Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practice The Rhetorics of Comparison [Hardcover]

Within both feminist theory and popular culture, establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. African female genital cutting and Western cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism, ethnocentrism and racism.

Feminism, Culture and Embodied Practiceexamines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device  with particular theoretical, social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators, and what do these analogies do? What knowledges, hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce, disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory, and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community, this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts.

This book is valuable reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers in Gender Studies, Postcolonial or Race Studies, Cultural and Media Studies, and other related disciplines.

Introduction: Feministm, Culture and Embodied Practice: The Rhetorics of Comparison 1. Comparing Cultures: Feminist Theory, Anti-Essentialism and New Humanisms 2. Critical Frameworks: Intersectionality, Relationality and Embodiment 3. Continuums and Analogues: Linking 'African' Female Genital Cutting and 'Western' Body Modifications 4. Constitutive Comparisons: Producing Muslim Veiling, Anorexia and 'Western' Fashion and Beauty Practices 5. Weaving Relational Webs: Theorising Cultural Difference and Embodied Practice

'...[Demonstrates] both robust theoretical knowledgl³¼