic intertwining of beings inserted between the leaves of the world. The relation of the self with the world is established through the act of perception, mainly visual and aural, when the body becomes intertwined with the world, thus resulting in a powerful welding. Such moments of vision are brief and elusive, which enhances a sense of transitoriness, and, yet, they are also timeless as the self becomes immersed in the experience. As time is a recurrent theme in Hardy's poetry, this essay discusses it in the context of dwelling, the provisionality of which is demonstrated in the prevalent sense of temporality, marked by seasons and birdsong, which underline the rhythms of the world.


Author(s):  
Joshua S. Walden

The book’s epilogue explores the place of musical portraiture in the context of posthumous depictions of the deceased, and in relation to the so-called posthuman condition, which describes contemporary changes in the relationship of the individual with such aspects of life as technology and the body. It first examines Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo to view how Bernard Herrmann’s score relates to issues of portraiture and the depiction of the identity of the deceased. It then considers the work of cyborg composer-artist Neil Harbisson, who has aimed, through the use of new capabilities of hybridity between the body and technology, to convey something akin to visual likeness in his series of Sound Portraits. The epilogue shows how an examination of contemporary views of posthumous and posthuman identities helps to illuminate the ways music represents the self throughout the genre of musical portraiture.


2000 ◽  
Vol 86 (3_part_2) ◽  
pp. 1149-1154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brandy S. Wegner ◽  
Anita M. Hartmann ◽  
C. R. Geist

The purpose of this study was to assess the immediate influence of brief exposure to images taken from print media on the general self-consciousness and body self-consciousness of 67 college women. After viewing photographs of either thin female models or control photographs, the women completed the Self-consciousness Scale and the Body Self-consciousness Questionnaire. Although a was .45, the college women who looked at images of thin female models gave immediate ratings significantly ( p < .001) higher on both general Self-consciousness and Body Self-consciousness than those who looked at control images.


2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-211
Author(s):  
Ashjan Ajour

Abstract This article explores the body as a site of subjectivity production during a hunger strike in Occupied Palestine. It further explores the former political prisoners’ theory of subjectivity as it emerges through their praxis and philosophy of freedom. Although the body is the principal tool that the hunger strikers use, they don't consider it the decisive factor in attaining their goal. For that they build on the immaterial strength that develops with the deterioration of the body and from which they construct the concept of rouh (soul). This is expressed through the formation of contradictory binaries: body versus soul and body versus mind. The article shows that the hunger strike not only is a political strategy for liberation; it also moves into a spiritualization of the struggle. It uses and problematizes Foucault's “technologies of the self” to theorize the specific formation of subjectivity in the Palestinian hunger strike under colonial conditions, and it contributes to theories of subjectivation. The hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent technologies of resistance to transcend the colonial and carceral constraints on their freedom and create the capacity for the transformation from a submissive subject to a resistant one.


Author(s):  
Robbie Duschinsky ◽  
Sarah Foster

The theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust introduced by Peter Fonagy and colleagues at the Anna Freud Centre has been an important perspective on mental health and illness. This book is the first comprehensive account and evaluation of this perspective. The book explores 20 primary concepts that organize the contributions of Fonagy and colleagues: adaptation, aggression, the alien self, culture, disorganized attachment, epistemic trust, hypermentalizing, reflective function, the p-factor, pretend mode, the primary unconscious, psychic equivalence, mental illness, mentalizing, mentalization-based therapy, non-mentalizing, the self, sexuality, the social environment, and teleological mode. The biographical and social context of the development of these ideas is examined. The book also specifies the current strengths and limitations of the theory of mentalizing and epistemic trust, with attention to the implications for both clinicians and researchers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-115
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Hanan

This essay (re)presents my own experiences living with attention deficit disorder (ADD) as a child and adult to provide a radically historical, contextual, and critical autoethnographic conceptualization of this “learning disability.” Specifically, by building upon Ragan Fox’s “auto-archeological” method, a critical perspective that “unite[s] autoethnography and Foucault’s theories of discourse,” I draw upon institutional artifacts, psychiatric diagnoses, and interviews with close family members to show that ADD is a “technology of the self” that economizes the body in accordance with a distinctly neoliberal temporality. This temporalizing process, I show, is reinforced by a range of other neoliberal technologies of selfhood and ultimately cultivates the very “deficit framework” that ADD diagnoses are aimed at healing. The conclusion questions the legitimacy of ADD outside of the various technological interfaces that make the disability visible as a public problem and considers the intimate connections between neoliberalism, ableism, and the contemporary university.


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