Varieties of embodiment and 'corporeal style'

What a ‘body’ is has become unshackled from what may appear to be inviolably natural ‘truths’ about it. In my opening chapter I consider the ways in which bodies have produced—and been produced by—bodies of work. Whether we have bodies or are bodies is a question which has been asked by human beings for millennia, and the idea of what ‘embodiment’ is, and does, is key when it comes to formulating answers for it. In introducing the essays that make up Talking Bodies, I reflect on how the body has been framed by numerous different discourses, from the anatomical to the sociological, and from the sexual to the epistemological. It is on and in the body that the major questions about human beings being human are asked and answered: questions of death, sex, community, cruelty, or religion. Put simply, the body needs to be put back into writing about the body, but since writing on the body always necessitates approximation due to the insufficiency and contingency of language, this is an enterprise that is simultaneously bewildering and worthwhile.

Citation

Rees, Emma L. E. (2017). Varieties of embodiment and ‘corporeal style’. In E. L. E. Rees (Ed.), Talking Bodies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Embodiment, Gender, and Identity (pp. 1-15). London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Publisher

Palgrave Macmillan

URI

http://hdl.handle.net/10034/622890

Type

Book chapter

ISBN

9783319637778

Additional Links

https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783319637778#