Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison

ISBN-13: 9780415497909 / Angielski / Twarda / 2010 / 182 str.

Carolyn Pedwell

Opis

Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. 'African' female genital cutting and 'Western' cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism. Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device - with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts. This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.

This book explores the rhetorics of cross-cultural comparison in feminist writing concerned with embodiment and cultural difference. Establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural contexts has become a salient feminist strategy for countering cultural essentialism. Analogies drawn between ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ body modification, or Muslim veiling and anorexia, interrogate neo-colonialist binaries that distinguish practices as fundamentally distinct. Yet, the book argues, comparisons that over-invest in cross-cultural commonality risk redirecting critical attention away from the relationships of social antagonism which produce bodies, groups and practices differently. They can therefore defer in-depth analysis of the specific processes through which cultural essentialism is perpetuated and may in fact reify, rather than disrupt, racialised hierarchies. Reorienting the focus of cross-cultural feminist analysis from commonality to relationality, the book probes the complex problems of cultural essentialism and comparativism through unravelling some of the discursive-material circuits through which practices have been both linked and constituted differently.

The book will be of much interest to students and researchers of Women’s/Gender Studies, Postcolonial

Spis treści

Introduction: Feministm, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison 1. Comparing Cultures: Feminist Theory, Anti-Essentialism and New Humanisms 2. Critical Frameworks: Intersectionality, Relationality and Embodiment 3. Continuums and Analogues: Linking 'African' Female Genital Cutting and 'Western' Body Modifications 4. Constitutive Comparisons: Producing Muslim Veiling, Anorexia and 'Western' Fashion and Beauty Practices 5. Weaving Relational Webs: Theorising Cultural Difference and Embodied Practice

O autorze

Carolyn Pedwell is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her research interests include feminist and postcolonial theory; gender, cultural difference and ‘the body’; and the transnational politics of emotion and affect. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory, Feminist Review, and Body and Society.