"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.

This book carries on from the works of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell to show how the portrayal of consciousness embodied in myth can be extended to a reappraisal of the laws of physics; before they are descriptions of the world, these laws- ...

The Body in the Library reads representations of the corporeal in texts of empire; case studies include: - gendered representations of corporeality - medical regimes - ethnography and photography in the Pacific - cultural transvestism in ...

This book looks at the representation of the body in culture from a feminist perspective.

The Disordered Body presents a fascinating look at how three epidemics of the medieval and Early Renaissance period in Western Europe shaped and altered conceptions of the human body in ways that continue today.

In this innovative volume, leading scholars examine the role of the body as a primary site of political signification in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France.

Rosemarie Garland Thomson examines disabled figures in sentimental novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, African-American novels by Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde, and ...

In this work, the author draws on the literature of court poets, the hymns of saints and 'acharyas', and verses from inscriptions to illuminate premodern India's unique treatment of the sculpted and painted form.

Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, analyzes the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality.

The author argues for a new type of philosophical thinking that embraces the insights of feminism and abandons the hegemonic mode that is conventionally adopted in high theory.