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The Body in Culture, Technology and Society
Shilling offers the most comprehensive overview of the field to date and an innovative framework for the analysis of embodiment, founded on a revised view of the relation of classical works to the body. Shilling believes the body should be read as a multi-dimensional medium for the constitution of society.
eBook
On muscle : the stuff that moves us and why it matters
\"In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal--these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty--and how they have distorted it--through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health\"-- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Beauty Up
This engaging introduction to Japan's burgeoning beauty culture investigates a wide range of phenomenon—aesthetic salons, dieting products, male beauty activities, and beauty language—to find out why Japanese women and men are paying so much attention to their bodies. Laura Miller uses social science and popular culture sources to connect breast enhancements, eyelid surgery, body hair removal, nipple bleaching, and other beauty work to larger issues of gender ideology, the culturally-constructed nature of beauty ideals, and the globalization of beauty technologies and standards. Her sophisticated treatment of this timely topic suggests that new body aesthetics are not forms of \"deracializiation\" but rather innovative experimentation with identity management. While recognizing that these beauty activities are potentially a form of resistance, Miller also considers the commodification of beauty, exploring how new ideals and technologies are tying consumers even more firmly to an ever-expanding beauty industry. By considering beauty in a Japanese context, Miller challenges widespread assumptions about the universality and naturalness of beauty standards.
eBook
Sociology of the body : a reader
\"Sociology of the Body: A Reader brings together forty-two essays exploring the multitude of ways in which human bodies shape and are shaped by society. Revised to reflect the current state of the field, this second edition now incorporates an overarching intersectional approach to conceptualizing the body--both in relation to social processes, such as medicalization and reproduction, and social relationships, such as the construction of difference. The volume has therefore been carefully updated and re-organized not only to illuminate how bodies are used, shaped, presented, understood, and managed in society, but also to show how complex interactions of gender, sexuality, nationhood, ability and other social categories work together in the creation of inequality. This second edition also enhances theoretical and historical foundations of the book, helping students to better comprehend historical continuities and discontinuities of the social treatment and understanding of the body. Detailed, thought-provoking, and altogether current, this collection remains an essential introduction to the theories, issues, and perspectives informing a sociological understanding of the body today.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Sensual relations
With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory.
eBook
The body : a very short introduction
The human body is thought of conventionally as a biological entity, with its longevity, morbidity, size and even appearance determined by genetic factors immune to the influence of society or culture. Since the mid-1980s, however, there has been a rising awareness of how our bodies, and our perception of them, are influenced by the social, cultural and material contexts in which humans live. Drawing on studies of sex and gender, education, governance, the economy, and religion, Chris Shilling demonstrates how our physical being allows us to affect the material and virtual world around us, yet also enables governments to shape and direct our thoughts and actions. Revealing how social relationships, cultural images, and technological and medical advances shape our perceptions and awareness, he exposes the limitations of traditional Western traditions of thought that elevate the mind over the body as that which defines us as human. Dealing with issues ranging from cosmetic and transplant surgery, the performance of gendered identities, the commodification of bodies and body parts, and the violent consequences of competing conceptions of the body as sacred, Shilling provides an account of why body matters present contemporary societies with a series of urgent and inescapable challenges.
Book
Biology unmoored
Biology Unmoored is an engaging examination of what it means to live in a world that is not structured in terms of biological thinking. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic research in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, Sandra Bamford describes a world in which physiological reproduction is not perceived to ground human kinship or human beings' relationship to the organic world. Bamford also exposes the ways in which Western ideas about relatedness do depend on a notion of physiological reproduction. Her innovative analysis includes a discussion of the advent of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), the mapping of the human genome, cloning, the commodification of biodiversity, and the manufacture and sale of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).
eBook
Neolithic bodies
\"This volume, building on the Neolithic Studies Group conference in 2014, captures the variety of debates taking place across research into Neolithic bodies of the Near East and Europe. Papers are divided into three themes: living bodies, the body in death, and representations of the body. Together these themes survey approaches from \"body worlds\" and technologies of the body to the myriad of complex social statements consolidated in art and funerary rites\"--Page 4 of cover.
Book
On female body experience : \Throwing like a girl\ and other essays
These essays describe diverse aspects of women’s lived body experience in modern Western societies. They combine theoretical description of experience with normative evaluation of the unjust constraints on freedom and opportunity that continue to burden many women. The lead essay rethinks the purpose of the category of “gender” for feminist theory, after important debates have questioned its usefulness. Other essays include reflection on the meaning of being at home and the need for privacy in old age residencies. Aspects of the experience of women and girls that have received little attention even in feminist theory are analyzed, such as the sexuality of breasts, or menstruation as punctuation in a woman’s life story. The phenomenology of moving in a pregnant body and the tactile pleasures of clothing are also considered.
eBook