The Artifice of Syphilitic and Damaged Female Bodies in Literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-82
Author(s):  
Encarnación Juárez-Almendros
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Common Representation ◽  
Female Prostitutes ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
La Lozana Andaluza ◽  
The Ideal

This chapter examines the literary depiction of the broken and contaminated corporality of female prostitutes as illustrated in Francisco Delicado’s La Lozana andaluza [Portrait of Lozana: The Lusty Andalusian Woman] (1528), Miguel de Cervantes’s Casamiento engañoso [The Deceitful Marriage] (1613), La tía fingida [The pretended aunt], a novel attributed to Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo’s satiric poetry written in the first half of the seventeenth century. These works share a common representation of syphilis as a gendered metaphor of physical and moral decay that functions in opposition both to male embodiment and to the ideal of the integrity of the female body, expressed in the concept of virginity and chastity. Furthermore, they exemplify the development of the syphilitic trope through the century as well as the diverse solutions to taming alterity.

The Ideal Hero: A Seventeenth-Century Choice

1965 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 54-65
Author(s):  
F. K. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Ideal

‘I saw a knock-out’: Fatness, (In)visibility, and Desire in Shallow Hal

Somatechnics ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jackie Wykes
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Fat Body ◽  
Western Culture ◽  
Embodied Experience ◽  
Knock Out ◽  
Dominant Meaning ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Fat Bodies ◽  
Sexual Body

When the Farrelly brothers' movie Shallow Hal (2001) was released, one reviewer suggested that the film ‘might have been more honest if [it] had simply made Hal have a thing about fat women’ ( Kerr 2002 : 44). In this paper, I argue that Kerr hits the mark but misses the point. While the film's treatment of fat is undoubtedly problematic, I propose a ‘queer’ reading of the film, borrowing the idea of ‘double coding’ to show a text about desire for fat (female) bodies. I am not, however, seeking to position Shallow Hal as a fat-positive text; rather, I use it as a starting point to explore the legibility of the fat female body as a sexual body. In contemporary mainstream Western culture, fat is regarded as the antithesis of desire. This meaning is so deeply ingrained that representations of fat women as sexual are typically framed as a joke because desire for fat bodies is unimaginable; this is the logic by which Shallow Hal operates. The dominant meaning of fatness precludes recognition of the fat body as a sexual body. What is at issue is therefore not simply the lack of certain images, but a question of intelligibility: if the meaning of fat is antithetical to desire, how can the desire for – and of – fat bodies be intelligible as desire? This question goes beyond the realm of representation and into the embodied experience of fat sexuality.

BODY PRACTICES OF WOMEN IN THE LIGHT OF FEMINIST DEBATES

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-156 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Female Body ◽  
Sense Of Self ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Regulation ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Phenomenological Tradition ◽  
Academic Feminism ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Body Practices

The paper provides an analysis of the structuralist and phenomenological traditions in interpretation of female body practices. The structuralist intellectual tradition bases its methodology on concepts from social anthropology and philosophy that see the body as ‘ordered’ by social institutions. Structuralist approaches within academic feminism are focused on critical study of the social regulation of female bodies with respect to reproduction and sexualisation (health and beauty practices). The author focuses on the dominant physical ideal of femininity and the means for body pedagogics that have been constructed by patriarchal authority. In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the phenomenological tradition is focused on the “lived” body, embodied experience, and the personal motivation and values attached to body practices. This tradition has been influenced by a variety of schools of thought including philosophical anthropology, phenomenology and action theories in sociology. Within academic feminism, there are at least three phenomenologically oriented strategies of interpretation of female body practices. The first one is centred around women’s individual situation and bodily socialization; the second one studies interrelation between body practices and the sense of the self; and the third one postulates the potential of body practices to destabilize the dominant ideals of femininity and thus provides a theoretical basis for feminist activism. The phenomenological tradition primarily analyses the motivational, symbolic and value-based components of body practices as they interact with women’s corporeality and sense of self. In general, both structuralist and phenomenological traditions complement each other by focusing on different levels of analysis of female embodiment.

Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conflicting Interests ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Held Back

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.

Embodying the culture of achievement: Culture between illness and perfection is a ‘thin line’ – obtaining the ideal female body as an act of achievement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1354067X2110040
Author(s):  
Josefine Dilling ◽  
Anders Petersen
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Female Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Thin Line ◽  
Complex Processes ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Body Ideals

In this article, we argue that certain behaviour connected to the attempt to attain contemporary female body ideals in Denmark can be understood as an act of achievement and, thus, as an embodiment of the culture of achievement, as it is characterised in Præstationssamfundet, written by the Danish sociologist Anders Petersen (2016) Hans Reitzels Forlag . Arguing from cultural psychological and sociological standpoints, this article examines how the human body functions as a mediational tool in different ways from which the individual communicates both moral and aesthetic sociocultural ideals and values. Complex processes of embodiment, we argue, can be described with different levels of internalisation, externalisation and materialisation, where the body functions as a central mediator. Analysing the findings from a qualitative experimental study on contemporary body ideals carried out by the Danish psychologists Josefine Dilling and Maja Trillingsgaard, this article seeks to anchor such theoretical claims in central empirical findings. The main conclusions from the study are used to structure the article and build arguments on how expectations and ideals expressed in an achievement society become embodied.

Commentary: Why Opera? The Politics of an Emerging Genre

2006 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-409 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dennis Romano
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Family Strategies ◽  
The Ideal

The reason why opera became the preeminent musical form of the seventeenth century not only in Venice but also throughout Europe lies in the profound changes among European elites at the time, particularly regarding notions of nobility and individual roles within family strategies. The lyricism of operatic music became the ideal vehicle to express the era's social transformations.

Carnival Is Woman

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Trinidad And Tobago ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Feminist Perspective ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Female Bodies

What is most intriguing in the Carnivals today is the substantial increase in the number of women who play mas’ with some figures estimating as much as 70% of all players. This volume, probably the first of its kind to concentrate solely on women in Carnival, normalizes the contemporary Carnival especially as it is playedin Trinidad and Tobago by demonstrating not only their numerical strength but the kind of mas’that is featured. The bikini and beads or bikini and feathers or 'pretty mas' is the dominant mas’ in today’s Carnival. The players of today, mainly women, are signifying or symbolizing by this form of mas’, their own newly found empowerment as females and their resistance to the older cultural norms of male oppression. Several chapters discuss in detail the commoditisation of Carnival in which sex is used to enhance tourism and provide striking visual images for magazines and websites. Several put the emphasis on the unveiling of the female body and the hip rolling sexual movements called “winin” or sometimes just “it” as in “use your it.” What most of these chapters have in common however is the emphasis on the performance of scantily clad female bodies and their movements and gyrations. This volume provides a feminist perspective to the understanding of Carnival today.

"Ten Times More Difficult to Treat": Female Bodies in Medical Texts from Early Imperial China

NAN Nü ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 182-215 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Wilms
Keyword(s):  
Chronic Conditions ◽  
Female Body ◽  
Medical Literature ◽  
Negative Association ◽  
Medical Texts ◽  
The Family ◽  
Imperial China ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
Reproductive Processes ◽  
Positive Focus

AbstractThis paper examines the interpretation of female bodies by male medical authors in post-Han China, investigating medical theories and practices as reflected in the applied medical literature of "prescriptions for women." Between the Han and Song periods, this paper argues, the negative association of the female body with the vague category of pathologies "below the girdle," referring most notably to conditions of vaginal discharge, was replaced with a more positive focus on menstruation, which symbolized regular and predictable cycles of generativity and free flow. As male physicians came to recognize the female body as gendered and accepted the need for a specialized treatment of women, menstruation became the window through which they gained access to the hidden processes inside the female body. By "balancing/regulating the menses," they learned to treat and prevent such dreaded chronic conditions as infertility, susceptibility to cold, or general emaciation and weakness, all which were seen as related to the female reproductive processes. Thus, the practice of menstrual regulation ultimately served to ensure female fertility and the continuation of the family line.

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