Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-25wd4 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T20:04:22.363Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Body as an “Object” of Historical Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Doug Mann
Doug Mann
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Body theory is the work of historians, sociologists, philosophers, and other scholars in the past twenty to twenty-five years that explicitly focuses on the body, especially on sexuality and gender. The body is seen as an ideological surface on which history and politics inscribe their truths. It is, in short, a corporeal epistemology standing in opposition to all the old cognitive epistemologies (e.g., Descartes, Locke, and modern analytic thought as a whole). Régimes of power are known through the way they oppress, manipulate, and construct the human body. Body theory includes the work of Michel Foucault, Thomas Laquer, and feminist scholars such as Hélène Cixous, Laura Mulvey, and Elaine Showalter. This work is carried on, by and large, in the methodological atmosphere of a constructivist notion of gender, sexuality, social ideas, and the self.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , Fall 1996 , pp. 753 - 776
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ankersmit, F. R. 1989 “Historiography and Postmodernism.” History and Theory, 28: 137–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre 1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bullough, Vern 1972 “Sex in History: A Virgin Field.” Journal of Sex Research, 8: 101–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bynum, Carol Walker 1989 “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages.” In Fragments for a History of the Human Body, edited by Feher, Michel. New York: Urzone.Google Scholar
Cixous, Hélène 1981 “The Laugh of the Medusa.” In New French Feminisms, edited by Marks, Elaine and Courtivron, Isabelle de. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Collingwood, R. G. 1946 The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Davidson, Arnold I. 1987 Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality.” Critical Inquiry, 14: 16–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Descartes, Rene 1968 The Meditations. Translated by Sutcliffe, F. E.. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Dworkin, Andrea 1992 “Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue,. Ethical Issues: Perspective for Canadians, edited by Soifer, Eldon. Peterborough ON: Broadview Press.Google Scholar
Emberley, Julia 1987 “The Fashion Apparatus and the Deconstruction of Postmodern Subjectivity.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11, 1-2: 120–33.Google Scholar
Faurschou, Gail 1987 “Fashion and the Cultural Logic of Postmodernity.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11, 1-2: 68–84.Google Scholar
Featherstone, Tony 1991 “The Body in Consumer Culture.” In The Body: Social Processes and Cultural Theory, edited by Hepworth, Mike, Featherstone, Tony, and Turner, Bryan S.. London: Sage.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finn, Geraldine 1985 “Patriarchy and Pleasure: The Pornographic Eye/I.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 9, 1-2: 81–95.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1977 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, edited by Bouchard, Donald F. and translated by Bouchard, and Simon, Sherry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1979 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1987 “Questions of Method: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” In After Philosophy: End or Transformation? edited by Baynes, Kenneth, Bohman, James, and McCarthy, Thomas. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel 1990 The Use of Pleasure, Vol. 2, The History of Sexuality. Translated by Hurley, Robert. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Frank, Arthur W. 1990 “Bringing Bodies Back In: A Decade in Review.” Theory, Culture & Society, 7, 131–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen 1986 “The Genealogical Writing of History: On Some Aporias in Foucault's Theory of Power.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 10, 1-2: 1–9.Google Scholar
Kroker, Arthur, and Marilouise, Kroker 1987 “Body Digest: Theses on the Disappearing Body in the Hyper-Modern Condition.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11, 1-2: i–xvi.Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas 1990 Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Lasch, Christopher 1979 The Culture of Narcissism. New York: Warner Books.Google Scholar
MacHardy, Karin Forthcoming “Discourse of Division: History, Literature, and the Struggle over Distinction.” Forthcoming in Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichte.Google Scholar
Mannheim, Karl 1936 Ideology and Utopia. Translated by Wirth, L. and Shils, E.. New York: Harvest.Google Scholar
Merquiour, J. G. 1985 Foucault. London: Fontana.Google Scholar
Mitchinson, Wendy 1991 The Nature of Their Bodies: Women and Their Doctors in Victorian Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Moi, Toril 1985 Sexuall Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura 1991 “A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman.” NLR, 188 (July/August).Google Scholar
Paglia, Camille 1992 Sex, Art, and American Culture. New York: Vintage Books.Google Scholar
Pollis, Carol A. 1987 “The Apparatus of Sexuality: Reflections on Foucault's Contribution to the Study of Sex in History.” Journal of Sex Research 23/3: 404–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sawchuk, Kim 1987 “A Tale of Inscription/Fashion Statements.” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, 11, 1-2: 120–33.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine 1990 Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. New York: Viking.Google Scholar
Soifer, Eldon ed. 1992 Ethical Issues: Perspective for Canadians. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.Google Scholar
Synott, Anthony 1989 “Truth and Goodness, Mirrors and Masks-Part I: A Sociology of Beauty and the Face.” The British Journal of Sociology, 40: 607–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tisdale, Sally 1992 “Talk Dirty to Me.” Harper's, February.Google Scholar
Turner, Bryan S. 1992 Regulating Bodies. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
White, Hayden 1973 Metahistory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
White, Hayden 1987 “The Literary Text as Historical Artifact.” In The Content of the Form, edited by White, Hayden. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Willis, Ellen 1992 “Feminism, Moralism, and Pornography.” In Ethical Issues: Perspective for Canadians, edited by Soifer, Eldon. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press.Google Scholar
Winch, Peter 1958 The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar