While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability (...) mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation. (shrink)

By using religion to get at the core concepts of Michel Foucault's thinking, this book offers a strong alternative to the way that the philosopher's work is read across the humanities. Foucault was famously interested in Christianity as both the rival to ancient ethics and the parent of modern discipline and was always alert to the hypocrisy and the violence in churches. Yet many readers have ignored how central religion is to his thought, particularly with regard to human bodies and (...) how they are shaped. The point is not to turn Foucault into some sort of believer or to extract from him a fixed thesis about religion as such. Rather, it is to see how Foucault engages religious _rhetoric_ page after page—even when religion is not his main topic. When readers follow his allusions, they can see why he finds in religion not only an object of critique, but a perennial provocation to think about how speech works on bodies—and how bodies resist. Arguing that Foucault conducts experiments in writing to frustrate academic expectations about history and theory, Mark Jordan gives equal weight to the performative and theatrical aspects of Foucault's writing or lecturing. How does Foucault stage possibilities of self-transformation? How are his books or lectures akin to the rituals and liturgies that he dissects in them? _Convulsing Bodies_ follows its own game of hide-and-seek with the agents of totalizing systems and gives us a Foucault who plays with his audiences as he plays for them—or teaches them. (shrink)

According to the biomedical model of medicine, the subject of the illness event is the pathology rather than the person diagnosed with the disease. In this view, a body-self becomes a ‘patient’ body-object that can be enrolled in a therapeutic protocol, investigated, assessed, and transformed. How can it be possible for cancer patients to make sense of the opposite dimensions of their body-self and their body-diseased-object? Could a creative embodied approach enable the coping with trauma tied (...) to the experience of illness? By applying a phenomenological approach and auto-ethnographic analysis to the experience of cancer, this visual exploration provides support for rethinking the cancer event through a performative perspective. This work previews images and video material collected over ten years of haematological treatments, video dance performances and physical explorations. This work displays how processes of healing can be set in motion by creative embodied practices, physical explorations and unexpected journeys. By resisting the biomedical model and allowing the emergence of new meanings, it illustrates how dance and performative practices offer ground for transformation. (shrink)

Open Access: This article argues for an aesthetic approach to resisting oppression based on judgments of bodily unattractiveness. Philosophical theories have often suggested that appropriate aesthetic judgments should converge on sets of objects consensually found to be beautiful or ugly. The convergence of judgments about human bodies, however, is a significant source of injustice, because people judged to be unattractive pay substantial social and economic penalties in domains such as education, employment and criminal justice. The injustice is compounded by the (...) interaction between standards of attractiveness and gender, race, disability, and gender identity. -/- I argue that we should actively work to reduce our participation in standard aesthetic practices that involve attractiveness judgments. This does not mean refusing engagement with the embodiment of others; ignoring someone’s embodiment is often a way of dehumanizing them. Instead, I advocate a form of practice, aesthetic exploration, that involves seeking out positive experiences of the unique aesthetic affordances of all bodies, regardless of whether they are attractive in the standard sense. I argue that there are good ethical reasons to cultivate aesthetic exploration, and that it is psychologically plausible that doing so would help to alleviate the social injustice attending judgments of attractiveness. -/- This essay was the winner of the 30th Anniversary of the American Society for Aesthetics Feminist Caucus Committee Feminist Research Essay prize in 2020. (shrink)

This article presents a critical phenomenology of embodiment in radical democratic struggles, focusing on racialized citizens inhabiting and navigating public spaces and on anti-racist protests. It contrasts the notion of the precarious body, central to critical theorists like Judith Butler, with an alternative phenomenological understanding, locating the political significance of the body in spontaneous movement (Arendt) and competence (Merleau-Ponty). Attending to either precariousness or mobile-capable bodies reveals distinct dimensions of radical democratic struggles. While precariousness addresses the unequal distribution (...) of social-material conditions, it tends to overshadow the shared lived experience of freedom among citizens countering inhibitions of free movement, often motivated by their disproportionate exposure to precarious conditions in the first place. From a phenomenological perspective, public action is permitted by capable and mobile bodies. It is argued that public space opens the power of “we-can” bodies by soliciting citizens' movement among others and their engagement in shared projects, according to their bodily capacities. Pluralistic interaction, aiming to maintain or create free spaces of movement, is presented as the political practice of freedom par excellence, exemplified by radical democratic walking practices in the Black civil rights movement. (shrink)

Frederick Douglass, in his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes how his sociopolitical identity was scripted by the white other and how his spatiotemporal existence was likewise constrained through constant surveillance and disciplinary dispositifs. Even so, Douglass was able to assert his humanity through creative acts of resistance. In this essay, I highlight the ways in which Douglass refused to accept the other-imposed narrative, demonstrating with his life the truth of his being—a human being unwilling (...) to be classified as thing or property. As I engage selected passages and key events from Douglass's narrative, I likewise explore the ways in which the resistance tactics. (shrink)

The article presents artistic body interventions as tactics of minimal resistance to the governance over those bodies, i.e., resistance to the apparatuses that govern, control and manage our bodies, and those that also make our bodies sacred. This means the resistance to the apparatuses that separate my body from my own management. Giorgio Agamben calls for the strategy of profanation, for bringing back what was sacred to the use and property of humans. The author offers (...) a thesis that the artistic acts that resist to the power over the bodies do not construct counter-apparatuses to the apparatuses of power, but they do challenge or even sometimes subvert the machines of governance over the bodies. (shrink)

This article discusses sorrow in terms of its resistant possibilities. It describes bodies of color as ontological sites of sorrow in the context of racism and xenophobia. This sorrow, however, does not condemn these bodies to hopelessness and erasure. Rather, it may constitute a rupture with a present that fails to acknowledge racist and xenophobic practices. In addition, it connects sorrow to the kind of melancholia that bodies of color experience given their being-in-worlds that consider them unwanted, unworthy, and disposable. (...) By way of photographic analysis, this article also presents the notion of aesthetic unsettlement in order to point to coalitional possibilities across experiences and histories of woundedness, melancholia, and sorrow. (shrink)

Drawing on the relation between disciplinary power and aesthetics, Honi Fern Haber argues that the muscled woman’s “revolting” body undermines patriarchy and empowers women. Consequently, female bodybuilding can be a Foucauldian and feminist practice of resistance. I will argue that Haber’s insistence on the visibility of embodied resistance is flawed. By positing a static goal and failing to sufficiently consider non-visible aspects of normalization, namely pleasure and pain, Haber risks reinscribing the muscled woman into yet another normalizing (...) scheme. In the light of recent work on Foucault's ethics and embodied resistance, I suggest that weight lifting may be more successfully recommended as a practice of resistance when undertaken to increase capacities and for the pleasure of the activity itself. (shrink)

This book explores a type of wandering referred to as “errant bodies.” This form of wandering is intentional, without specific destination, and operates as a means of resistance against hegemonic forms of power and cultural prescriptions. Beginning with an examination of the character and particulars of being an errant body, the book investigates historical errant bodies including Ancient Greek Cynics, Punks, Baudelaire, Situationists, Earhart, Kerouac, Fuller, Baudrillard, Hamish Fulton, and Keri Smith. Being an errant body means stepping (...) to the side of dominant culture, creating a potential means of political resistance in the technologically driven twenty-first century. (shrink)

Bears comprise a subculture of gay men who valorize the larger, hirsute body. This research interrogates Bear culture as a gendered strategy for repudiating effeminacy that simultaneously challenges and reproduces norms of hegemonic masculinity. In this research, the author situates his ethnographic study of a major metropolitan Bear community in its social and historical context to illuminate this paradox, with special emphasis on the embodiment of Bear masculinity and its effect on sexual practice. The author concludes that through a (...) process of embodied agency, Bear culture yields a number of sexually innovative practices that disperse pleasure across the body and disrupt genitally centered, phallusandreceptacle interpretations of sex. However, the subversive potential of these practices is significantly undermined by an attendant set of practices that reflect heteronormative and hegemonically masculine interpretations of sex. (shrink)

People attribute resistance to bodies in Spinoza's physics. It's not always clear what they mean when they do this, or whether they are entitled to. This article clarifies what it would mean, and examines the evidence for attributing resistance. The verdict: there's some evidence, but not nearly as much as people think.

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of (...) cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

An exploration of the traumas and possibilities of embodiment as it is lived in a political world. Unveiling the influence of phenomenology, particularly in that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on contemporary thought, it cuts across different disciplines in its analysis.

Psychiatric culture provides an important site for humanities scholars interested in the relationships between body, culture and identity. The problem raised in this article is how to ‘think’ the body as discursive, material and embodied without reinstating the notion that the discursive and material are two separate, preexisting entities that somehow ‘interact’. The focus of this article will be on the complex relational dynamics that exist between science and culture in the production of psychopathology. The discussion will centre (...) on the practices of a psychiatric user-movement, the Hearing Voices Network, that provide a radical challenge to the alignment of body, culture and identity in the production and understanding of psychopathology, and specifically the phenomenon of voice-hearing. The article will consider the importance of affectivity, relationality and embodiment in understanding the relationship between the performative injunctions of psychiatry, the transformative practices of the HVN and the production of subjectivity. (shrink)

This article considers women's use of the body as a site of protest by taking up women's participation in non-mainstream body modification. The use of scarification, multiple genital piercing and other practices by women in the lesbian SM movement has been considered self-mutilative (Jeffries, 1994). This article takes a different, but not uncritical, approach by examining the `reclaiming' discourse surrounding these practices and considering how this discourse reflects the feminist poststructuralist project of identity subversion.

Using Ritzer’s McDonaldization of Society thesis as a reference point, this article contributes sociologically to burgeoning critical obesity studies. It does this using qualitative data from a study of men and weightrelated issues undertaken in northern England. Taking a counter-intuitive approach, it explores whether slimming proceeds in accord with the rationalizing principles of the fast-food restaurant: calculability, efficiency, predictability and technological control. Rather than reproducing a simplified and ultimately stigmatizing account, where fatness is a pathological bodily state caused by fast (...) food, this article explores the degree to which fatness is actively made into a correctable problem using McDonaldized principles. Irrationalities and meaningful resistances associated with the public and private fight against fat are also considered. (shrink)

Abstract:The article interrogates notions of resistance and will against the Black Radical Tradition vis-à-vis a close reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power and through Hortense Spiller’s seminal essay, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” In reading Spillers alongside Nietzsche, the essay argues that black nihilism presents a more severe problem than Nietzsche could anticipate: that the black will is denied active desire and a cosmological body is left to express its “power”—only to highlight (black) resistance as a question.

This article thinks the place of the body, agency and movement in politics through the body of the asylum-seeker. Asylum-seekers do not have ample space to politically voice their experiences, but their bodies and ways of taking agency are fluid. The Agambenian idea of exceptional space and bare life privileges the power of the sovereign, leaving little space for agency for its subjects. It leads to an impasse, as it offers no viable option of thinking the possibilities of (...) opposing sovereign rule. We have resorted to Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy in order to read to the contrary: to sketch the potential of the body to move beyond the reach of sovereign power and to communicate itself and its relations to others. The untenability of the sovereign subject pointed to by Nancy’s ontology of bodies allows seeing the asylum-seeker’s body as expressive and moving body that reorganizes its relations to others and turns it to an active agent from which events of the body politic emerge. With its focus on crisscrossing movement of the body and between bodies, the notion of choreography assists us in envisioning that the space for political agency and community do not pre-exist, but are articulated through bodies’ movements. We argue that either purely textual analysis or focus on administrative rationality is bound to leave possible expressions of political agency aside, and thus to ignore the challenge the bodily choreographies of asylum-seekers pose to political theory. We illustrate our argument with vignettes from Fernand Melgar’s 2008 documentary film The Fortress. (shrink)

Background: The present study compared the effects of a traditional resistance training and resistance training combined with cognitive task on body composition, physical performance, cognitive function, and plasma brain-derived neurotrophic factor levels in older adults. Methods: Thirty community-dwelling older adults were randomized into TRT and RT+CT. Exercise groups performed a similar resistance training program, twice a week over 16 weeks. Cognitive Training involved performing verbal fluency simultaneously with RT. Exercise sessions were performed 2-3 sets, 8-15 repetitions (...) at 60-70% of 1-repetition maximum. Body composition, physical function, cognitive performance, and BDNF levels were assessed before and after intervention period. Results: The physical performance was similarly improved in response to both TRT and RT+CT. However, exclusive improvements on cognitive function and BDNF levels were observed only after RT+CT. Conclusion: The RT program associated with a cognitive task, improved physical and cognitive performance in healthy older adults. (shrink)

Foreign Bodies analyzes how our culture elaborates for us the bodies we have by natural evolution. Calling on the new means contemporary thinkers have used to understand the body, Alphonso Lingis explores forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The book contrasts the findings of theory with the practice of the body as formulated in quite different kinds of language--the language of plastic art (the artwork body builders make of themselves), biography, anthropology and literature. Lingis (...) explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, attitudes, gestures and purposive action; how our susceptibility to pain and excitability by pleasure acquiesce in and resist the ways they are identified and manipulated today; how cultures code our sensuality with phallic and with fluid identities; how others dress appeals to and puts demands on us. (shrink)

How are we to understand hunger strikes and episodes of lip-sewing in immigration detention? Are they simply cases of self-destruction or bare life, as is often claimed, or is there scope to view these embodied acts of self-harm as having a political dimension and to see those engaged in them as resistant subjects exercising political agency? To explore these issues, I draw on recent feminist theoretical work on vulnerability. Received wisdom suggests that vulnerability is an impediment to political action. Rejecting (...) the idea that vulnerability equates exclusively to injurability and passivity, I contend, by contrast, that corporeal vulnerability can potentially prompt action, serve as a resource for collective acts of resistance, and enable the politicization of certain spaces. Since context matters to how vulnerability and resistance intersect, I illustrate my argument by exploring, in particular, the protests that took place at Woomera immigration detention centre in Australia in 2002. (shrink)

This book serves as both an introduction to the concept of resistance in poststructuralist thought and an original contribution to the continuing philosophical discussion of this topic. How can a body of thought that mistrusts universal principles explain the possibility of critical resistance? Without appeals to abstract norms, how can emancipatory resistance be distinguished from domination? Can there be a poststructuralist ethics? David Hoy explores these crucial questions through lucid readings of Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Derrida, and (...) others. He traces the genealogy of resistance from Nietzsche's break with the Cartesian concept of consciousness to Foucault's and Bourdieu's theories of how subjects are formed through embodied social practices. He also considers Levinas, Heidegger, and Derrida on the sources of ethical resistance. Finally, in light of current social theory from Judith Butler to Slavoj Zizek, he challenges "poststructuralism" as a category and suggests the term "post-critique" as a more accurate description of contemporary Continental philosophy.Hoy is a leading American scholar of poststructuralism. Critical Resistance is the only book in English that deals substantively with the topical concept of resistance in relation to poststructuralist thought, discussions of which have dominated Continental social thought for many years. (shrink)

There are few issues that have been as vexing for the Australian healthcare community as the Australian governments policy of mandatory, indefinite, immigration detention. While many concepts have been used to begin to describe the many dilemmas faced by healthcare professionals and their resolution, they are limited, perhaps most fundamentally by the fact that immigration detention is antithetical to health and wellbeing. Furthermore, and while most advice recognises that the abolition of detention is the only option in overcoming these issues, (...) it provides little guidance on how action within detention could contribute to this. Drawing on the work of political theorists and the broader sociological literature, we will introduce and apply a form of action that has not yet been considered for healthcare workers within detention, resistance. We will draw on several examples from the literature to show how everyday resistance could be enacted in healthcare and immigration detention settings. We argue that the concept of resistance has several conceptual and practical advantages over much existing guidance for healthcare workers in these environments, namely that it politicises care and has synergies with other efforts aimed at the abolition of detention. We also offer some reflections on the justifiability of such action, arguing that it is largely consistent with the existing guidance produced by all major healthcare bodies in Australia. (shrink)

Introduction: Non-violent resistance, carried out by healthcare workers, has been a common phenomenon. Despite this and despite the issues this type of action raises, we know little about the healthcare workers who engage in this action and their perspectives about its justification. This exploratory study sought to address this gap, examining these fundamental questions amongst a sample of healthcare workers who have engaged in acts of resistance, exploring their understanding of non-violent resistance, its justification and the barriers (...) they faced in engaging in such action. Methods: Participants were recruited through Medact's ( https://www.medact.org/ ) member database and directed to an online survey hosted on Qualtrics. While participants were unlikely to be representative of the broader UK healthcare community, participants were in an advantageous position to comment on non-violent resistance. Descriptive quantitative analysis and a content analysis were conducted. Results: The majority of participants felt that non-violent resistance could be justified dependent on its cause and/or the action in question. Within this, most felt that if action were non-violent, that if it didn't harm patients and that if the issue in question had to do with health being compromised, action was often justified. A number of others framed their justification as being a right or duty to engage in non-violent resistance. In relation to barriers to engaging in non-violent resistance, these fell into three categories: personal, professional and broader concerns related to society or the general culture found in healthcare. Within these, time and concerns about registration or the consequences of engaging in action were cited as the greatest barriers. Conclusions: These results suggest that healthcare workers who regularly engage in non-violent action carefully thought through their actions, acknowledging the diversity of actions and issues that could be challenged, for many patient care remained a primary concern. There is a need for clarity from regulatory bodies and in particular the need for dialogue between healthcare bodies and healthcare workers who continue to engage in acts of non-violent resistance. (shrink)

In marked contrast to Husserlian “unities of sense” that structure consciousness around _egoic_ ideal-meaning intention, contemporary phenomenology orders sense according to an excess of givenness – a surfeit of presence – that surpasses this intentional relation. But Emmanuel Falque argues that there is a resistance that _precedes_ the phenomenological order of givenness and sense. Before the saturated phenomena (Marion), the _pathos_ of the flesh (Henry), and the irruption of the Other (Levinas), there is a resistance of presence that (...) is not _sensu stricto_ given at all. Falque turns to the early writings of Emmanuel Levinas on trauma and insomnia and the hum and buzz of the _il y a_ (the “there is …”) that precedes the order of givenness and sense, including the Levinasian Other, in order to make sense of this _a priori_ resistance. There is a presence of the body, experienced in some sense via trauma, insomnia, and Falque’s own notion of the “spread body” that is not given yet constitutes an integral part of embodied experience. The way Falque engages with these bodily experiences reformulates the phenomenological limit, not in terms of excess and givenness, but in terms of resistance and the “extra-phenomenon.” Phenomenological engagement with resistance thus becomes a wager on meaning and sense, the outcome of which cannot be known in advance, that is, cannot be always and already ordered to phenomenological givenness. (shrink)

This paper rehabilitates the Stoic conception of blending from the ground up, by freeing the Stoic conception of body from three interpretive presuppositions. First, the twin hylomorphic presuppositions that where there is body there is matter, and that where there is reason or quality there is an incorporeal. Then, the atomistic presupposition that body is absolutely full and rigid, and the attendant notion that resistance (antitupia) must be ricochet. I argue that once we clear away these (...) presuppositions about body, the foundations of Stoic corporealism fall into place. Body is fundamental (not hylomorphic). The two fundamental principles (archai) are bodies: divine active reason (logos) and passive matter (hulē); and these two bodies are two, not matter and form all over again, nor actual and potential, but agent and patient. The independence of the two archai is no threat to the unity of the cosmos, however, because the Stoic theory of body allows for the complete coextension of the archai. The hylomorphic thinker rightly asks, what relation could be tighter than that of the wax and its shape? The Stoic replies: a causal relation, the interaction of agent and patient completely coextended in a through and through blend. (shrink)

Webster's Dictionary defines “femininity” as “the quality or nature of the female sex”; the Oxford English Dictionary as “the quality or assemblage of qualities pertaining to the female sex”. Both are wrong. One can be a member of the female sex and yet fail or refuse to be feminine; conversely, one may be biologically male and a drag queen. Femininity is a certain set of sensibilities, behavioral dispositions, and qualities of mind and character. It is also a compelling aesthetic of (...) embodiment, “a mode of enacting and re‐enacting received gender norms which surface as so many styles of the flesh”. What follows will focus on the ways in which some feminist thinkers have theorized the norms that govern the production and behavior of an ideally feminine body. (shrink)

This paper redirects some of the philosophical discussion of sexual objectification. Rather than contributing further to debates over what constitutes objectification and whether it is harmful, I argue that aesthetic experience is a useful tool for resisting objectification. Attending to our embodied experiences provides immediate evidence that we are subjects; aesthetically attending to that evidence is a way of valuing it. I consider the human body as an aesthetic site, then as an ethico-aesthetic site, and finally as a site (...) of resistance. In addition to deepening accounts of body aesthetic experience, this paper helps frame human bodies as integral to moral agency, rather than impediments to it. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Catherine Malabou : “Unbind Me” Judith Butler : What Kind of Shape Is Hegel's Body in? Catherine Malabou : What Is Shaping the Body? Judith Butler : A Chiasm between Us, but No Chasm.

In this paper I argue that the way to reduce the power of overdemanding beauty ideals is not to advocate that individuals have a ‘duty to resist’, a duty to stop engaging in appearance enhancing practices and body work. I begin by arguing against the claim that women who ‘do’ beauty are suffering from false consciousness. I then give four further additional arguments against advocating a ‘duty to resist’ as an effective means to challenge dominant beauty norms. First, that (...) as a tactic it is ineffective. Second, it is an individual approach which divides and silences. Third, it induces shame and blame, and undermines effective collective action. Fourth, it fails to recognize the privilege of the group norms which make resistance possible. (shrink)

Beginning in the 1940s, mass production of antibiotics involved the industrial-scale growth of microorganisms to harvest their metabolic products. Unfortunately, the use of antibiotics selects for resistance at answering scale. The turn to the study of antibiotic resistance in microbiology and medicine is examined, focusing on the realization that individual therapies targeted at single pathogens in individual bodies are environmental events affecting bacterial evolution far beyond bodies. In turning to biological manifestations of antibiotic use, sciences fathom material outcomes (...) of their own previous concepts. Archival work with stored soil and clinical samples produces a record described here as ‘the biology of history’: the physical registration of human history in bacterial life. This account thus foregrounds the importance of understanding both the materiality of history and the historicity of matter in theories and concepts of life today. (shrink)

Neurosurgeon Sergio Canavero proposed the HEAVEN procedure – i.e. head anastomosis venture – several years ago, and has recently received approval from the relevant regulatory bodies to perform this body-head transplant in China. The BHT procedure involves attaching the donor body to the head of the recipient, and discarding the body of R and head of D. Canavero’s proposed procedure will be incredibly difficult from a medical standpoint. Aside from medical doubt, the BHT has been met with (...) great resistance from many, if not most bio- and neuroethicists.Given both the known challenges and unknown outcomes of HEAVEN, several important neuroethical and legal questions have emerged should Canavero be successful, including: What are the implications for transplantology in the U.S., inclusive of issues of expense, distributive justice, organizational procedures, and the cost of novel insight? How do bioethical and neuroethical principles, and legal regulations of human subject research apply? What are the legal consequences for Canavero performing a BHT? What are the tentative implications for the metaphysical and legal identity of R should they survive post-BHT? These questions are analyzed, issues are identified, and several solutions are proposed in an attempt to re-configure HEAVEN into a safe, clinically effective, and thus realistically viable procedure.Notably, the permissibility of conducting the BHT in China fosters additional, important questions, focal to whether Western ethics and professional norms be used to guide the BHT – or any neuroscientific research and its use - in non-Western countries, such as China; if the models of responsible conduct of research are identical, similar, or applicable to the intent and conduct of research in China; and what economic and political implications are fostered if/when such avant garde techniques are successful.These questions are discussed as a further impetus to develop a globally applicable neuroethical framework that would enable both local articulation and cosmopolitan inquiry and oversight of those methods and approaches deemed problematic, if and when rendered in more international settings. (shrink)

In this article I defend an account of beauty labor as a form of resistance that can enable individuals and communities to combat body oppression. Focusing on the “Fuck Flattering!” movement, a social-media-driven movement in which fat people purposefully wear unflattering clothing to resist antifat fashion and oppressive body standards, I first set three criteria necessary for an act of beauty labor to count as one of resistance. I argue that (1) the agent in question must (...) be situated as a less ideal candidate for attributions of beauty, (2) the agent must have some level of knowledge or awareness of the norms (defined in light of dominant groups) and their harms, and (3) that knowledge or awareness of the harms of said norms must inform the agent's act of beauty labor. Based on this account of beauty labor as resistance, I argue that beauty labor can combat larger systems of oppression and incite meaningful change insofar as it enables individuals to claim and reclaim space (both digital and physical) from which fat people have been historically excluded, while affording an opportunity for education and unpacking of oppression and bias, and expanding the fashion industry. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to compare the acute effects of performing a lower body resistance training program in one long or two shorter sessions in 1 day on training volume and affective measures. Employing a randomized-crossover design, 23 resistance-trained women performed two training days consisting of one long or two short sessions separated by 3.5–5 h. Each training day was separated by 4-6 days and consisted of three sets to failure for six exercises. Training volume (...) were recorded during the sessions. Rating of perceived exertion for effort, rating of perceived exertion for discomfort, session displeasure/pleasure and exercise enjoyment were measured 10 min after each session. Participants also completed a readiness to train questionnaire, 24 h after each session, and which training protocol they preferred, 48 h after the last session. The long session led to higher RPE, RPD and sPDF compared to the short sessions. There was no difference in EES. The short sessions had 3% higher training volume than the long session. There were no differences in perceived readiness to train 24 h after the sessions. Twenty-two participants preferred the long session, while one preferred the short sessions. In conclusion, performing a longer, lower body, resistance training session led to greater perceptions of effort, discomfort and session pleasure than splitting the same program into two shorter sessions among resistance-trained women. However, two shorter sessions led to a greater training volume. (shrink)

During the last two decades, many thinkers on Iranian cinema have had many things to say about censorship, especially the issue of the veil imposed on women’s gender by the authorities in Iran. In this paper, I will describe Hamid Dabashi’s narrative as related to the concept of “truth” to show further that the veil issue has reached a new phase in Iran. Although much of what Dabashi defines as the absented body of women in his article “Body (...) less faces: Mutilating modernity and abstracting women in an ‘Islamic cinema’” may still hold, I believe his over-arching narrative doesn’t contribute enough to our understanding of the new relations among the authorities and actresses’ Fashion styles on red carpets. This paper’s method is connected with cultural and visual studies through Roland Barthes’ semiotics. I first focus on Hamid Dabashi’s conception of “truth” and how he believes “truth” is related to Islamic ideology and embodied in Iranian post-revolutionary cinema to further (through analysing photos of Iranian actresses’ clothing who attend festivals) conclude that Iranian women try to adopt new resistances in choosing their costumes compared to the early two decades of post-revolutionary Iran. The presence of Iranian women in festivals especially regarding what they wear has established a new interwoven relationship with authorities which has somewhat not been surveyed properly. By surveying the photos of their fashion and style I conclude that they are in constant negotiation with authorities through what they rebelliously wear. (shrink)

Donna Haraway views being a cyborg rather than a ‘goddess’ desirable. This feminist slogan can be seen in terms of the democratising power of a hybrid identity facilitated by technology as a substantial alternative to traditional notions of gendered identity. This paper aims to study S. B. Divya’s 2021 novel Machinehood to analyse how technology and identity are tied up in the context of the novel. The paper benefits from the insights from critical posthumanism by analysing how the transformation into (...) a cyborg is problematised by the moral and ethical overtones facilitated by dakinis (mythological figures in Buddhism). While providing tactical advantage, cyborg may become the negation of one’s gender and flesh. The cyborg has been viewed as a capitalist desire. Thus, a cyborg society benefits from the transformative acts that resist such erasure and preserve one’s sense of identity rooted in their body. (shrink)

Indeterminate Bodies organizes a number of theoretical and empirical studies around the concept and actuality of indeterminacy, as it relates to body and society. Located within the struggle to apprehend different categories of ‘body’ in the volatile flows of late-capital, indeterminacy is considered through such multiple incarnations as economy, contingency, inheritance, question, force, uncertainty, materiality and affective resistance to determination. While indeterminacy is often positioned as the ‘trouble’ or friction in subject/object knowledge-formation (framed as ontological or empirical (...) challenge), it also engenders affects such that some subjects are both in and out of recognition. Questions of indeterminacy overlap with work on imperceptibility, giving rise to interlocked questions about the modes of representation, categorization, inclusion, exclusion and sensibility in the production of bodies. We address the hesitancies, difficulties and necessities of working with and through indeterminacy in order open up new descriptions, visions and modes of political work. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the way to reduce the power of overdemanding beauty ideals is not to advocate that individuals have a ‘duty to resist’, a duty to stop engaging in appearance enhancing practices and body work. I begin by arguing against the claim that women who ‘do’ beauty are suffering from false consciousness. I then give four further additional arguments against advocating a ‘duty to resist’ as an effective means to challenge dominant beauty norms. First, that (...) as a tactic it is ineffective. Second, it is an individual approach which divides and silences. Third, it induces shame and blame, and undermines effective collective action. Fourth, it fails to recognize the privilege of the group norms which make resistance possible. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the way to reduce the power of overdemanding beauty ideals is not to advocate that individuals have a ‘duty to resist’, a duty to stop engaging in appearance enhancing practices and body work. I begin by arguing against the claim that women who ‘do’ beauty are suffering from false consciousness. I then give four further additional arguments against advocating a ‘duty to resist’ as an effective means to challenge dominant beauty norms. First, that (...) as a tactic it is ineffective. Second, it is an individual approach which divides and silences. Third, it induces shame and blame, and undermines effective collective action. Fourth, it fails to recognize the privilege of the group norms which make resistance possible. (shrink)

In Body and Story Richard Terdiman explores the tension between what seem two fundamentally different ways of understanding the world: as physical reality and as representation in language. In demonstrating the complicated relationship between these two perspectives, he also offers a new approach to the problem of conflicts between irreconcilable but equally compelling theoretical ideas. Enlightenment rationalism is most often understood as maintaining that words can meaningfully refer to and grasp things in the material world, while Postmodernism famously argues (...) that nothing exists outside of language. Terdiman challenges this clean distinction, finding the early seeds of Postmodern doubt in the Enlightenment, and demonstrating the stubborn resistance of material reality -- particularly that of the body -- to language even today. Building on readings of works by 18th-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot and contemporary philosopher-icon Jacques Derrida, Terdiman argues that despite their genuine and profound opposition, a constant negotiation or mutual interrogation has always been taking place between these two world-views, even as the balance at times shifts to one side or the other. In analyzing these shifts he proposes a new model for understanding how seemingly unabridgeable theories legitimately coexist in our intellectual conception of the world, and he suggests a new ethics for managing this coexistence. (shrink)

This collection looks from a variety of angles at the human body as it resists the determinations of gender, sexuality, socialisation and history. Ranging from classical hermaphrodites, Bruegel's blind faces and Weimar transgender surgery, via Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, state-socialist sport and Proust, to Barbie, Lari Pittman, American Psycho, IVF and video dance, the sixteen essays question the relationship between politics, culture and desire. This richly illustrated book also features the original work of two young photographers and a theatre director.