Unruly Bodies

The first critical study of personal narrative by women with disabilities, Unruly Bodies examines how contemporary writers use life writing to challenge cultural stereotypes about disability, gender, embodiment, and identity. Combining the analyses of disability and feminist theories, Susannah Mintz discusses the work of eight American autobiographers: Nancy Mairs, Lucy Grealy, Georgina Kleege, Connie Panzarino, Eli Clare, Anne Finger, Denise Sherer Jacobson, and May Sarton. Mintz shows that by refusing inspirational rhetoric or triumph-over-adversity narrative patterns, these authors insist on their disabilities as a core--but not diminishing--aspect of identity. They offer candid portrayals of shame and painful medical procedures, struggles for the right to work or to parent, the inventive joys of disabled sex, the support and the hostility of family, and the losses and rewards of aging. Mintz demonstrates how these unconventional stories challenge feminist idealizations of independence and self-control and expand the parameters of what counts as a life worthy of both narration and political activism. Unruly Bodies also suggests that atypical life stories can redefine the relation between embodiment and identity generally.

Despite the West's privileging of slenderness as an aesthetic ideal, the African Diaspora has historically displayed a resistance to the Western European and North American indulgence in 'fat anxiety.' The Embodiment of Disobedience explores the ways in which the African Diaspora has rejected the West's efforts to impose imperatives of slenderness and mass market fat-anxiety. Author Andrea Shaw explores the origins and contradictions of this phenomenon, especially the cultural deviations in beauty criteria and the related social and cultural practices. Unique in its examination of how both fatness and blackness interact on literary cultural planes, this book also offers a diasporic scope that develops previously unexamined connections among female representations throughout the African Diaspora.

A manual for activism that begins with our most powerful asset -- our bodies Even as a wave of renewed feminism swells, too many women continue to starve, stuff, overwork, or neglect our bodies in pursuit of paper-thin ideals. "Fitness" has been co-opted by the beauty industry. We associate it with appearance when we should associate it with power. Grounded in advocacy with a rowdy, accessible spirit, Physical Disobedience asserts that denigrating our bodies is, in practice, an act of submission to inequality. But when we strengthen ourselves -- taking broad command of our individual physicality -- we reclaim our authority and build stamina for the literal work of activism: the protests, community service, and emotional resilience it takes to face the news and stay engaged. Physical Disobedience introduces a breathtaking new perspective on wellness by encouraging nonviolence toward our bodies, revitalizing them through diet and exercise, fashion and social media, alternative therapies, music, and motherhood. The goal is no longer to keep our bodies in check. The goal is to ignite them, to set them free, and have a mighty fine time doing it.

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of “unruliness” in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical, political, and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression – embodied, print, digital, and sonic – Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness, more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity, is constitutive of the political itself.

You know the type: the woman who won't shut up, who's too brazen, too opinionated - too much. She's the unruly woman, and she embodies one of the most provocative and powerful forms of womanhood today. In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, popular BuzzFeed columnist Anne Helen Petersen examines this phenomenon, using the lens of 'unruliness' to discuss the ascension of pop culture powerhouses like Amy Schumer, Nicki Minaj, and Caitlyn Jenner, and why the public loves to love (and hate) these controversial figures.

What forces bring ordinary people together in public to make their voices heard? What means do they use to break through impediments to democratic participation? Unruly Rhetorics is a collection of essays from scholars in rhetoric, communication, and writing studies inquiring into conditions for activism, political protest, and public assembly. An introduction drawing on Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler explores the conditions under which civil discourse cannot adequately redress suffering or injustice. The essays offer analyses of “unruliness” in case studies from both twenty-first-century and historical sites of social-justice protest. The collection concludes with an afterword highlighting and inviting further exploration of the ethical, political, and pedagogical questions unruly rhetorics raise. Examining multiple modes of expression—embodied, print, digital, and sonic—Unruly Rhetorics points to the possibility that unruliness, more than just one of many rhetorical strategies within political activity, is constitutive of the political itself.

Original oral and ethnographic sources inform this conceptual history of power in central Africa, imagined through the lens of Kitawala religious practices. Unruly Ideas: A History of Kitawala in Congo recounts the multifaceted history of the Congolese religious movement Kitawala from its colonial beginnings in the 1920s through its continued practice in some of the most conflict-riven parts of the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo today. Drawing on a rich body of original oral, ethnographic, and archival research, Nicole Eggers uses Kitawala as a lens through which to address the complex relationship between politics, religion, healing, and violence in central African history. Kitawala, which has roots in the African Watchtower (Jehovah’s Witness) movement, has long been viewed both by scholars and by popular historians as a form of male-dominated, anticolonial insurgency. But just as Kitawalists were never exclusively male, their teachings and activities were never directed solely at the Belgian colonial state, and their yearnings for self-rule were never entirely about the secular realms of authority. A more comprehensive look at the oral and archival evidence reveals they were and are concerned with the morality of power more broadly: on state, communal, and individual levels. Moreover, Kitawalist doctrine is itself unruly, and its preachers, prophets, and practitioners have articulated innumerable interpretations—most quite different from Watchtower Christianity—across space and time. More than a case study of a particular religious movement, Unruly Ideas is a conceptual history of power that investigates how communities and individuals in the region have historically imagined power, sought to access it, wielded it, and policed the morality of its uses. By focusing on power and its intellectual and social history in Congo, Unruly Ideas creates an analytical space in which readers can understand the differing manifestations of Kitawala—from its overtly political and sometimes violent moments to those more aptly characterized as individual quests for spiritual and physical therapy—as varying themes in the same story: the pursuit of wellness in the context of malady. On a more practical level, the book raises important questions about the project of writing histories of places like eastern Congo: a region where the repercussions of decades of political neglect, upheaval, and violence force us to reconsider how we can think about and use oral and archival sources. Finally, the book investigates the embodied and gendered nature of field research and interrogates the intersubjective and reciprocal nature of knowledge production.

'Learning Bodies’ addresses the lack of attention paid to the body in youth and childhood studies. Whilst a significant range of work on this area has explored gender, class, race and ethnicity, and sexualities – all of which have bodily dimensions – the body is generally studied indirectly, rather than being the central focus. This collection of papers brings together a scholarly range of international, interdisciplinary work on youth, with a specific focus on the body. The authors engage with conceptual, empirical and pedagogical approaches which counteract perspectives that view young people’s bodies primarily as ‘problems’ to be managed, or as sites of risk or deviance. The authors demonstrate that a focus on the body allows us to explore a range of additional dimensions in seeking to understand the experiences of young people. The research is situated across a range of sites in Australia, North America, Britain, Canada, Asia and Africa, drawing on a range of disciplines including sociology, education and cultural studies in the process. This collection aims to demonstrate – theoretically, empirically and pedagogically – the implications that emerge from a reframed approach to understanding children and youth by focusing on the body and embodiment.

Unruly Bodies explors our ever-changing relationship with our bodies - the emotional, the psychological, the cultural, and the scientific.