Incorporating Cultural Theory: Maternity at the Millennium

John O'Neill

Apr 2002 · State University of New York Press

About this ebook

Incorporating Cultural Theory addresses the status of the body and sexuality in cultural criticism by focusing on issues of sexuality, intimacy, and identity. With a perspective grounded in body politics, O'Neill offers careful but contesting studies of theorists including Barthes, Derrida, Lyotard, Freud, Lacan, Hegel, Parsons, and Merleau-Ponty, that amplify his own overarching theoretical framework. Concluding chapters demonstrate the practicality of the author's body-political critical theory, offering analyses of Jurassic Park and the London Millennium Dome as cyborg practices designed to bypass the reproductive anxieties of bodies, families, and communities by shape-shifting the loss of a civic boundary. The overarching frame of the book—maternity at the millennium—provides a unique topic for using psychoanalysis to reconsider cultural studies, and O'Neill argues throughout for keeping cultural studies focused on wholeness and integration, instead of the fragmentation and alienation embraced by postmodern theoretical excesses.

About the author

John O'Neill is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto, a Member of the Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of several books, including The Poverty of Postmodernism, and the coeditor of The Journal of Classical Sociology and the international quarterly Philosophy of the Social Sciences.