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The Carnal Body: Representation, Performativity and the Rest of Us
Author(s) -
Detamore Mathias J.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
geography compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.587
H-Index - 65
ISSN - 1749-8198
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00292.x
Subject(s) - scholarship , sociology , performativity , power (physics) , politics , gender studies , enlightenment , physical body , mind–body problem , epistemology , aesthetics , social science , political science , law , philosophy , physics , quantum mechanics
The body has long been a concern of human knowledge; where it comes from, how it develops, how it works, what it means. Since the feminist political activism and academic scholarship of the late 1960s, at least, the body has had a resurging interest in the social sciences and humanities as a location through which Enlightenment notions of a mind/body dichotomy have held the female body captive. Out of this, how the body is ‘represented’ and how the body is ‘performed’ through the ways in which we talk about ourselves has theoretically pushed the body to the fore in much academic thought and inquiry. While gender and (soon following) sexuality has been the primary impetus for reevaluating the body and its relationship to power, the body can now be found in an array of other socio‐political phenomena that render the body a site for exclusion, violence and marginality. Yet the elusiveness of the body and its difficulty at definition continues to provoke anxiety in scholars working through its problems. A recent contribution on ‘carnality’ seems to offer us a window into a more refined and nuanced understanding of the body, highlighting the inseparable interdependence between the corporeal material of the body and the subjective discourses that ‘matter forth’ the body. This essay examines the location of the body in geographical literatures and the social sciences and humanities by briefly outlining its (re)emergence in feminist literatures; locating its continuing development in geographical literatures; taking it through one particular prevailing theoretical debate (including a major geographical intervention through the work of Nigel Thrift); and supposing my own intervention working through Elizabeth Povinelli’s concept of ‘carnality’.