Postmodern/Post-mortem Human Body-Parts: Grotesque Subjects in The Melancholy of Anatomy

This paper critiques the literary representation of the human body as a “clean” slate, an organically wholesome subject by delving into the postmodern body-writing of Shelley Jackson’s short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002). Building upon the idea of “metabody” or grotesque body-part as subjects, the flesh-characters, namely Egg, Sperm, Foetus, Cancer, Nerve, Phlegm, Blood, Milk and Fat, breaks apart from their marginality, and evolves in a rhizomatic structure, pressing their possibilities of manifold existence in a fantastical world. Through the lens of body studies critics (Mikhail Bakhtin and Elisabeth Grosz) and recent postmodern scholarship, the paper studies the performance of flesh-characters, creating a post-mortem pathology in literature. Jackson’s deviant approach re-maps the anatomy of the human body and engages in psychophysiological parodies, thereby disclosing social phobias pertaining to the repulsive sides of the human and feminine body. Metabodies are self-reflexive, postmodern grotesque, with micro-narratives; and their innovative representations give agency and consciousness to the usually discarded body-parts and fluids, thereby making the human body a non-normative and discursive text and context.

Faroeste brasileiro: a boi, a bala e a bíblia.

Throughout the years 1953-1979, bloomed a popular Brazilian cycle of films closely related to the North-American Western gender. Notwithstanding, these Westerns fell quickly into oblivion, mainly due their lack of aesthetics innovations and their undisguised commercial drive. Nevertheless, once it was bound to satisfy the collective phantasies of its audience, the corpus of these films displayed a plethora of representations pertaining to their sociocultural, historical and political environment. They provided a profuse amount of audiovisual material open to researches in a variety of fields – gender representation, psychosocial culture, authoritarian politics and ethics – which are still at work in actual Brazilian social, institutional and political practices. And since they were bound to please a masculine audience, Brazilian Western movies framed a striking fictional world underlined by the psychoanalytical theme of the figuration of women as the absolute model of alterity. Women were usually placed as imaginary emblems of private property, democratic values and/or Christian faith, which, by their turn, performed dramatically under three signifiers: the “Bull”, the “Bullet”, and the “Bible”. Depicted not as proper characters and deprived of dramatic motivations, they were, by consequence, liable to specific modalities of physical violence – abduction, torture, rape and murder. Cruelty against the feminine body blended together the misogynistic bias of Brazilian culture with the masculine impotence during the authoritarian dictatorship epoch in a framework which could only be furnished by the imaginary themes and structures of Western movie.

Merleau-Ponty on the Sexed Body

This paper engages with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of the sexed body in the Phenomenology of Perception. I focus on his notion of the sexual schema to show that, contrary to a number of feminist critiques, it does not (1) posit a neutral body overcoded by culturally-contingent sexual determinations or (2) erase the feminine body, but is informed by Merleau-Ponty particular version of the phenomenological reduction whereby factic determinations are “bracketed” to permit the object under study to reveal itself as it is rather than as we wish it to be or have been conditioned to think it. I subsequently defend Merleau-Ponty against the long-standing claim that entwining sexuality with existence prevents an analytic and by extension positive conception of sexuality by arguing that he rejects the monadic logic that this charge is premised on to instead challenge us to think of sexuality in terms of its integration with an individual’s entire embodied, embedded existence. The result is an analysis that emphasizes the ambiguity, afoundationalism, individuality, and open-ended immanent expressivity of sexuality.

Are Feminine Body Weight Norms Different for Black Students or in Black Schools? Girls’ Weight-Related Peer Acceptance across Racialized School Contexts

Adolescent girls with overweight or obesity are less socially integrated than their thinner peers. We examine racial-ethnic differences in girls’ weight-related friendship patterns, especially noting Black–white distinctions given their different norms about the ideal feminine form. We also test whether schools with more Black students see diminished weight-related differences in peer integration for all girls and/or for Black girls. Using 1994–1995 data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we predict the number of friendship nominations girls receive conditional on their weight status, race-ethnicity, and school’s racial composition. Both white and Black girls with overweight or obesity are less integrated than their thinner peers regardless of the school’s Black enrollment rate. Hispanic girls with overweight are more integrated than white girls with overweight, particularly in schools with low Black enrollments. The relative consistency of girls’ weight-related friendship patterns demonstrates the ubiquity of dominant feminine thinness norms.