Emphasizing the human body in all of its forms, Beauty Unlimited expands the boundaries of what is meant by beauty both geographically and aesthetically. Peg Zeglin Brand and an international group of contributors interrogate the body and the meaning of physical beauty in this multidisciplinary volume. This striking and provocative book explores the history of bodily beautification; the physicality of socially or culturally determined choices of beautification; the interplay of gender, race, class, age, sexuality, and ethnicity within and on the (...) body; and the aesthetic meaning of the concept of beauty in an increasingly globalized world. Foreward by Carolyn Korsmeyer. Authors include Noel Carroll, Gregory Velazco Y Trianosky, Monique Roelofs, Whitney Davis, Eleanor Heartney, Diana Tietjens Meyers, Phoebe M. Farris, Mary Devereaux, Jo Ellen Jacobs, Karina L. Cespedes-Cortes and Paul C. Taylor, Fedwa Malti-Douglas, Stephen Davies, Jane Duran, Valerie Sullivan Fuchs, Keith Lehrer, Allen Douglas, Cynthia Freeland, Eva Kit Wah Man, Mary Bittner Wiseman, and Peg Brand's essay, "ORLAN Revisited: Disembodied Virtual Hybrid Beauty.". (shrink)

In this article the author revisits Carol Smart’s 1989 publication Feminism and the power of law. She engages with Smart’s main claims by way of a number of other thinkers. Following Marianne Constable’s description of contemporary American legal thought as socio-legal, the author tentatively considers if it could be argued that some strains in contemporary legal feminism that adopted a sociological method resulted in a similar absence of justice that concerns Constable. Smart’s caution against the development of a feminist jurisprudence (...) is critically analysed with the benefit of hindsight. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault and Goodrich, the author tentatively considers the becoming of a feminist jurisprudence as a minor jurisprudence. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. (Deleuze 1995, 176)Sociology takes social creation to be the whole of what is and will be. (Constable 1994a, 589). (shrink)

This article explores the possibilities of considering how ‘matter and meaning are mutually constituted’ in the production of knowledge (Barad, 2007: 152) through presenting a diffractive analysis of a piece of interview data with a six-year-old boy in a preschool class. Inspired by Donna Haraway’s (1997) and Karen Barad’s (2007) theorising, I understand diffractive analysis as an embodied engagement with the materiality of research data: a becoming-with the data as researcher. Understanding the body as a space of transit, a series (...) of open-ended systems in interaction with the material-discursive ‘environment’, diffractive analyses constitute transcorporeal engagements with data. Stacy Alaimo’s (2010) theorisation of the transcorporeal is put to work diffractively with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s (1987) thinking on the process of becoming minor or minoritarian. This implies a reconceptualisation of the very act of thinking as a transcorporeal process of engagement, going beyond the idea of reflexivity and interpretation as inner mental activities taking place in the mind of the researcher understood as separated from the data. Through my example, I argue that diffractive analysis can make visible new kinds of material-discursive realities that can have transformative and political consequences. (shrink)

So-called ‘new materialism’ enables feminist theorists to emphasize the agential quality of matter, thereby challenging the notion that matter, particularly the biological body, is passive and inert – a notion that is gendered given the traditional association of passive matter with the feminine. While appreciating the materialist turn increasingly evident in feminist theory, Claire Colebrook warns feminist thinkers against an uncritical appeal to the vitalist tradition, which continues to privilege action, creativity and productivity over that materiality which remains unactualized potential. (...) After outlining the new materialist re-conception of matter, this paper considers the idea of a ‘passive vitalism’, which Colebrook develops in light of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's co-authored works. This paper shares Colebrook's contention that the new materialist emphasis on the agency of matter simply extends the model of the human person to the rest of nature. However, the final part of this paper begins to indicate how a theological materialism is able to affirm both the agency and patiency of matter in ways that challenge the view that the avowal of divine transcendence is inevitably opposed to the integrity of material immanence. (shrink)

Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. In this article, I deploy ethnographic material to show how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centred on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.

With a focus on appearance and racialised perceptions of skin colour, this paper discusses the differences between being and feeling acceptable, pretty or ugly and the possibility of such displacement (from being to feeling or vice versa), as a way to understand what beauty does in people’s lives. The paper explores the fragility of beauty in relation to the visibility of the body in specific racialised contexts. It investigates the claim that beauty can be considered a feeling that emphasises processes (...) (what beauty does) rather than contents (what beauty is). Drawing from life stories with Mexican women, I examine their concerns about visibility, temporality and appearance as expressions of racist practices and ideas, within a context where the racial project of mestizaje (racial mixture) is in operation. Beauty matters as it makes evident the pervasiveness of racism in the everyday. The lived experience of beauty, in its displacement and fragility, as a feeling and as resource, can also point to some of the strategies to resist, cope and get on. (shrink)

This thesis attempts to describe and interpret the design practice of an American architect, Frank O. Gehry through concepts developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator, French psychotherapist, philosopher and activist, Félix Guattari. At the same time, prototyping a website-based interactive project called PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES, it explores an alternative form for the Doctoral thesis. In addition to connections with visual arts, such as painting and cinema, the experimental project PLATEAU GEHRY_CONNECTIVES includes references to concepts and phenomena from various (...) areas of knowledge revealing distinctive, unusual qualities of Gehry’s creative approach in the production of design artefacts. The thesis documents and discusses means of representation in architectural design fused into the specific creative culture of Frank O. Gehry. It notices that the discourse in architectural theory and practice, often neglects what occurs on a particular molecular level of the architectural design process. It shows that elements of micro-level of design procedures render Gehry’s idiosyncratic design phenomena intelligible and perceptible in a new way. It claims that it has been possible because Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts become perceptibly operational in the interpretation of such phenomena, at the level of elementary units of Gehry’s design procedures. Moreover, through this close-up perspective, the thesis’ investigations identify certain similarities in the operational modes of the architect and the painter. It demonstrates how Gehry, who has anchored his interest in painting, and specifically in what he defined as ‘immediacy in painting,’ was able to transform the practice of architectural drawing from projective to a cognitive one. It also shows, how the architect re-defines the commonly applied projective geometries from passive, arbitrary role to an active agent, and how the architect links drawing practice with the construction process on a new, almost palpable level. While stressing its the manual character, the thesis demonstrates that Gehry’s explorative culture of challenging means of representation employed in architectural design production facilitates the re-disciplining of architecture culminating in the integration of the CATIA system in the design procedures. This study of Gehry’s design actions and strategies can help the reader to understand the significance of experimental and intuitive design practices. The thesis proposes the Deleuzian interpretation of Gehry’s experiments in the aesthetics of design thinking and acting. It renders perceptions of patterns, according to which, other design practices can operate. (shrink)

This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to The Stendhal Syndrome'. In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that (...) Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended "philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought "historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the "giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento's films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film. In my subsequent discussion of Argento's "Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer. In these terms, a Deleuzian "approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento's work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism. (shrink)