"Perspectives on Embodiment" offers multiple ways of conceptualizing human corporeality. These essays collectively defy arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture and reveal the complex ways in which nature and culture interact to produce embodied subjects.
A central premise of this collection is that a variety of perspectives is needed to illuminate the fluid, ever-changing features of human corporeality. This book not only explores what it means to be an embodied subject, but also encourages speculation about our future bodily incarnations.

This collection of essays defy arbitrary distinctions between nature and culture and reveal the complex ways in which nature and culture interact to produce embodied subjects.

This text presents a wide-ranging discussion of the body image by looking at the individual's immediate apprehension toward his or her body and bodily capabilities. In a philosophical treatment of the role played by the body image in our everyday experience, Gail Weiss returns to the seminal contributions of the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty and the psychoanalyst Paul Schilder, which reveal the complex physiological, social and physical structure of the body image.

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render "the familiar" a site of oppression for many. In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. The volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

Phenomenology, the philosophical method that seeks to uncover the taken-for-granted presuppositions, habits, and norms that structure everyday experience, is increasingly framed by ethical and political concerns. Critical phenomenology foregrounds experiences of marginalization, oppression, and power in order to identify and transform common experiences of injustice that render "the familiar" a site of oppression for many. In 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, leading scholars present fresh readings of classic phenomenological topics and introduce newer concepts developed by feminist theorists, critical race theorists, disability theorists, and queer and trans theorists that capture aspects of lived experience that have traditionally been neglected. By centering historically marginalized perspectives, the chapters in this book breathe new life into the phenomenological tradition and reveal its ethical, social, and political promise. The volume will be an invaluable resource for teaching and research in continental philosophy; feminist, gender, and sexuality studies; critical race theory; disability studies; cultural studies; and critical theory more generally.

The contributors to this international volume take up questions about a phenomenology of time that begins with and attunes to gender issues. Themes such as feminist conceptions of time, change and becoming, the body and identity, memory and modes of experience, and the relevance of time as a moral and political question, shape Time in Feminist Phenomenology and allow readers to explore connections between feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and time. With its insistence on the importance of gender experience to the experience of time, this volume is a welcome opening to new and critical thinking about being, knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics.

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009

More than sixty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir identified the importance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings to feminist theory. His exploration of the relationship between the body and the space it inhabits is key to modern phenomenological thinking. But there has been little agreement on how Merleau-Ponty's ideas ultimately have an impact on feminist philosophy. Does his emphasis on physical subjectivity lend a certain agency to all bodies, regardless of sex? Or do Merleau-Ponty's specific descriptions of physical experience betray an intrinsic bias toward a male heterosexual point of view? The essays presented here by Olkowski and Weiss attempt to situate Merleau-Ponty in the larger context of feminist theory, while impartially evaluating his contributions, both positive and negative, to that theory.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Jorella Andrews, David Brubaker, Judith Butler, Laura Doyle, Helen Fielding, Vicki Kirby, Sonia Kruks, Ann Murphy, Johanna Oksala, and Beata Stawarska.

More than sixty years ago, Simone de Beauvoir identified the importance of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writings to feminist theory. His exploration of the relationship between the body and the space it inhabits is key to modern phenomenological thinking. But there has been little agreement on how Merleau-Ponty's ideas ultimately have an impact on feminist philosophy. Does his emphasis on physical subjectivity lend a certain agency to all bodies, regardless of sex? Or do Merleau-Ponty's specific descriptions of physical experience betray an intrinsic bias toward a male heterosexual point of view? The essays presented here by Olkowski and Weiss attempt to situate Merleau-Ponty in the larger context of feminist theory, while impartially evaluating his contributions, both positive and negative, to that theory.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Jorella Andrews, David Brubaker, Judith Butler, Laura Doyle, Helen Fielding, Vicki Kirby, Sonia Kruks, Ann Murphy, Johanna Oksala, and Beata Stawarska.

The contributors to this international volume take up questions about a phenomenology of time that begins with and attunes to gender issues. Themes such as feminist conceptions of time, change and becoming, the body and identity, memory and modes of experience, and the relevance of time as a moral and political question, shape Time in Feminist Phenomenology and allow readers to explore connections between feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and time. With its insistence on the importance of gender experience to the experience of time, this volume is a welcome opening to new and critical thinking about being, knowledge, aesthetics, and ethics.

Spanning Merleau-Ponty's early and late thought, this volume focuses on the ontological, ethical, and political implications of his unique emphasis on the constitutive intertwinings of inside and outside, self and other, language and gesture, body and world, and identity and difference.