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Drawing on a rich array of textual and visual primary sources-including medicine, satire, play script, dictionaries, natural philosophy, and texts on collecting wonders-this book provides a fresh perspective on monstrosity in early modern European culture. The essays explore how exceptional bodies challenged social, religious, sexual and natural structures and hierarchies in the sixteenth-, seventeenth- and early eighteenth centuries and contributed to its knowledge, virtue and emotional repertoire. Prodigious births, maternal imagination, hermaphrodites, collections of extraordinary things, powerful women, disabilities, controversial exercise, shapeshifting phenomena, and hybrids of different kinds are examined in a period before all deviances became normalized, in the sense, close and relative to a homogenous standard. The historicizing of exceptional bodies is central in the volume since it brings out the early modern culture and deepen our knowledge of its specific ways of conceptualizing singularities, rare examples, paradoxes, rules and conventions in nature and society.
This volume offers some of the outputs, challenges and opportunities created in an interdisciplinary programme that was set up to engage multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives on issues at the intersections of nature and culture, sex and gender. When working with mass spectrometers, microscopes, discourse analysis or interviews, one rarely has to explain them to colleagues. They are the tools used. But when working in inter- or transdisciplinary settings, such tools require explanations. These conversations make evident that trans and interdisciplinary (gender) research is a not just a novelty requiring an adjectival prefix ‘trans-‘ or ‘inter-’, it is something done, perfo...
The Eloquent Blood focuses on the changing construction of femininity and feminine sexuality in interpretations of the goddess Babalon. A central deity in Thelema, the religion founded by the notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), Babalon is based on Crowley's favorable reinterpretation of the biblical Whore of Babylon, and is associated with liberated female sexuality and the spiritual ideal of passionate union with existence. Combining research on historical and contemporary Western esotericism with feminist and queer theory, the book sheds light on the ways in which esoteric movements and systems of thought have developed over time in relation to political movements.
In this timely and richly illustrated book, a group of multidisciplinary scholars explores the uses and handlings of fetuses, still-born, reproductive organs, and pregnant bodies for knowledge production, including the development of vaccines and pharmaceuticals, in Sweden over five hundred years. By examining the conflicted values and balancing acts of a variety of actors, such as medical experts, legal officials, policymakers, media professionals, disability organizations, and women’s movements, it demonstrates how the uses of aborted fetuses for research generated public controversy and became regulated by ethics and law in Sweden. Contributors are: Eva Åhrén, Annika Berg, Elisabet Björklund, Maria Björkman, Maja Bondestam, Isa Dussauge, Helena Franzén, Solveig Jülich, Francis Lee, Tove Paulsson Holmberg, Morag Ramsey, Anton Runesson, Helena Tinnerholm Ljungberg, and Anna Tunlid.
What does it mean to read queerly? The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Reading upholds intersectional thinking to recognise the wide currency and appeal of queer studies for a new generation of scholars, activists, students and interested allies. Its four interconnecting parts - 'transing queer readings', 'reading queer ecologies', 'queer reading as practice' and 'reading queer futures' - speak to, and help to critique and foreground, expansive queer epistemologies. Contributors evocatively explore the relationships between queerness and genders, embodiments, race, narrative, methodology, history, literature, media and art. Bringing together emerging and established queer theorists, this timely collection demonstrates how germane queer readings, theories and companions are to the livelihood of interdisciplinary research and humanistic inquiry in the 2020s.
There is no shortage of Black characters in Miguel de Cervantes’s works, yet there has been a profound silence about the Spanish author’s compelling literary construction and cultural codification of Black Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. In Cervantine Blackness, Nicholas R. Jones reconsiders in what sense Black subjects possess an inherent value within Cervantes’s cultural purview and literary corpus. In this unflinching critique, Jones charts important new methodological and theoretical terrain, problematizing the ways emphasis on agency has stifled and truncated the study of Black Africans and their descendants in early modern Spanish cultural and literary production. Through the le...
In centuries past, sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were unmentionables debarred from polite conversation and printed discourse. Yet one scientific discipline-anatomy-had license to represent and narrate the intimate details of the human body-anus and genitals included. Figured within the frame of an anatomical plate, presentations of dissected bodies and body-parts were often soberly technical. But just as often monstrous, provocative, flirtatious, theatrical, beautiful, and even sensual. Queer Anatomies explores overlooked examples of erotic expression within 18th and 19th-century anatomical imagery. It uncovers the subtle eroticism of...
Plants are silent, still, or move slowly; we do not have the sense that they accompany us, or even perceive us. But is there something that plants are telling us? Is there something about how they live and connect, how they relate to the world and other plants that can teach us about ecological thinking, about ethics and politics? Grounded in Thoreau's ecology and in contemporary plant studies, Dispersion: Thoreau and Vegetal Thought offers answers to those questions by pondering such concepts as co-dependence, the continuity of life forms, relationality, cohabitation, porousness, fragility, the openness of beings to incessant modification by other beings and phenomena, patience, waiting, slowness and receptivity.
The history of the modern sciences has long overlooked the significance of domesticity as a physical, social, and symbolic force in the shaping of knowledge production. This book provides a welcome reorientation to our understanding of the making of the modern sciences globally by emphasizing the centrality of domesticity in diverse scientific enterprises.
Avhandlingen behandlar den korta men intensiva perioden 1893–1910 då kastrering användes som behandlingsmetod för att bota prostatahypertrofi. Fokus för analysen är hur prostatan, prostatahypertrofi och testiklarna skapades som medicinska kunskapsobjekt. Studien undersöker även hur jämförelser med andra kroppar – kvinnor, djur, män som avvek från normen med två fungerande testiklar – än den ”normala” manliga kroppen var en viktig del av kunskapsproduktionen av dessa kunskapsobjekt. Analytiskt används främst begreppen agentiell realism, agentiella snitt och vetenskapligt historieberättande. Som ett komplement används även begreppen spektrum och spektrum av avlivnin...