New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment [Hardcover]

Despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, womens bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive technologies, sexual violence, objectification, motherhood, and sex trafficking, among others, constitute ongoing, pressing concerns for womens bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital. This book engages with these themes by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on womens bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists concernsboth theoretically and empiricallyabout gender and embodiment in the present context and beyond. The collection brings together essays from a variety of feminist scholars who deploy diverse theoretical approaches, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and new materialisms, in order to examine philosophically the question of the current status of gendered bodies through cutting-edge feminist theory.

1. Contested Terrains: New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment  Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal

Part I  Normative Bodies, Ethics, and Vulnerability

2. A Genealogy of Womens (Un)Ethical Bodies  Gail Weiss

3. The Normal Body: Female Bodies in Changing Contexts of Normalization and Optimization  Julia Jensen and Maren Wehrle

4. How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms of Responsiveness  Danielle Petherbridge

Part II  New Directions in Feminist Theory

5. Revisiting Feminist Matters in the Post-Linguistic Turn: John Dewey, New Materialisms, and Contemporary Feminist Thought  Clara Fischer

6. Feminist and Transgender Tensions: An Inquiry into History, Methodological Paradigms, andlsp