Feminism Culture and Embodied Practice

<p>Within both feminist theory and popular culture establishing similarities between embodied practices rooted in different cultural and geo-political contexts (e.g. ‘African’ female genital cutting and ‘Western’ cosmetic surgery) has become increasingly common as a means of countering cultural essentialism ethnocentrism and racism.</p><p><em>Feminism Culture and Embodied Practice</em> examines how cross cultural comparisons of embodied practices function as a rhetorical device – with particular theoretical social and political effects - in a range of contemporary feminist texts. It asks: Why and how are cross-cultural links among these practices drawn by feminist theorists and commentators and what do these analogies do? What knowledges hierarchies and figurations do these comparisons produce disrupt and/or reify in feminist theory and how do such effects resonate within popular culture? Taking a relational web approach that focuses on unravelling the binary threads that link specific embodied practices within a wider representational community this book highlights how we depend on and affect one another across cultural and geo-political contexts.</p><p>This book is valuable reading for undergraduates postgraduates and researchers in Gender Studies Postcolonial or Race Studies Cultural and Media Studies and other related disciplines.</p>