Download or read book Making a Social Body written by Mary Poovey and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995-11-15 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With much recent work in Victorian studies focused on gender and class differences, the homogenizing features of 19th-century culture have received relatively little attention. In Making a Social Body, Mary Poovey examines one of the conditions that made the development of a mass culture in Victorian Britain possible: the representation of the population as an aggregate—a social body. Drawing on both literature and social reform texts, she analyzes the organization of knowledge during this period and explores its role in the emergence of the idea of the social body. Poovey illuminates the ways literary genres, such as the novel, and innovations in social thought, such as statistical thinking and anatomical realism, helped separate social concerns from the political and economic domains. She then discusses the influence of the social body concept on Victorian ideas about the role of the state, examining writings by James Phillips Kay, Thomas Chalmers, and Edwin Chadwick on regulating the poor. Analyzing the conflict between Kay's idea of the social body and Babbage's image of the social machine, she considers the implications of both models for the place of Victorian women. Poovey's provocative readings of Disraeli's Coningsby, Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend show that the novel as a genre exposed the role gender played in contemporary discussions of poverty and wealth. Making a Social Body argues that gender, race, and class should be considered in the context of broader concerns such as how social authority is distributed, how institutions formalize knowledge, and how truth is defined.

Download or read book The Frail Social Body written by Carolyn J. Dean and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2000-02-16 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amid the national shame and subjugation following World War I in France, cultural critics there—journalists, novelists, doctors, and legislators, among others—worked to rehabilitate what was perceived as an unhealthy social body. Carolyn J. Dean shows how these critics attempted to reconstruct the "bodily integrity" of the nation by pointing to the dangers of homosexuality and pornography. Dean's provocative work demonstrates the importance of this concept of bodily integrity in France and shows how it was ultimately used to define first-class citizenship. Dean presents fresh historical material—including novels and medical treatises—to show how fantasies about the body-violating qualities of homosexuality and pornography informed social perceptions and political action. Although she focuses on the period from 1890 to 1945, Dean also establishes the relevance of these ideas to current preoccupations with pornography and sexuality in the United States.

Download or read book The Making of the Modern Body written by Catherine Gallagher and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-09-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines.

Download or read book Defining the Victorian Nation written by Catherine Hall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2000-05-25 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defining the Victorian Nation offers a fresh perspective on one of the most significant pieces of legislation in nineteenth-century Britain. Hall, McClelland and Rendall demonstrate that the Second Reform Act was marked by controversy about the extension of the vote, new concepts of masculinity and the masculine voter, the beginnings of the women's suffrage movement, and a parallel debate about the meanings and forms of national belonging. Fascinating illustrations illuminate the argument, and a detailed chronology, biographical notes and a selected bibliography offer further support to the student reader.

Download or read book Social Bodies written by Helen Lambert and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proliferation of press headlines, social science texts and "ethical" concerns about the social implications of recent developments in human genetics and biomedicine have created a sense that, at least in European and American contexts, both the way we treat the human body and our attitudes towards it have changed. This volume asks what really happens to social relations in the face of new types of transaction - such as organ donation, forensic identification and other new medical and reproductive technologies - that involve the use of corporeal material. Drawing on comparative insights into how human biological material is treated, it aims to consider how far human bodies and their components are themselves inherently "social." The case studies - ranging from animal-human transformations in Amazonia to forensic reconstruction in post-conflict Serbia and the treatment of Native American specimens in English museums - all underline that, without social relations, there are no bodies but only "human remains." The volume gives us new and striking ethnographic insights into bodies as sociality, as well as a potentially powerful analytical reconsideration of notions of embodiment. It makes a novel contribution, too, to "science and society" debates.

Download or read book Romantic Generations written by Robert F. Gleckner and published by Bucknell University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These essays express a common belief that the study of Romantic literature must be at once professionally serious and personally engaging. Topics discussed range from Wordsworth to Lady Caroline Lamb, and from Blake and Burke to the contemporary Irish poet Paul Muldoon. Each essay also offers close readings of essential works on English and Irish Romanticism. Introducing the collection is a tribute by the celebrated Romanticist Peter Manning.

Download or read book The Body written by Chris Shilling and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this introduction, Chris Shilling considers the social significance of the human body, and the importance of the body to individual and collective identities. He examines how bodies not only shape but are shaped by the social, cultural, and material contexts in which humans live.

Download or read book The Social Body written by Nick Crossley and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-03-13 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores both the embodied nature of social life and the social nature of human bodily life. It provides an accessible review of the contemporary social science debates on the body, and develops a coherent new perspective. Nick Crossley critically reviews the literature on mind and body, and also on the body and society. He draws on theoretical insights from the work of Gilbert Ryle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, George Herbert Mead and Pierre Bourdieu, and shows how the work of these writers overlaps in interesting and important ways which, when combined, provide the basis for a persuasive and robust account of human embodiment. The Social Body provides a timely review of the theoretical approaches to the sociology of the body. It offers new insights, and a coherent new perspective on the body.

Download or read book Making Social Knowledge in the Victorian City written by Martin Hewitt and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study explores the ‘ecology of knowledge’ of urban Britain in the Victorian period and seeks to examine the way in which Victorians comprehended the nature of their urban society, through an exploration of the history of Victorian Manchester, and two specific case studies on the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell and the campaigns for educational extension which emerged out of the city. It argues that crucial to the Victorians’ approaches was the ‘visiting mode’ as a particular discursive formation, including its institutional foundations, its characteristic modes and assumptions, and the texts which exemplify it. Recognition of the importance of the visiting mode, it is argued, offers a fundamental challenge to established Foucauldian interpretations of nineteenthcentury society and culture and provides an important corrective to recent scholarship of nineteenth-century technologies of knowing.

Download or read book Making Sense of Health Illness and Disease written by Peter Twohig and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2004 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Health, illness and disease are topics well-suited to interdisciplinary inquiry. This book brings together scholars from around the world who share an interest in and a commitment to bridging the traditional boundaries of inquiry. We hope that this book begins new conversations that will situate health in broader socio-cultural contexts and establish connections between health, illness and disease and other socio-political issues. This book is the outcome of the first global conference on "Making Sense of: Health, Illness and Disease," held at St Catherine's College, Oxford, in June 2002. The selected papers pursue a range of topics from the cultural significance of narratives of health, illness and disease to healing practices in contemporary society as well as patients' illness experiences. Researchers and health care practitioners now live in the age of interdisciplinarity, which has transformed both health care delivery and research on health. The essays in this collection transcend the traditional boundaries of biomedicine and draw attention to the many ways in which health is embedded in socio-cultural norms and how these norms, in turn, shape health practices and health care. This volume is of interest not only to researchers but also to those delivering health care.

Download or read book Choreomania written by Kélina Gotman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When political protest is read as epidemic madness, religious ecstasy as nervous disease, and angular dance moves as dark and uncouth, the 'disorder' being described is choreomania. At once a catchall term to denote spontaneous gestures and the unruly movements of crowds, 'choreomania' emerged in the nineteenth century at a time of heightened class conflict, nationalist policy, and colonial rule. In this book, author K lina Gotman examines these choreographies of unrest, rethinking the modern formation of the choreomania concept as it moved across scientific and social scientific disciplines. Reading archives describing dramatic misformations-of bodies and body politics-she shows how prejudices against expressivity unravel, in turn revealing widespread anxieties about demonstrative agitation. This history of the fitful body complements stories of nineteenth-century discipline and regimentation. As she notes, constraints on movement imply constraints on political power and agency. In each chapter, Gotman confronts the many ways choreomania works as an extension of discourses shaping colonialist orientalism, which alternately depict riotous bodies as dangerously infected others, and as curious bacchanalian remains. Through her research, Gotman also shows how beneath the radar of this colonial discourse, men and women gathered together to repossess on their terms the gestures of social revolt.

Download or read book Acting Bodies and Social Networks written by Bianca Maria Pirani and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2010 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyzes the complex interactions of body, mind and microelectronic technologies. Internationally renowned scholars look into the nature of the mind - a combination of thought, perception, emotion, will and imagination - as well as the ever-increasing impact and complexity of microelectronic technologies.

Download or read book The Social Life of Fluids written by Jules David Law and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Analyzing the expression of scientific understanding and the technological manipulation of fluids--blood, breast milk, and water--in Victorian novels, Law traces the culture's growing anxiety about fluids from the 1830s through the 1890s.

Download or read book Making the Body Beautiful written by Sander L. Gilman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nose reconstructions have been common in India for centuries. South Korea, Brazil, and Israel have become international centers for procedures ranging from eyelid restructuring to buttock lifts and tummy tucks. Argentina has the highest rate of silicone implants in the world. Around the globe, aesthetic surgery has become a cultural and medical fixture. Sander Gilman seeks to explain why by presenting the first systematic world history and cultural theory of aesthetic surgery. Touching on subjects as diverse as getting a "nose job" as a sweet-sixteen birthday present and the removal of male breasts in seventh-century Alexandria, Gilman argues that aesthetic surgery has such universal appeal because it helps people to "pass," to be seen as a member of a group with which they want to or need to identify. Gilman begins by addressing basic questions about the history of aesthetic surgery. What surgical procedures have been performed? Which are considered aesthetic and why? Who are the patients? What is the place of aesthetic surgery in modern culture? He then turns his attention to that focus of countless human anxieties: the nose. Gilman discusses how people have reshaped their noses to repair the ravages of war and disease (principally syphilis), to match prevailing ideas of beauty, and to avoid association with negative images of the "Jew," the "Irish," the "Oriental," or the "Black." He examines how we have used aesthetic surgery on almost every conceivable part of the body to try to pass as younger, stronger, thinner, and more erotic. Gilman also explores some of the extremes of surgery as personal transformation, discussing transgender surgery, adult circumcision and foreskin restoration, the enhancement of dueling scars, and even a performance artist who had herself altered to resemble the Mona Lisa. The book draws on an extraordinary range of sources. Gilman is as comfortable discussing Nietzsche, Yeats, and Darwin as he is grisly medical details, Michael Jackson, and Barbra Streisand's decision to keep her own nose. The book contains dozens of arresting images of people before, during, and after surgery. This is a profound, provocative, and engaging study of how humans have sought to change their lives by transforming their bodies.

Download or read book Improve Your Social Skills written by Daniel Wendler and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-09-12 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Improve Your Social Skills is a comprehensive, practical guide to social skills.It contains 200+ pages of step-by-step, easy-to-understand explanations of social interaction, written by a professional social skills coach whose TEDx talk on overcoming the social challenges of Asperger's Syndrome has been viewed over 180,000 times.You'll learn how to: Make Conversation (and keep conversation flowing smoothly!) Read Body Language (and send positive signals with your own body language!) Meet New People (and make friends with them!) Tell Stories In Conversation (that don't bore your audience!) Combat Shyness And Social Anxiety (a little courage every day adds up!) Date Successfully (without manipulation or sneaky tricks!) And More! (lots more!)Ok, enough with the bullet points.I'm Dan Wendler, and I wrote the book. I wrote it because I believe everyone deserves a place to belong and I didn't want poor social skills to hold anyone back from friendship and community. even if they struggle with social skills. I know firsthand how hard it is to struggle socially. Growing up, I was bullied, harassed, and excluded -- no matter how hard I tried to fit in. It wasn't until I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome that I put the puzzle pieces together. I realized I struggled socially because I didn't have any social skills -- and just like any other skill, social skills can be learned. So I started to learn them. It took hard work, but I soon started to see improvement in my ability to interact with others. Eventually I was able to start making wonderful friends and today I feel comfortable and confident in all sorts of social interactions.On January 1st, 2012, I launched ImproveYourSocialSkills.com to share what I'd learned with the world. Hundreds of thousands of people visit the site every year, and I'm excited to help even more with the Improve Your Social Skills Kindle guide.The guide you're about to read is a compilation of the social principles I've learned during my lifetime of personal social skills study, as well as the techniques I developed while offering hundreds of hours of social skills coaching. These principles led me to a life full of close friendship, satisfying connection, and tender romance.I believe that with these principles, you can live a life full to the brim with friendship, connection, and love. I hope that after reading Improve Your Social Skills, you'll believe that too.

Download or read book Body Wars written by Margo Maine and published by Gurze Books. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written for activists and educators, this cultural critique of female body image discusses the topic as it relates to sports, fashion, advertising, and propaganda, and offers practical strategies for those willing to fight unhealthy or unrealistic female images in society. Original. Tour.

Download or read book Key Concepts in Body and Society written by Kate Cregan and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-08-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a very useful book outlining the key concepts of the body in society. It is easy to read and provides useful examples, making it ideal for students across a range of social science disciplines." - Dr Sharron Hinchliff, Sheffield University "Cregan has achieved something distinct: an account of the sociology of the body which incorporates both theory and empirical studies, which demonstrates excellent coverage of an ever expanding field, and which is written in an accessible style... An intelligent treatment and account of the sociology of the body, which I look forward to incorporating into my teaching." - Dr Rob Meadows, University of Surrey "This book is a great idea. It provides a thorough, accessible and interesting introduction to the most important concepts in the sociology of the body. Students new to this area will find it invaluable." - Professor Deborah Lupton, University of Sydney This book provides a clear, focused road map to the study of the body in society. It defines, explains and applies core topics relating to the human body demonstrating how we approach it as a social phenomenon. Each concept: Includes an easy to understand definition Provides real-world examples Gives suggestions for further reading Is carefully cross-referenced to other related concepts. Written to meet the needs of the modern student, this book offers the basic materials, tools and guidance needed study and write about the body.