Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/201/4359/899.2.full.pdf

Phenomenology of perception.

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The Science Question in Feminism

The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction by Emily Martin Beacon Press, 1987 Paperback, 276 pp $1195 Winner of the 1988 Eileen Basker Memorial Prize As anthropology at its best can do, this book exposes hidden cultural assumptions about the nature of reality Martin has produced a powerful study of the dialectic between medical metaphors for women's reproductive processes and women's own views of those processes She and her associates interviewed 165 white and black women, seeking a balance between the three life stages of puberty, childbearing, and menopause 43% of her interviewees were working-class; 57% middleclass Early on Martin came up against one of the greatest dangers of studying one's own society Hearing women discuss uterine contractions as separate from the self and labor as something one "went through," and reading the same in medical texts, she at first thought that her interviews had turned up views of the body that simply reflected actual scientific fact It took her some time to realize that such scientific views are not "fact" but culturally grounded statements of an underlying ideology To get at this ideology Martin studied medical texts for the "grammar" that scientific medicine uses to describe female bodies In this medical grammar, she finds industrial society writ small The female reproductive tract is a machine designed to produce a baby; accordingly, menstruation represents failed production, connoting both a productive system that has failed to produce and one that produces only useless waste Such metaphors, disturbing to a society whose existence depends upon continued production, lead to menstruation's description in medical texts in highly negative terms: The fall in blood progesterone and estrogen, which results from regression of the corpus luteum, deprives the highly developed endometrial lining of its hormonal support    Disintegration starts    The endometrial arteries dilate, resulting in hemorrhage through the weakened capillary walls; the menstrual flow consists of this blood mixed with endometrial debris    (quoted on p 48) (Martin contrasts this with a description of male reproductive physiology which speaks of the "remarkable" cellular transformation from spermatid to mature sperm, its "amazing" nature and "sheer magnitude") Confronting the argument that the above is not value-laden but simply a factual description of menstruation, Martin examines medical descriptions of the analogous regular shedding and replacement of the lining of the stomach, finding in a number of texts no references to degeneration, but instead a stress on the periodic "renewal" of the stomach lining Concluding that writers can choose to depict what happens to the lining of stomachs and uteruses either negatively as breakdown and decay or positively as continual production and replenishment, Martin suggests an alternative medical description of menstruation: A drop in the formerly high levels of progesterone and estrogen creates the appropriate environment for reducing the excess layers of endometrial tissue Constriction of capillary blood vessels causes a lower level of oxygen and nutrients and paves the way for a vigorous production of menstrual fluids    Such a description would far more accurately reflect women's own more positive assessments of the menstrual fluid as the desired product Viewing pregnancy as the sole purpose of female reproductive organs and despising menstruation as a "waste" ignores the reality that most women do not intend to get pregnant most of the time (and so are often joyful when menstruation begins), and conceals "the true unity women have    [Menstruation is] the one thing we all share" (p 112) In spite of ambivalence about the "disgusting mess," most interviewees felt that menstruation defines them as women and insisted that they wouldn't want to give it up Teens spoke of the joy of getting their periods so they could be part of the in-group that shared the women's "special secret," of mothers and sisters greeting their first menstruation with "You're a woman now! …

The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction

This article offers reflection on the relationship between the researcher and the field of research, within the sport of men's boxing, which is strongly characterized by polarized oppositions: between winning and losing, success and failure, women and men and, perhaps most importantly for the researcher, `insiders' and `outsiders'. It is this interrelationship between `insiders' and `outsiders' and the embodiment, not only of the practitioners of the sport but also the embodied presence of the researcher, which is used here to explore methodological questions about the research process and debates about how the researcher is situated in relation to the research site, by addressing questions about ontological complicity that are implicated in the distinction between `hanging out' and `hanging about' at the gym and as part of the culture of boxing.

/pdf/hanging-out-and-hanging-about-insider-outsider-research-in-1twjz108u0.pdf

Hanging out and hanging about Insider/outsider research in the sport of boxing

Men's boxing is a sport with successful, high profile and affluent participants and one that includes many of the very much less well off. It has traditionally involved high participation by men from black and minority ethnic backgrounds. The sport is beset by contradictions, between racism and opportunity, discipline and excess, beautiful bodies and those that are fractured and damaged, and between traditional and alternative presentations of masculinity. The negotiation and presentation of raced and gendered identities have a strong presence, especially in terms of the ways in which hegemonic masculinity might be enacted. This paper is about racialized masculinities in boxing and links ethnography at a Sheffield gym that has produced some very well-known boxers, with an exploration of popular, media narratives about this particular performance of masculinities and the discursive location of boxing as a sport. It looks at the enactment of masculinities at a site that might appear to offer particularly essentialized and polarized versions of masculinity, race and class. It examines the ways in which men participate in boxing at a variety of levels and the interconnections between the public and the private stories that are told about men and boxing.

/pdf/rumbles-in-the-jungle-boxing-racialization-and-the-2kltt3h8om.pdf

Rumbles in the Jungle: Boxing, Racialization and the Performance of Masculinity

This book draws upon and develops theories of identitifcation and identity in the world of boxing, through the diverse worlds that the sport invokes.The book explores the personal and public worlds of boxing through ethnographic research and critical analyses of representations of its public stories, in the media, cinema and literary forms as well as the legends which abound in boxing about its heroic and anti-heroic figures.'The "I" of the Tiger' engages with the tensions and ambivalences of gendered identifications and the intersections between the social and the psychic in a world that might appear to offer a simple story of belonging, in order to present a focused argument about the centrality of the relationship between personal and public worlds, the material and the symbolic and the often contradictory nature of identificatory processes.

Boxing, Masculinity and Identity

Introduction Kath Woodward 1. Questions of identity Kath Woodward 2. Identity and gender Jenny Gove and Stuart Watt 3. Identity, inequality and social class Maureen Mackintosh and Gerry Mooney 4. Identity and nation Montserrat Guibernau and David Goldblatt :Afterword Kath Woodward

Questioning Identity : Gender, Class, Nation

Motherhood is the subject of considerable discussion and review. We are all, as Rich has famously said, ‘of woman born’ (1977), and this is still the case at the current stage of technological development, although it may not be for ever. Yet, motherhood is subject both to assumptions that it is an identity that can be taken for granted — it is ‘natural’ so requires no further interrogation — and to a plethora of critiques through which meanings about what it means to be a mother are constructed. This chapter uses approaches that have been developed within cultural studies to look at the politics of representation and addresses some of the ways in which motherhood is represented, for example through discourses in popular culture.

Kath Woodward

Papers

Hanging out and hanging about Insider/outsider research in the sport of boxing

Rumbles in the Jungle: Boxing, Racialization and the Performance of Masculinity

Boxing, Masculinity and Identity

Questioning Identity : Gender, Class, Nation

Representations of Motherhood