The Body

by Lisa Blackman

Thoroughly updated and revised throughout with brand new chapters on affective bodies, indeterminate bodies, assemblaged bodies and a new conclusion, and featuring essay and classroom questions for classroom use, The Body: Key Concepts, Second Edition , presents a concise and up-to-date introduction to, and analysis of, the complex and influential debates around the body in contemporary culture. Lisa Blackman outlines and illuminates those debates which have made the body central to current interdisciplinary thinking across the arts, humanities and sciences. Since body studies hit the mainstream, it has grown in new regions, including China, and moved in new directions to question what counts as a body and what it means to have and be a body in different contexts, milieu and settings. Lisa Blackman guides the reader through socio-cultural questions around representation, performance, class, race, gender, disability and sexuality to examine how current thinking about the body has developed and been transformed. Blackman engages with classic anthropological scholarship from Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock, revisits black feminist writings from the 1980s, as well as engaging with recent debates, thought and theorists who are inventing new concepts, methods and ways of apprehending embodiment which challenge binary and dualistic categories. It provides an overview of the proliferation of body studies into other disciplines, including media and cultural studies, philosophy, gender studies and anthropology, as well as mapping the future of body studies at the intersections of body and affect studies.

Genres: Theory, Feminism, Academic, Nonfiction

182 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2008

Reviews

[Martmota · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has been an amazing formative read. I've learned so much and I feel like this book has open so many doors that were half closed for me. It's a great introduction to Body Studies (even though it has more than 10 years), however I admit that some of the concepts and authors discussed can be hard to grasp to someone that hasn't heard of any of them prior to this text (so maybe it doesn't make the case for a complete introduction to the subject but deeper read... idk).

[Apoorva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Accessible academic texts are so hard to access.

[Outi Condit · Rating 5 out of 5]

Clear and pedagogically mapped genealogy of the conceptualisation of the body and affect.

[E A · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great bits for academic essays, easy to access and relatively easy to understand (from a neurodivergent standpoint).

[Christoph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good introduction and overview of sociological approaches to the body as a research topic.