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The Skin We Live In: Explorations of Body Modification, Sexuality, and Citizenship
Author(s) -
Brandt Keri Jacqueline
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
symbolic interaction
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.874
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1533-8665
pISSN - 0195-6086
DOI - 10.1525/si.2004.27.3.429
Subject(s) - citizenship , sociology , inscribed figure , human sexuality , ethnography , gender studies , queer , construct (python library) , politics , queer theory , identity (music) , aesthetics , everyday life , epistemology , anthropology , political science , law , art , philosophy , geometry , mathematics , computer science , programming language
In the past ten to fifteen years, feminist and queer theorists have taken a particular interest in the body as a topic for social theory. Much of this work has brought to the forefront the notion of the body as a site on which social, political, and cultural ideas are inscribed. The body is theorized as a cultural construct, and emphasis is placed on the body’s locatedness and differentiation and the relationship between identity and particular forms of embodiment. Amid all this theorizing, however, qualitative research about lived corporeality—how embodiment is experienced in the everyday world—is in short supply. This essay reviews three books—two ethnographic works on body modification and one deep analysis of theoretical and public debates about the question of sexual citizenship—that attempt to illuminate how competing discourses shape the subjective experiences of embodiment. These are timely books; sexual citizenship, or the question of who will and who will not be REVIEW ESSAY