Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Banu Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair, taking the reader on an unsettling journey that passes through the suicides of enslaved Africans, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists, Gandhian fasting practices, Bouazizi's self-incineration, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers to chart a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment offers a bold materialist theory of corporeal agency that upholds the fundamental rebelliousness of the body.

With attention to the ways in which new reproductive technologies facilitate the gradual disembodiment of reproduction, this book reveals the paradox of women's reproductive experience in patriarchal cultures as being both, and often simultaneously, empowering and disempowering. A rich exploration of birth appropriation in the West, New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment investigates the assimilation of women's embodied power into patriarchal systems of symbolism, culture and politics through the inversion of women's and men's reproductive roles. Contending that new reproductive technologies represent another world historical moment, both in their forging of novel social relations and material processes of reproduction, and their manner of disembodying women in unprecedented ways - a disembodiment evident in recent visual and literary, popular and academic texts - this volume locates the roots of this disembodiment in western political discourse. A call to feminist political theory to re-remember the material dimensions of bodies and their philosophical significance, New Reproductive Technologies and Disembodiment will appeal to scholars of sociology, gender studies, political and social theory and the study of science, technology and health.

Liveness is a pivotal issue for performance theorists and artists. As live art covers both embodiment and disembodiment, many scholars have emphasized the former and interpreted the latter as the opposite side of liveness. In this book, the author demonstrates that disembodiment is also an inextricable part of liveness and presence in performance from both practical and theoretical perspectives. By applying phenomenological theory to live performance, the author investigates the possible realisation of aesthetic dynamics in live art via re-engagement with the notions of embodiment, especially in the sense provided by philosophers such as Gabriel Marcel and Morris Merleau-Ponty. Creative practices from leading performance artists such as Franko B, Ron Athey, Manuel Vason and others, as well as experimental ensembles such as Goat Island, La Pocha Nostra, Forced Entertainment and the New Youth are discussed, offering a new perspective to re-frame human-human relationships such as the one between actor and spectator and collaborations in live genres In addition, the author presents a new interpretation model for the human-material in live genres, helping to bridge the aesthetic gaps between performance art and experimental theatre and providing an ecological paradigm for performance art, experimental theatre and live art.

A stunning debut collection that interrogates what it means to be black and male in America

In this latest book, J. Marshall Unger exposes the historical, scientific, cultural, and practical flaws accompanying the widespread belief that Chinese characters embody pure, language-less meaning. Whether one is interested in Chinese characters from the standpoint of language, literature, semiotics, psychology, history, cultural studies, or computers, Ideogram contains new ideas and insights that are sure to challenge preconceptions and provoke thought.

Discussing medieval and early modern 'disembodied heads' this collection questions the why and how of the primacy of the head in the bodily hierarchy during the premodern period. On the basis of beliefs, mythologies and traditions concerning the head, they come to an ‘cultural anatomy’ of the head.