In recent years, questions concerning "the body" and its place in postmodern discourses have taken center stage in academic disciplines. Body Politics joins these discussions by focusing on the challenges women face when their externally defined identities and representations as bodies-their body fictions-speak louder than what they know to be their true selves.

Racialized, gendered, or homophobic body fictions disfigure individuals by placing them beneath a veil of invisibility and by political, emotional, or spiritual suffocation. As objects of interpretation, "female bodies" in search of health care, legal assistance, professional respect, identity confirmation, and financial security must first confront their fictionalized doubles in a collision that, in many cases, ends in disappointment, distress, and even suicide.

The contributors reflect on women's day-to-day lives and the cultural productions (literature, MTV, film, etc.) that give body fictions their power and influence. By exploring how these fictions are manipulated politically, expressively, and communally, they offer reinterpretations that challenge the fictional double while theorizing the discursive and performative forms it takes.

Contributors include Trudier Harris, Maude Hines, S. Yumiko Hulvey, Debra Walker King, Sue V. Rosser, Stephanie A. Smith, Maureen Turim, Caroline Vercoe, Gloria Wade-Gayles, and Rosemary Weatherston.

Examines the disjunction between women's appearance and reality.

About the Author

Debra Walker King is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Author of Deep Talk: Reading African American Literary Names, her articles and reviews have appeared in Names: the Journal of the American Name Society; Philosophy and Rhetoric; and African American Review. She also contributed essays to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts, edited by Dolan Hubbard.

Reviews

An eclectic cross-disciplinary collection about the layered effects and expectations of gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies, this volume adds to the literature of feminist work on body politics and the body as a site of cultural contestation. King (Univ. of Florida, Gainsville) includes fine essays from well-known and rising scholars that cover women's bodies as aging, academic, raced, performing, performative, sexualized, scientific, and monstrous. The two opening essays, by Gloria Wade-Gayles and Sue Rosser, offer provocative views on women, age, race, and research. Particularly noteworthy is King's own groundbreaking essay on the work of Morrison and Naylor, in which she marks the territory of writing in red ink and links this to the blood that spills from the pages of works by African American women writers. Maude Hines's essay is one of the most compelling discussions to date of Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow. Those familiar with the work of Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante will find the essays about their work particularly useful, as the essays provide a cohesive narrative of their performance art that is not easy to put into words. King's preface and Trudier Harris's excellent afterword deftly pull the multiple perspectives in the collection together. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty. -R. M. Bredin, California State UniversitFullerton, 2001may CHOICE.

"[I]ncludes fine essays from well-known and rising scholars that cover women's bodies as aging, academic, raced, performing, performative, sexualized, scientific, and monstrous." -Choice

Book Information
ISBN 9780253214096
Author Katie King
Format Paperback
Page Count 232
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 155mm * 15mm