This book is the first to unite two major schools of educational philosophy, traditional American pragmatism and contemporary poststructuralism, to offer both theoretical and concrete suggestions for dealing with actual classroom race and gender related events. While schools are one of the most common settings ofrace and gender discord, this book upholds schools as the primary location for alleviating systems of oppression.
For it is within schools that children learn how to enact and respond to race and gender through the cultivation of habits, including dispositions, bodily comportment, and ways of interacting.
In a spirit of social transformation, this book argues that when students learn to inhabit their races and genders more flexibly, many classroom problems can be prevented and current social structures of identity-based oppression can be alleviated. Among the vast literature on contemporary reproductive technologies, Prosthetic Bodies stands out in its effective combination of insights, methods, and theories from the history of medicine, constructivist science and technology studies, and feminist theory.
The double focus on IVF and related techniques, and fetal treatment and surgery, enables the identification of debatable tendencies within today's reproductive medicine: the translation of ever more medical problems basically unrelated to women's own reproductive health - and, in the case of fetal diagnosis and treatment, sometimes formerly even unrelated to reproduction as such - into medical indications for invasive, often highly experimental interventions in women's bodies.
The analyses show how, through the operations and workings of reproductive technologies themselves, as well as a variety of discursive mechanisms within scientific language, today's recasting of men's fertility problems and children's congenital anomalies as women's reproductive problems comes to appear inevitable.
The book challenges the ability of traditional forms of medical ethics and law to adequately identify this incremental process. The careful analyses and arguments in Prosthetic Bodies will be relevant to students of science and technology, gender studies, philosophy, medical ethics, and law, and others interested in the cultural, ethical, and political ramifications of contemporary reproductive technologies.
In emphasizing the resignifying moments within the reigning discourse of love, this study acknowledges the tyranny to women that most Petrarchan poems impose. But it also searches out of cultural intelligibility in some Petrarchan poems to ask why Petrarch, Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell locate their questions about sexuality, society, and poetry in the woman they imagine for the construct. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc. Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation.
The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts.
This book discusses the reality of human being by pointing out some of the very fundamental issues that remain hidden from the eyes of the modern and post-modern western thought. In this reference, the role of metaphysical worlds in actualizing human knowledge is also discussed. This book also shows how the human life is a journey back towards its origin i.
In this reference, this book also explains the principles on the basis of which human soul would continue its life in the post-humus world. This book also clarifies the benefits of focusing onto the self and how this focus may lead to the realization of the Eternal Self of God.
In this way, it shows how it is not impossible to experience the post-humus conditions even before death. It also specifies what kind of lifestyle may possibly ensure the occurrence of such mystic experiences. This book reflects on the implications of neurobiology and the scientific worldview on aspects of religious experience, belief, and practice, focusing especially on the body and the construction of religious meaning.
Goetz Publisher: Lulu. All levels — primary and secondary passivity, and activity — together compose the individual and personal style of the experiencing subject. The level of bodily habit formation is core to what I would like to call a habitual identity ; that is, an identity habitually performed and thus operative, and not yet thematic as such.
This goes to show that bodily performativity and its resulting habitual identity operate mostly without thematic awareness of the respective subject. Although one can make aspects of these bodily habits thematic, such as when we learn skills, this might not be the case with all bodily ways of moving or with our styles of perceiving and attending to things in the world e.
These norms that inform the socialization of how we sit, eat, walk, etc. The more passively a habit has been acquired, the more foundational it is thereby to the respective identity as a whole. This also means, however, that it is more difficult to make the habit thematic and so, to try to change it.
This habitual style is necessary for a coherent stream of experience and it facilitates the orientation and interaction of subjects within a shared environment. Although habitual identity is a stable and characteristic way of relating to the world that can be identified and anticipated by oneself as well as by others, it cannot be reduced to an already articulated social identity category like, gender.
Rather, habitual identity is gradually developed and so must remain constantly open to a changing environment and to future experiences. Habitual identity is instead to be conceived as a dynamic, performative, bodily unity. Types are local, flexible and thus changeable and pre-conceptual generalities whereas concepts are fixed classifications. Footnote Concretely taken such a habitual identity is always already social.
As human bodily subjects we are situated, which is to say that we are embedded in and shaped by already existing ecological, historical, cultural and socio-economic environments, reflecting in turn specific social norms and power relations.
With Husserl, we can differentiate between that which is possible for human embodied subjectivities in general and that which is concretely do-able for a particular subject. In general , habitual identity is the potential of a human or even non- human bodily organism to develop a remaining shape, continuous and typical style of experiencing with and over against an environment.
From a perspective of situatedness, neither external norms the social nor bodies are two entire different entities or realms that must be somehow bridged, but both are agents and results of reciprocal processes of interaction, or, as the late Merleau-Ponty would put it, both are instituting and instituted sense Merleau-Ponty , 6, 8. If identities were to be purely individual and thus purified of custom, common sense or shared norms, we would be unable to recognise or to understand them as such.
Even in the domain of art, there is no such thing as a mere individual sense or invention. But, were identity to be merely a representation of the respective discourse or a mimicry of the past or a social field, then all persons within such field would be somehow the same. However, in my view, she underestimates the fact that one does not merely have an identity, but also habitually is an identity.
Most people live the gender identity they have been given as though it were self-evident, even though we can come to understand that this is the result of a process of normalization. As humans and persons, we are thus able to relate to this habitual unity and, arguably, have the potential to intentionally appropriate, change or resist those norms and social habits specific to an identity. That we can have an identity in the proper personal sense points to the necessity of identifying with oneself through intersubjective identity categories concepts.
Depending on the rigidness of these categories and respective social organization, such processes of identification are not at or for all voluntary, smooth or even successful. However this distance and relation to our operative habitual identity also shows the possibility of being able to reflectively distance and evaluate oneself.
As Husserl points out, although we are embedded in a tradition, we do not shape ourselves and merely inherit, subjects have the personal and ethical responsibility to test and question the norms they passively inherit.
It should be admitted, however, that such a view is perhaps overly optimistic, presupposing a high amount of reflectivity and autonomy that is not a given in certain contexts of political domination and restrictions.
But even before we relate to ourselves as bodies with specific i. From a phenomenological perspective, performativity begins at the first stages of bodily norm enactment — the stages which Butler would define as primarily deterministic. But, in the assimilation of norms, there is already a need for processes of individualization which involves some degree of creativity.
Understood as habit formation, performativity or the process of materialization cannot be reduced to mere automaticity or to the repetition of custom. In this sense, even strictly normalizing or forced forms of habituation as discussed by Butler, but also by Foucault and others cf. Foucault , seem only possible because being a body precisely means that we generate habits and skills from the get-go.
Such habit formation is never purely free, individual or neutral, rather, it is always already embedded in a specific material or social situation that frames its limits and possibilities.
If I learn how to ski, speed type or dance, for example, I am not completely free to do this however I might like; there are specific bodily, material limits to my performance, but also specific rules and norms as to what counts as skiing, speed typing or dancing.
Certainly, these rules are neither universal nor entirely fixed and so can differ in their strictness. Thus: one could ask: what is the difference between a bodily subject that 1 freely acquires a habitual style felt as positive coherence and as individual and a body that is 2 subjected under prefixed social norms? Regarding their function, both operations of habituation can be described as the implicit or explicit acquisition of practical and social skills.
They might differ, however, with regard to the individual contribution they allow, ranging from an activity of conditioning to an interactive learning process. This might be in turn expressed in either a more primary or secondary passivity , and result in mere automatic and compulsory behavior on the one hand, and flexible or even intelligent habits on the other. Activities like marching, factory work, and handwriting are learnt according to strict manuals and norms, and have to be executed in an exact predefined way, otherwise the people partaking in these activities were sanctioned cf.
In the case of gender, there are plenty of examples that show how supposedly ideal female or male comportment and behaviors are habituated through familial and public socialization and organization, through unquestioned traditions and rituals. Although non-conformity might not nowadays in western countries be explicitly punished, still there are implicit ways in which they can be reinforced through discursive ideals, the gain of social recognition and of respective social, economic or legal advantages or disadvantages.
Skills are learnt by trial and error and playing around, not by repetition alone. As Merleau-Ponty illustrates with his examples of playing an instrument or typing, to acquire a habit means to acquire a new motoric meaning, that is, a new practical possibility. Such a practical possibility must then not be limited to the very context of its acquirement. The learnt behavior becomes a skill and so, part of the body namely, the body-schema of the one who has acquired it.
This means in turn that this skill can at least potentially be applied to various contexts. Someone who learnt how to play piano or to type can execute these skills upon every respective object with keys and beyond. We are thus not faced with uniform picture wherein habit is either forcible iteration or purely creative, but with a spectrum of more or less constrained conditions of habit.
This leads to a spectrum of identity formation whereby, on the one side of the spectrum, we have cases of discipline, but on the other side examples like dance improvisation or the development of new music or dance styles; where the first cases rely on strict pre-defined normative manuals and ideals that should be imitated, the second link positively to already established movements, sounds and meanings, creatively cites them, and thereby cultivates new styles and meanings.
Such an institution can thereby not be reduced to the replication of an already instituted sense, like a mimicry of the past, but by carrying this sense into the future by infusing it with a new sense. Even in its highly disciplinary form as pre-defined, fixed norms and power relations, habit nonetheless provides the shaping force of performativity; that is to say, habit brings something into being via its repeated enactments.
Habit consists then of a bodily process that is not unlike the semantic performativity of citation, but differs in its concrete realization and impact. While linguistic signs are less dependent on their respective context, bodily performativity, expressed in durable changes of bodily behavior, may be more dependent on it.
But, even then, one carries with them an incorporated past, rendering any transformation slow and gradual. Footnote 12 A mere intellectual critique or linguistic engagement in re-signification of norms might thus not be enough. Instead, one has to engage in developing altogether different habits as well as different societal organization and circumstances.
On the one hand, habit formation is more permanent and intruding as it affects the very being of the body, that is, how we experience and relate to the world; our habitual identity. But the necessity of a bodily appropriation of norms also implies an inherent potential for agency, found in the very process of acquirement as well as in every future actualization in different contexts.
Although concrete bodies and their idiosyncratic formation of identities are never pre-discursive or stand outside power-relations, embodied experience has a subversive potential all by itself. The fact that the lived body must take part in the process of identity formation means that we have to attribute at least a certain sense of activity to the body.
Even though this normalization defines our bodily comportments, needs and experiences in an anonymous way, the skills that we acquire in this process of discipline are not fully bound to the conditions of its formation. Indeed, we can use them in different contexts. Furthermore, living bodies experience the very processes they are involved in.
Even when there is no reflective or articulated insight into these forced forms of habituation, there might still be feelings of disorientation, uncomfortableness and dissatisfaction, which can open room for resistance. As Johanna Oksala puts it, it is not discourses themselves, but the dissatisfaction or gap found within individual experiences in relation to dominant cultural representations that generate critique Oksala , Re-signification of dominant norms as a strategic resistance in a Butlerian sense is thus only possible because identity is not merely assigned but also experienced, and thus matters to the respective individuals.
Although we might be born into a situation not of our choosing and hence affected by norms that precede and will likely surpass our existence, we do in our own idiosyncratic way supplant them.
Determinism first, voluntarism later. From a bottom-up or developmentary standpoint, however, interested in the pre-conceptual foundations of language and concepts, this order will appear in many respects reversed. Contrary to more situated approaches, such a general phenomenological approach seeks to pin down the necessary conditions for every actual and possible experience. In this regard, the body is not thematized as concept with historically contingent meaning invested with power relations, but as the necessary condition for a coherent experience and thus for every formation of identity.
Instead of juxtaposing these two strands of approaches, assign them to opposed philosophical schools poststructuralism vs. One line of investigation starts top-down from a specific historical, social situation with respective norms and identity categories e. A bottom-up approach in turn seeks to tackle how bodily subjects are able to establish a coherent identical experience while giving them a particular style and form in general. In both lines of investigations, bodies, in general and in particular, do matter.
In general , as I tried to argue in this paper, bodies are needed for acquiring a stable identification with existing norms , but also for the possibility of reshaping them. The habit formation which leads to an individual style or habitual identity, is in turn a building block for every proper, that is, articulated or conceptual, identity.
Such a pre-institutionalized collectivity of assembling bodies relies on shared experiences of precariousness and vulnerability instead of a stable and fixed identification, which in turn excludes other forms of identity. Not every form of identity formation must thus be exclusionary, this seems only happening when the always open and flexible processes of plasticity and performativity are tried to be put into stone.
However, such a fixation and preservation of identity might put an end to every meaningful identity formation as this needs identity to be lived and enacted by flexible as well as vulnerable bodies in changing environments.
In particular , embodiment and bodily practices always depend on specific circumstances and thus engenders the practical possibilities and disabilities of subjects. A top-down or concretely situated approach typically consists of an investigation into a specific socio-historical situation as a starting point that reflects identity categories. Footnote 14 A good example of such approaches who take bodies serious as lived from within and perceived or interpreted from without, are approaches in critical phenomenology, who integrate poststructuralist and sociological insights cf.
Weiss et al. Together, these two approaches follow a weak and strong thesis of identity as bodily performativity. The weak thesis claims that performative bodily practices are needed so as to acquire a stable identification with existing norms, but also to make possible their individualization and transformation.
Alternatively, the strong thesis assumes that bodily performativity is necessary for every higher form of identity formation and that it is therefore foundational with regard to conceptual and linguistic forms of signification and identification. Such habitual identities , as I have depicted them, are then in no way merely individual or a creation ex nihilo , they are social from the start, although not necessarily yet linguistic. They are shaped by interpellation and by the material content and environment which assumes the need to acquire a habitual identity.
In this context, the social fields we live in, including their dominant norms and powers, get incorporated by habituation and thus become part of our very bodies. Here, it needs to be differentiated between how these norms implicitly affect our bodily comportment i. This distinction would function to further differentiate between an account of how norms operate and how they are thematized.
The tensions between these domains could explain how people misidentify with and are thereby motivated to resist the social categories into which they are forced. Here, it becomes clear that if we want to change social order and dominant norms, it is not enough to change our speaking or thinking, but also our daily doings and habits, which is way more difficult and will only succeed through continuous performances, of not a few but many bodies.
But, as bodily subjects with a generally shared vulnerability, there is always the potential for building particular collectivities or serialities cf.
Butler , Sartre , Young Only, a concretely visible plurality of bodies is able to gradually achieve what in general should be self-evident, namely that all bodies, independent of their cultural intelligibility, abilities or disabilities, can and should matter. In the following I will use the term identity in two different meanings. With regard to Butler, one can speak of identity as identification with something an already existing category of identity , thus in the sense of a group identity.
This corresponds to the top-down approaches in the way I define them. In the second part, I refer to identity as a kind of individualisation or typification. Here 'identity' means a stable and recognisable form, unity or constancy of behaviour, that is, a certain style of being in the world, which is formed through bodily practices and repetition.
Feminist e. Sara Ahmed, Gayle Salamon or post-colonial phenomenological analyses e. Butler refers to J. Austin to point out how language can actually produce real world effects and thus have an ontological impact. Butler understands this performative force of language with Derrida as a process of citationality and with Lacan as a citing of the symbolic order or law Derrida Sex is then assumed within repeated acts of interpellation in which the symbolic order or law is cited Lacan , As a correct citation or identification can fail, the symbolic order produces abject bodies, i.
Already in her early phenomenological texts on performativity, Butler shows an overly intellectualist reading of phenomenological concepts. Ewara This epistemological claim is not unlike the phenomenological one that experience has to be coherent and concordant or normative and normal if one wants to call it a meaningful experience. However, and here the phenomenologist would arguably be critical of Butler, this appearance cannot be entirely determined by existing discourses, norms or worldviews.
Within appearance, being or matter is presenting itself — albeit, always partially — in the flesh, and confronts us with its transcendence, obduracy, and resistance. In the temporal course of our appearance, we have to fulfill and correct our former intentions, and thus reality — ideally-speaking — functions as a constant corrective to our former appearances. In this, she returns to her original formulation in relation to De Beauvoir as being situated passively and in-situation actively taking on this situation , cf.
Butler In The Psychic Life of Power Butler explains why we are psychologically attached to the very norms that acted violently on us even when they institute a situation of oppression Butler a. Gallagher b , Moreover, that this practical form of performativity — as a general capacity of human bodily existence — is prior to every linguistic form of performativity or even is the foundation of linguistic forms of performativity.
But for such a conclusion, a lot more research is required, where bottom-up and top-down approaches are combined. These are two levels of objectivity or generality. Such a habitual bodily identity relies on the existence of a minimal self as proposed by Dan Zahavi, as formal, implicit self-relation that characterizes all kinds of experiences shall they be experiences of someone, cf. Zahavi , Moreover, this approach is compatible with a pattern theory of the self, cf. Gallagher , which accounts for different and combinable levels of selves from minimal, bodily to narrative self.
But this must not go along with a dismissal of classical or transcendental phenomenology. Rather, it is precisely because embodiment has a transcendental necessary status for every possible experience, that concrete experience can never be neutral: it is situated and shaped by physical, material, political, historical, traditional and generational forces for the better and for the worse.
Ahmed, S. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press. Allen, A. The power of feminist theory. Domination, resistance, solidarity. Boulder: Westview Press. The politics of our selves. Power, autonomy, and gender in contemporary critical theory. New York: Columbia University Press. Al Saji, A. Bodies and sensings: On the use of Husserlian Phenomenology for feminist theory. Continental Philosophy Review, 43 , 13— Austin, J. Doing things with words.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Beauvoir, De S. The second sex. New York: Vintage Books. Benhabib, S. Feminism and postmodernism: An uneasy alliance. Benhabib, J. Butler, D. Cornell, N. Fraser Eds.
Luckily, there are lots of free and paid tools that can compress a PDF file in just a few easy steps. Public Pastes. JavaScript 28 min ago 0. Arduino 50 min ago 0. Arduino 51 min ago 0. Arduino 52 min ago 0. Arduino 53 min ago 0. Arduino 55 min ago 0.
0コメント