Body Politics and the Fictional Double

In recent years, questions concerning "the body" and its place in postmodern discourses have taken centre 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 lived experience or true selves. Instead of telling a story of the self, racialized, gendered or homophobic body fictions disfigure individuals by concealing them beneath a veil of invisibility and political, emotional or spiritual suffocation. The indivudual lives and relationships affected by the distorting stories these fictions tell are usually female and often ethnic while the interpreters and empowered authorities are not. As the object 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. We are in crisis. It is for these reasons that "Body Politics" concerns itself with women's bodies as well as the difference race and ethnicity makes. The moments of collision this volume examines include reflections on women's day to day lives as well as 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, contributors offer reinterpretations that challenge the fictional double while theorizing the discursive and performative forms its takes.

Table of Contents:
Contents Introduction: Body Fictions, by Debra Walker King 1. Who Says an Older Woman Can’t/Shouldn’t Dance? Gloria Wade-Gayles 2. When Body Politics of Partial Identifications Collide with Multiple Identities of Real Academics: Limited Understandings of Research and Truncated Collegial Interactions Sue V. Rosser 3. Body Language: Corporeal Semiotics, Literary Resistance Maude Hines 4. Writing in Red Ink Debra Walker King 5. Myths and Monsters: The Female Body as the Site for Political Agendas S. Yumiko Hulvey 6. Agency and Ambivalence: A Reading of Works by Coco Fusco Caroline Vercoe 7. Performing Bodies, Performing Culture: An interview with Coco Fusco and Nao Bustamante Rosemary Weatherston 8. Women Singing, Women Gesturing: The Gendered and Racially-Coded Body of Music Video Maureen Turim 9. Bombshell Stephanie A. Smith Afterword: The Unbroken Circle of Assumptions Trudier Harris Notes Selected Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

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.

Review :
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