Thinking the Limits of the Body (SUNY series in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art)

Shows the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in discussions of the body. Thinking the Limits of the Body......Page 4 CONTENTS......Page 6 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS......Page 8 Introduction: Bodies at the Limit by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Gail Weiss......Page 10 PART I: HORIZONS......Page 20 1. Histories of the Present and Future: Feminism, Power, Bodies by Elizabeth Grosz......Page 22 2. The Body as a Narrative Horizon by Gail Weiss......Page 34 PART II: DERMAL BOUNDARIES......Page 46 3. Cutups in Beauty School by Linda S. Kauffman......Page 48 4. Deep Skin by William A. Cohen......Page 72 PART III: RACIAL EDGES......Page 92 5. Ontological Crisis and Double Narration in African American Fiction: Reconstructing Our Nig by Laura Doyle......Page 94 6. Parallaxes: Cannibalism and Self-Embodiment Or, The Calvinist Reading of Tupi A-Theology by Sara Castro-Klar ́en......Page 110 PART IV: DIS-ABLING ALLIANCES......Page 136 7. Making Freaks: Visual Rhetorics and the Spectacle of Julia Pastrana by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson......Page 138 8. Critical Investments: AIDS, Christopher Reeve, and Queer/Disability Studies by Robert McRuer......Page 154 PART V: LIMINALITIES......Page 174 9. The Inhuman Circuit by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen......Page 176 10. Mourning the Autonomous Body by Debra B. Bergoffen......Page 196 ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS......Page 206 C......Page 208 G......Page 209 M......Page 210 S......Page 211 Z......Page 212 This collection maps the very best efforts to think the body at its limits. Because the body encompasses communities (social and political bodies), territories (geographical bodies), and historical texts and ideas (a body of literature, a body of work), Cohen and Weiss seek trans-disciplinary points of resonance and divergence to examine how disciplinary metaphors materialize specific bodies, and where these bodies break down and/or refuse prescribed paths. Whereas postmodern theorizations of the body often neglect its corporeality in favor of its cultural construction, this book demonstrates the inseparability of textuality, materiality, and history in any discussion of the body.