Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable SelfWritten by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as ′monstrous′ or ′vulnerable′ and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily ′normality′ and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body. |
Contents
| 1 | |
| 9 | |
Chapter 2 Monstering the Mother | 28 |
Chapter 3 The Selfs Clean and Proper Body | 48 |
Chapter 4 Contagious Encounters and the Ethics of Risk | 68 |
Chapter 5 Levinas and Vulnerable Becoming | 87 |
Chapter 6 The Relational Economy of Touch | 103 |
Chapter 7 Welcoming the Monstrous Arrivant | 120 |
Notes | 134 |
| 142 | |
| 149 | |
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Common terms and phrases
already Ambroise Paré anxiety Aristotle autonomous binary birth bodily boundaries century chapter characterised claim clean and proper clear closure concept concorporation conjoined twins constitutes context corporeal cultural cyborg deconstruction Derrida Despite différance disabled discourse disruption distinction Donna Haraway Eilish embodied encounter example excessive face fear female feminine feminist figure flesh foetus freak shows Haraway Haraway’s historical human ideal identity imaginary infant Irigaray issue Katie Kristeva Levinas Levinasian ethics limits Luce Irigaray Malebranche mark masculinist maternal imagination maternal impressions meaning Merleau-Ponty metaphorical mirror mirror stage modernist monsters monstrous body moral Moreover morphology mother move nature Nonetheless normal normalisation normative notion object one’s ontological originary parasitic twin phenomenological postmodernism postmodernist potential precisely proximity psychic puts question radical reflect remains response selfsame sense separation sexual difference significance simply singular skin speaks specific stake texts threat tion touch undecidable understanding vulnerability women