Feminism and the biological body / Lynda Birke.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Birke, Lynda I. A., author.

Series:

Gender, science, and technology.

Gender, science, and technology

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Feminist theory.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (viii, 204 pages) : illustrations.

Place of Publication:

Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

Summary:

Bodies may be currently fashionable in social and feminist theory, but their insides are not. Biological bodies always seem to drop out of debates about the body and its importance in Western culture. They are assumed to be fixed, their workings uninteresting or irrelevant to theory. Birke argues that these static views of biology do not serve feminist politics well. As a trained biologist, she uses ideas in anatomy and physiology to develop the feminist view that the biological body is socially and culturally constructed. She rejects the assumption that the body's functioning is somehow fixed and unchanging, claiming that biological science offers more than just a deterministic narrative of 'how nature works'. Feminism and the Biological Body puts biological science and feminist theory together and suggests that we need a politics which includes, rather than denies, our bodily flesh.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Figures

Introduction

1. Ironing out the Differences? Feminism and Biology

2. Black Boxes and Tedious Universals: Feminism and the (Biological) Body

3. Short Circuits: Reading the Inner Body

4. Spaces and Solidities: Representing Inner Processes

5. Traces of Control: the Body as Systems

6. The Heart - a Broken Metaphor?

7. The Body Becoming: Change and Transformation

8. Connections: the Body’s World

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

1-4744-6443-2