From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0268022321 ISBN 13: 9780268022327

Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The Middle Ages provides a particularly rich trove of hybrid creatures, semi-human beings, and composite bodies: we need only consider manuscript pages and stone capitals in Romanesque churches to picture the myriad figures incorporating both human and animal elements that allow movement between, and even confusion of, components of each realm.

From Beasts to Souls: Gender and Embodiment in Medieval Europe raises the issues of species and gender in tandem, asking readers to consider more fully what happens to gender in medieval representations of nonhuman embodiment. The contributors reflect on the gender of stones and the soul, of worms and dragons, showing that medieval cultural artifacts, whether literary, historical, or visual, do not limit questions of gender to predictable forms of human or semi-human embodiment. By expanding what counts as "the body" in medieval cultural studies, the essays shift our understanding of gendered embodiment and articulate new perspectives on its range, functions, and effects on a broader theoretical spectrum. Drawing on depictions of differently bodied creatures in the Middle Ages, they dislodge and reconfigure long-standing views of the body as always human and the human body as merely male and female.

The essays address a number of cultural contexts and academic disciplines: from French and English literature to objects of Germanic and Netherlandish material culture, from theological debates to literary concerns with the soul. They engage with issues of gender and embodiment located in stones, skeletons, and snake tails, swan-knights, and werewolves, along with a host of other unexpected places in a thought-provoking addition to somatic cultural history.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

E. Jane Burns is the Druscilla French Distinguished Professor of Women's and Gender Studies, and adjunct professor of English and comparative literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Peggy McCracken is professor of French, women's studies, and comparative literature at the University of Michigan.

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Critical animal studies has insisted that nonhuman organisms be considered outside their dependencies upon human definition, mak- ing the field one of our most promising modes for practicing posthu- manism. Inspired by the nomadic ethology of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Rosi Braidotti has argued that the animal is to be “taken in its radical immanence as a body that can do a great deal, as a field of forces, a quantity of speed and intensity, and a cluster of capabilities,” opening the way to a “bioegalitarian ethics.”

What happens, though, if we substitute for animal what Braidotti calls “inorganic others”? Can we still attain her “posthuman bodily materialism,” one in which the forces, intensities, and potentialities belong to a nonbiological body, belong to, say, a rock? What would this embodied, posthuman stone do? Would it possess those attributes we associate with biological bodies: motility, mutability, sexual difference, worldedness (Umwelt), desire? Could such a stone be gendered? Would it reproduce? Or would this lithic organism offer something stranger still?

(excerpted from Chapter 1)

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0268022321
• ISBN 13: 9780268022327
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 280
• Herausgeber: Burns E. Jane, McCracken Peggy
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland