Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic


Book Description

Today humans are often seen as commodities rather than image bearers. Classics scholar Nadya Williams brings insight from the beliefs and practices of the early church about motherhood, raising children, and human life, suggesting there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person above our economic production.




Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic


Book Description

In Romanticism, Maternity, and the Body Politic, Julie Kipp examines Romantic writers' treatments of motherhood and maternal bodies in the context of the legal, medical, educational and socioeconomic debates about motherhood so popular during the period. She argues that these discussions turned the physical processes associated with mothering into matters of national importance. The privately shared space signified by the womb or the maternal breast were made public by the widespread interest in the workings of the maternal body. These private spaces evidenced for writers of the period the radical exposure of mother and child to one another - for good or ill. Kipp's primary concern is to underline the ways that writers used representations of mother-child bonds as ways of naturalizing, endorsing and critiquing Enlightenment constructions of interpersonal and intercultural relations. This fascinating literary and cultural study will appeal to all scholars of Romanticism.




From the Womb to the Body Politic


Book Description

In Russia during the second half of the eighteenth century, a public conversation emerged that altered perceptions of pregnancy, birth, and early childhood. Children began to be viewed as a national resource, and childbirth heralded new members of the body politic. The exclusively female world of mothers, midwives, and nannies came under the scrutiny of male physicians, state institutions, a host of zealous reformers, and even Empress Catherine the Great. Making innovative use of obstetrical manuals, belles lettres, children’s primers, and other primary documents from the era, Anna Kuxhausen draws together many discourses—medical, pedagogical, and political—to show the scope and audacity of new notions about childrearing. Reformers aimed to teach women to care for the bodies of pregnant mothers, infants, and children according to medical standards of the Enlightenment. Kuxhausen reveals both their optimism and their sometimes fatal blind spots in matters of implementation. In examining the implication of women in public, even political, roles as agents of state-building and the civilizing process, From the Womb to the Body Politic offers a nuanced, expanded view of the Enlightenment in Russia and the ways in which Russians imagined their nation while constructing notions of childhood.




Black Mothers and the National Body Politic


Book Description

Black Mothers and the National Body Politic: The Narrative Positioning of the Black Maternal Body from the Civil War Period through the Present focuses on the struggles and triumphs of black motherhood in six works of narrative prose composed from the Civil War period through the present. Andrea Powell Wolfe examines the functioning of the black maternal body to both define and undermine ideal white womanhood; the physical scarring of the black mother and the reclamation of the black maternal body as a site of subversion and nurturance as well as erotic empowerment; and the construction of oppressive discourses surrounding black female bodies and reproduction and the development of resistance to these types of discourses. These tensions undergird a multifaceted discussion of the narrative positioning of the black maternal body within and in relationship to the national body politic, an inherently exclusionary and restrictive metaphorical entity constructed and socially contracted over time by an already politically empowered citizenry. Ultimately, close analysis of the texts under study suggests that the United States—as a figurative body complete with imagined “parts” that perform separate functions, from intelligence to labor, ingestion to expulsion—has simultaneously used and cast off the black maternal body over the course of centuries.




The Book of the Body Politic


Book Description

Christine de Pizan was born in Venice and raised in Paris at the court of Charles V of France. Widowed at the age of twenty-five, she turned to writing as a source of comfort and income, and went on to produce a remarkable series of books, including poetry, politics, chivalry, warfare, religion and philosophy. She is considered to be France's first female professional writer. This was the first translation into modern English of Christine de Pizan's major political work, The Book of the Body Politic. Written during the Hundred Years' War, it discusses the education and behaviour appropriate for princes, nobility and common people, so that all classes can understand their responsibilities towards society as a whole. A product of a time of civil unrest, The Book of the Body Politic offers a medieval political theory of interdependence and social responsibility from the perspective of an educated woman.




American Body Politics


Book Description

Felipe Smith tracks the emergence of particular gender images--such as white witch, black madonna, mammy, and white lady--and their impact on early African American literature. Smith gives us a remarkable synthesis of historical readings combined with a highly original contribution to the comprehension of racial thought and literary writing.




Postcommunism and the Body Politic


Book Description

The epidemic of mass rape in the former Yugoslavia has illustrated once again, and in particularly brutal fashion, the inextricable relationship between national politics, sexual politics, and body politics. The nexus of these three forces is highly charged in any culture, at any time in history, but especially so among cultures in which rapid, even cataclysmic, changes in material realities and national self-conceptions are eroding or overwhelming previously secure boundaries. The postcommunist moment in the so-called Second World--Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union--has dramatically exposed the opportunities and dangers that arise when the political, cultural, and economic foundations of a society are de- and then re-structured. Gender roles and relations, expressions of sexuality or attempts to recontain them, representations of the body, especially the female body, and the larger, cultural meanings it assumes, are particularly marked sites to witness the performance of complex national dramas of crisis and change. This groundbreaking volume turns its attention to the Second World, specifically to such subjects as the birth of the sex media and porn industry in Russia; Russian women and alcoholism; cinema in post-communist Hungary; patriotism and gender in Poland; sexual dissidence in Eastern Europe; and women in the former Yugoslavia. >[ go to the Genders website ]




Bodies, Politics, and African Healing


Book Description

This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.




Body/Politics


Book Description

Negotiating the terrain between techno-optimism and eco-pessimism, this work establishes the political connections between technologies of the body, property, and the environment. Specific technologies of the body, such as surrogacy and in vitro fertilization, are examined in relation to their political and legal constructions. Next, Shevory analyzes private property as an evolving historical concept that implicates environmental and biological transformations with particular attention given to biotechnology cases. He then considers the body's appearance and its alterations through plastic surgery, dieting, or piercing as political constructions. A theoretical overview specifies technoprogressivist (liberal) and technophobic traditions, especially as they have evolved in the United States during the second half of the 20th-century. Drawing upon critical and feminist theories, Shevory specifies a body politics that negotiates the terrain between these two traditions. Body technologies and markets, he argues, interact to consolidate and reinforce dominant systems of power, while at the same time resisting and sometimes subverting them. Technology is often a factor in the fragmentation of evolving political ideological discourses on the left and right; however, the resulting instabilities create the potential for both the expansion of global capital and its subversion via democratic interventions.




Body Politics Rethinking Gender and Masculinity


Book Description

The research on men and masculinities traces back to the women’s and gay liberation movements that challenged existing understandings of gender and power. This proposes to look into gender as socially constructed than what was earlier thought to be biological. As a logical extension of Feminism, Masculinity Studies looks into sex/gender as a discursive social construct and tries to understand them through theoretical hermeneutics. Instead of considering masculinity to be ‘natural character type’, ‘a behavioural average’ or ‘a norm’, the focus should be given to the process through which the gendered bodies perform. In this regard, sex/gender is not fixed, instead is in a continuous flux; thus, masculinity should be recognised as a gender presentation that is continuously transforming and evolving. This volume, Body Politics: Rethinking Gender and Masculinity will engage with the current developments in the field of Masculinity Studies and will try to diversify the issues of gender and masculinity.