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Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (Published in association with Theory, Culture & Society)

by Margrit Shildrick (Author), Margrit Shildrick (Author)

  • New

    Paperback 2001

    $65.98
Synopsis

Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as 'monstrous' or 'vulnerable' and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily 'normality' and bodily perfection.

Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

$65.98

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 162
 Edition: 1
 Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
Published: 01 Nov 2001
ISBN 10: 0761970142
ISBN 13: 9780761970149

Media Reviews
`Shildrick's study stands out among postmodern analyses of the body by refusing to abandon the fleshiness of cultural life. The scope of this book is impressive and its analysis of monstrous corporeality and vulnerability as an inalienable counterpart of what it is to be human culminates in a posthumanis ethics of and for the body that will be the subject of debate among body theorists, feminists and cultural analysts' - Chris Shilling, University of Portsmouth

Excellent text; informative endnotes. Recommended for upper-division undergraduates through professionals.

-- CHOICE
Author Bio
My long term research interests have focused on the body and particularly on the notion of the anomalous body, whether that relates to sex and gender, to disability, to ageing, or to cyborgs. At present I am working on an international project exploring the phenomenology of heart transplant recipients. My approach has always been broadly postmodernist - or at least poststructuralist - and strongly influenced by the ongoing development of feminist theory and of postconventional bioethics. For many years I have done collaborative work on disability, and the area of Critical Disability Studies has more recently become a sharper focus of research. I have recently finished a new book (Dangerous Discourses) which brings together many of my existing interests as well as extending them into legal theory, queer theory and even psychoanalysis. I hope that any students (or intending students) pursuing dissertations or theses in any of those fields will get in contact.