Bodies that Still Matter

2021 ◽  
pp. 33-42
Author(s):  
Judith Butler
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
The Body ◽  
Political World ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Problem

This chapter starts with an obvious presupposition: no body can sustain itself on its own. The body is not a self-subsisting kind of being; it is, rather, given over to others in order to persist. What does it mean to be “given over” to others, and to have this as a constitutive feature of embodied life? It may be that we require care, or that we are vulnerable in a way that cannot be overcome. How do these two terms work in relation to embodied lives that encounter unlivable situations as a result of unaddressed exposure or infrastructural failures of care? The bodies that assemble to object to unlivable conditions make certain kinds of demands. How do we understand the form and aim of such demands on the part of bodies that require support, address, and conditions for persistence? This chapter seeks to show that the kind of claim bodies make on politics follows from the radical lack of self-sufficiency that characterizes bodies more generally. The lack of self-sufficiency is not a political problem, but politics emerges precisely when the social organization of what Marx called “basic requirements” consistently fail and “basic requirements” begin to make their claim on the broader social and political world.

Governing Homelessness through Running

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 88-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan C Clift
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self In Relation ◽  
For Profit ◽  
Not For Profit ◽  
Development Organizations ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
The Social ◽  
A Site

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility.

Touch in Its Social and Historical Aspects II

2018 ◽  
pp. 93-118
Author(s):  
Aniket Jaaware
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
The Body ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Historical Aspects ◽  
The Social

This chapter focuses on the social organization of touch. When one talks about the social organization of touch, they are talking about the organization of the meanings of the kinds of touch: That is what is being regulated and organized. In urban centers, the substance on which the regulations operate is undergoing a shift. Inasmuch as there is the situation of people of different castes forcibly mixing together under the rubric of acquisition, the body begins to stray out of the orbit of regulations. Indeed, in the ostensibly public places, the bodies themselves are more or less without regulations of the traditional kind. Thus, the most prominent occasion of involuntary touch is to be found in these public places. The more communal kind of touch is still obtained on festive and ritual occasions, where the inherited meanings of touch still operate across generations.

Bolognina gym

Ethnography ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-310
Author(s):  
Giuseppe Scandurra
Keyword(s):  
Social Organization ◽  
Rapid Change ◽  
Social World ◽  
Children Of Immigrants ◽  
The Body ◽  
Vocational School ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Family Responsibilities ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World

Abstract This article describes the social organization of the ‘Tranvieri’ boxing gym in Bolognina, a working class Bologna neighbourhood that has seen rapid change over the last 20 years due to the closure of factories and arrival of immigrants, especially from the Maghreb. The population of the gym has changed accordingly: currently, about two-thirds of those attending the gym as a leisure centre are children of immigrants. I have studied the practices of everyday life, the ‘techniques of the body’ of these young boxers born in Italy but without citizenship, who frequent the gym daily after vocational school or work and attending to family responsibilities. For these young men, boxing is not a solution to the frustrations inflicted by a social world they perceive as indifferent, if not hostile, towards them; rather, it offers them a chance to be represented within that world as something other than merely excluded. As scholars have shown, boxing is a male world: women are perceived as extraneous to the gym and, although two or three women practise boxing at Tranvieri, female boxing is generally met with disapproval. The tension between the boxing world and the world of women is also exhibited in the conflict between trainers, who wish to strictly control the athletes in terms of diet, schedules and sexual practices, and the boxers’ mothers, wives and girlfriends.

Fictions of the Human Right to Health: Writing Against the Postcolonial Exotic in Western Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary J. Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Health Research ◽  
Western Medicine ◽  
Scientific Method ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
The Body ◽  
Health And Wellness ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Cultural Specificity ◽  
The Social

The last decade has witnessed far greater attention to the social determinants of health in health research, but literary studies have yet to address, in a sustained way, how narratives addressing issues of health across postcolonial cultural divides depict the meeting – or non-meeting – of radically differing conceptualisations of wellness and disease. This chapter explores representations of illness in which Western narrators and notions of the body are juxtaposed with conceptualisations of health and wellness entirely foreign to them, embedded as the former are in assumptions about Cartesian duality and the superiority of scientific method – itself often conceived of as floating (mysteriously) free from its own processes of enculturation and their attendant limits. In this respect my work joins Volker Scheid’s, in this volume, in using the capacity of critical medical humanities to reassert the cultural specificity of what we have come to know as contemporary biomedicine, often assumed to be

A body without a head

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Chavoshian ◽  
Sophia Park
Keyword(s):  
Liberation Theology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Women's Spirituality ◽  
Passive Condition ◽  
Sexual Identities ◽  
Logical Square ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminine Sexuality ◽  
Body Shapes ◽  
Body Theory

Along with the recent development of various theories of the body, Lacan’s body theory aligns with postmodern thinkers such as Michael Foucault and Maurice Merlot-Ponti, who consider body social not biological. Lacan emphasizes the body of the Real, the passive condition of the body in terms of formation, identity, and understanding. Then, this condition of body shapes further in the condition of bodies of women and laborers under patriarchy and capitalism, respectively. Lacan’s ‘not all’ position, which comes from the logical square, allows women to question patriarchy’s system and alternatives of sexual identities. Lacan’s approach to feminine sexuality can be applied to women’s spirituality, emphasizing multiple narratives of body and sexual identities, including gender roles. In the social discernment and analysis in the liberation theology, we can employ the capitalist discourse, which provides a tool to understand how people are manipulated by late capitalist society, not knowing it. Lacan’s theory of ‘a body without a head’ reflects the current condition of the human body, which manifests lack, yet including some possibilities for transforming society.

Myriad Aspects of Secular Thinking on Malayali Cuisine

GIS Business ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 202-206
Author(s):  
SAJITHA M
Keyword(s):  
Social Status ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Social Indicators ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Healthy Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Civilized Society

Food is one of the main requirements of human being. It is flattering for the preservation of wellbeing and nourishment of the body.  The food of a society exposes its custom, prosperity, status, habits as well as it help to develop a culture. Food is one of the most important social indicators of a society. History of food carries a dynamic character in the socio- economic, political, and cultural realm of a society. The food is one of the obligatory components in our daily life. It occupied an obvious atmosphere for the augmentation of healthy life and anticipation against the diseases.  The food also shows a significant character in establishing cultural distinctiveness, and it reflects who we are. Food also reflected as the symbol of individuality, generosity, social status and religious believes etc in a civilized society. Food is not a discriminating aspect. It is the part of a culture, habits, addiction, and identity of a civilization.Food plays a symbolic role in the social activities the world over. It’s a universal sign of hospitality.[1]

Körpertechniken

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erhard Schüttpelz
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
The Social

The contribution re-establishes Marcel Mauss's concept of body functional techniques: the social-anthropological basis, the theoretical technical position and the systematic programming of this term. According to Mauss, modern body functional techniques and their media inventions can be interpreted in different ways: as strategies for the reduction of the body and as a project of a reciprocal, psychosomatic, ritualistic and medial intensification.

Unmaking and Remaking the World in Long-Term Solitary Confinement

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 16
Author(s):  
Lisa Guenther
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Solitary Confinement ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
State Prison ◽  
Legal Documents ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Civil Death

In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry analyzes the structure of torture as an unmaking of the world in which the tools that ought to support a person’s embodied capacities are used as weapons to break them down. The Security Housing Unit (SHU) of California’s Pelican Bay State Prison functions as a weaponized architecture of torture in precisely this sense; but in recent years, prisoners in the Pelican Bay Short Corridor have re-purposed this weaponized architecture as a tool for remaking the world through collective resistance. This resistance took the form of a hunger strike in which prisoners exposed themselves to the possibility of biological death in order to contest the social and civil death of solitary confinement. By collectively refusing food, and by articulating the meaning and motivation of this refusal in articles, interviews, artwork, and legal documents, prisoners reclaimed and expanded their perceptual, cognitive, and expressive capacities for world-making, even in a space of systematic torture.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document