Feminism and the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Catherine Kevin

Des. 2009 · Cambridge Scholars Publishing

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By definition, feminism is concerned with the historical, social and political meanings of sexual difference in the human body, and the spectrum of experiences those meanings produce. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, gendered forms of violence persist, abortion remains a political issue, reproductive and cosmetic technologies and their concomitant ethical questions are proliferating, and the presence of women’s bodies in public spaces and for public consumption produces a range of anxieties about women’s well-being and the common good. Feminist scholars from across the disciplines grapple with these issues in Feminism and the Body. In so doing they continue a history of intellectual endeavor that, for centuries, has striven to identify the interplay between corporeal differences and relationships of power.

This collection will take the reader on a journey into myriad domains in which a variety of discursive effects come to life in the embodied subject: from the theatres of medical surgery and law to the discussion fora of sex therapy and marriage guidance experts; from Peruvian villages of the late twentieth century to African American plays of the 1920s and 1930s; from explicitly feminist novels and films to the mainstream press and right into feminist scholarship that theorises the female body.

In so doing, this collection restates and reinvigorates feminism’s long-standing, necessary and emphatic engagement with the female body.

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Catherine Kevin is a lecturer in history at Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia. She has previously held positions at King’s College London and in news and current affairs at SBS Television. Catherine is currently preparing a monograph entitled Great Expectations: A Political History of Pregnancy in Australia. She is the co-editor of Branding Cities, Cosmopolitanism, Parochialism and Social Change (Routledge, 2009) and has published articles on the histories of feminism and the reproductive body in Australia. Catherine teaches in the fields of body politics, memory and Australian cultural and political history.