Description
Book SynopsisA collection of essays in feminist philosophy. Contributors theorize how we act through differently acculturated bodies in a variety of interpersonal and political contexts. Addresses recent feminist challenges to bring the body more fully and positively into theory.
Trade Review“Bridging the gap that too often exists between theories of agency and embodiment, this exciting collection examines how bodies are agenetic and how human agency in the world is embodied. This volume will be welcomed by feminists and others who are interested in the ethical, political, economic, and global dimensions of human bodily agency.”
—Shannon Sullivan,Penn State University
“The essays contained in this volume offer fascinating philosophical, religious, scientific, historical, and political reflections on what it means to express (and fail to express) agency in and through one’s bodily interactions with other bodies. Above all, Embodiment and Agency reveals the diverse ways in which the experience of agency is always already embodied, thereby countering traditional liberal views that identify agency with conscious activity or a particular set of cognitive capacities.”
—Gail Weiss,George Washington University
Table of ContentsContents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Minding Bodies
Letitia Meynell
Part I: Becoming Embodied Subjects
1. Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming a Subject
Kym Maclaren
2. Racial Grief and Melancholic Agency
Angela Failler
3. A Knowing That Resided in My Bones: Sensuous Embodiment and Trans Social Movement
Alexis Shotwell
4. The Phrenological Impulse and the Morphology of Character
Rebecca Kukla
5. Personal Identity, Narrative Integration, and Embodiment
Catriona Mackenzie
6. Bodily Limits to Autonomy: Emotion, Attitude, and Self-Defense
Sylvia Burrow
Part II: Embodied Relations, Political Contexts
7. Relational Existence and Termination of Lives: When Embodiment Precludes Agency
Susan Sherwin
8. A Body No Longer of One’s Own
Monique Lanoix
9. Premature (M)Othering: Levinasian Ethics and the Politics of Fetal Ultrasound Imaging
Jacqueline M. Davies
10. Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity
Sue Campbell
11. Collective Memory or Knowledge of the Past: “Covering Reality with Flowers”
Susan E. Babbitt
12. Agency and Empowerment: Embodied Realities in a Globalized World
Christine Koggel
List of Contributors
Index
