Bodies of Difference

Bodies of Difference
Author: Matthew Kohrman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2005-05-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520226445

Annotation A study of the culture of disability in China and the emergence of the government institution known as the China Disabled Persons' Federation.

Embodied Difference

Embodied Difference
Author: Jamie A. Thomas
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2019-02-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1498563872

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, this book explores marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. The chapters center upon physical contexts, discursive spaces, and philosophical arenas to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, whiteness, and normativity.

The Body and Physical Difference

The Body and Physical Difference
Author: David T. Mitchell
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 1997
Genre: Eugenics
ISBN: 9780472066599

Groundbreaking perspectives on disability in culture and the arts that shed light on notions of identity and social marginality

Deviant Bodies

Deviant Bodies
Author: Jennifer Terry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 1995-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780253116352

"... the papers in Deviant Bodies reveal an ongoing Western preoccupation with the sources of identity and human character." -- Times Literary Supplement "Highly recommended for cultural studies... " -- The Reader's Review "It would be useful for upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in the sociology of the body, the history and sociology of science and medicine, and women's studies courses, particularly those exploring the feminist critiques of science and medicine." -- Contemporary Sociology "... a powerful deconstruction of the scientific gaze in configuring bodily deviance as a means of legitimating the social order within multiple historical and social contexts.... the many excellent selections will make for compelling reading for students of medical anthropology and the history of science." American Anthropologist Deviant Bodies reveals that the "normal," "healthy" body is a fiction of science. Modern life sciences, medicine, and the popular perceptions they create have not merely observed and reported, they have constructed bodies: the homosexual body, the HIV-infected body, the infertile body, the deaf body, the colonized body, and the criminal body.

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World

Difference and Disability in the Medieval Islamic World
Author: Kristina Richardson
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 168
Release: 2012-07-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 074864508X

Medieval Arab notions of physical difference can feel singularly arresting for modern audiences. Did you know that blue eyes, baldness, bad breath and boils were all considered bodily 'blights', as were cross eyes, lameness and deafness? What assumptions about bodies influenced this particular vision of physical difference? How did blighted people view their own bodies? Through close analyses of anecdotes, personal letters, (auto)biographies, erotic poetry, non-binding legal opinions, diaristic chronicles and theological tracts, the cultural views and experiences of disability and difference in the medieval Islamic world are brought to life.

In-Between Bodies

In-Between Bodies
Author: Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 142
Release: 2007-10-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780791472224

Connects theories of sexual difference to race and queer theories through a focus on “in-between” bodies.

Choreographing Difference

Choreographing Difference
Author: Ann Cooper Albright
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780819569912

The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity — a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings. Through her articulate and nuanced analysis of contemporary choreography, Albright shows how the dancing body shifts conventions of representation and provides a critical example of the dialectical relationship between cultures and the bodies that inhabit them. As a dancer, feminist, and philosopher, Albright turns to the material experience of bodies, not just the body as a figure or metaphor, to understand how cultural representation becomes embedded in the body. In arguing for the intelligence of bodies, Choreographing Difference is itself a testimonial, giving voice to some important political, moral, and artistic questions of our time. Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

Medicalizing Blackness

Medicalizing Blackness
Author: Rana A. Hogarth
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2017-09-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1469632888

In 1748, as yellow fever raged in Charleston, South Carolina, doctor John Lining remarked, "There is something very singular in the constitution of the Negroes, which renders them not liable to this fever." Lining's comments presaged ideas about blackness that would endure in medical discourses and beyond. In this fascinating medical history, Rana A. Hogarth examines the creation and circulation of medical ideas about blackness in the Atlantic World during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. She shows how white physicians deployed blackness as a medically significant marker of difference and used medical knowledge to improve plantation labor efficiency, safeguard colonial and civic interests, and enhance control over black bodies during the era of slavery. Hogarth refigures Atlantic slave societies as medical frontiers of knowledge production on the topic of racial difference. Rather than looking to their counterparts in Europe who collected and dissected bodies to gain knowledge about race, white physicians in Atlantic slaveholding regions created and tested ideas about race based on the contexts in which they lived and practiced. What emerges in sharp relief is the ways in which blackness was reified in medical discourses and used to perpetuate notions of white supremacy.

Volatile Bodies

Volatile Bodies
Author: Elizabeth Grosz
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1994-06-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780253208620

"Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is subject to the endless rewriting and inscription that constitute all sign systems. Grosz demonstrates that the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan theorize a male body. She then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women--menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause--to lay the groundwork for new theories of sexed corporeality."--Back cover.

Disability Bioethics

Disability Bioethics
Author: Jackie Leach Scully
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2008
Genre: Bioethics
ISBN: 9780742551220

Jackie Leach Scully argues that bioethics cannot avoid the task of considering the moral meaning of disability in humans - beyond simply regulating reproductive choices or new areas of biomedical research. By focusing on the experiential and empirical reality of impairment, and drawing on recent work in disability studies, Scully brings new attention to complex ethical questions surrounding disability. Impairment is variously considered as a set of social relations and practices, as experienced embodiment, and as an emancipatory movement, as well as a biomedical phenomenon. In this way, disability is joined to the general late-twentieth century trend of attending to difference as a significant and central axis of subjectivity and social life.