Representing Bodies

According to the bodily awareness thesis (BAT), awareness of one's own body is a necessary condition for the acquisition and possession of concepts of primary qualities such as force and shape. I discuss two arguments for this thesis. The acquisition argument for BAT focuses on the role of bodily sensation and action in the acquisition of the concept of force. I suggest that this argument requires us to conceive of the content of sensation as both representational and non–conceptual. The objective reality argument for BAT claims that awareness of one's own body is an essential component of those experiences which are required for a proper grasp of concepts of primary qualities. I conclude by arguing, in opposition to Sartre and Merleau–Ponty, that there is no incoherence in the idea that one's body is a thing among other things.     

Cartesian Bodies and Movement Phenomenology

This essay critically considers scientific and metaphorical understandings of the body and embodiment. It employs interrogates and employs the concepts of embodiment, ego, bodily intentionality, and anorexia from a phenomenological perspective. It considers the battery of concepts regarding embodiment: soma (the shape of the body), sarx (the flesh of the body) and pexis (the body and soul in unity). While Soma and sarx are the objective body, they are explained by the natural sciences. Pexis is the ‘unobjective’ body; it is subjective, and it is to be studied as a subjective phenomenon. To understand pexis means to understand that the body does not finish with the skin but is connected to its surroundings. There is also a consideration of the possibilities of the body under Heidegger's idea of protention, which refers to the transformation of the body into an instrument. When the body is conceived of as an instrument or object anorexia is seen as an illness only of embodiment as soma. A richer alternative is the idea that anorexia is an illness of existence that can be explained by Heidegger's discussion of embodiment via the concept of dasein.     

Mushroom Bodies Suppress Locomotor Activity in Drosophila melanogaster

Locomotor activity of single, freely walking flies in small tubes is analyzed in the time domain of several hours. To assess the influence of the mushroom bodies on walking activity, three independent noninvasive methods interfering with mushroom body function are applied: chemical ablation of the mushroom body precursor cells; a mutant affecting Kenyon cell differentiation (mushroom body miniature¹); and the targeted expression of the catalytic subunit of tetanus toxin in subsets of Kenyon cells. All groups of flies with mushroom body defects show an elevated level of total walking activity. This increase is attributable to the slower and less complete attenuation of activity during the experiment. Walking activity in normal and mushroom body-deficient flies is clustered in active phases (bouts) and rest periods (pauses). Neither the initiation nor the internal structure, but solely the termination of bouts seems to be affected by the mushroom body defects. How this finding relates to the well-documented role of the mushroom bodies in olfactory learning and memory remains to be understood.     

Bodies capture attention when nothing is expected

Functional neuroimaging research has shown that certain classes of visual stimulus selectively activate focal regions of visual cortex. Specifically, cortical areas that generally and selectively respond to faces (Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J., & Chun, M. M. (1997). The fusiform face area: a module in human extrastriate cortex specialized for face perception. Journal of Neuroscience, 17(11), 4302-4311; Puce, A., Allison, T., Asgari, M., Gore, J. C., & McCarthy, G. (1996). Differential sensitivity of human visual cortex to faces, letterstrings, and textures: a functional magnetic resonance imaging study. Journal of Neuroscience, 16(16), 5205-5215.) and to the human body (Downing, P. E., Jiang, Y., Shuman, M., & Kanwisher, N. (2001). A cortical area selective for visual processing of the human body. Science, 293(5539), 2470-2473.) have recently been described using fMRI. A parallel body of research has focused on the ability of faces to "capture" the focus of attention, compared to other kinds of objects (Lavie, N., Ro, T., & Russell, C. (2003). The role of perceptual load in processing distractor faces. Psychological Science, 14(5), 510-515; Ro, T., Russell, C., & Lavie, N. (2001). Changing faces: a detection advantage in the flicker paradigm. Psychological Science, 12(1), 94-99; Vuilleumier, P. (2000). Faces call for attention: evidence from patients with visual extinction. Neuropsychologia, 38(5), 693-700.). The present study uses Mack and Rock's "inattentional blindness" paradigm to investigate whether unexpected, task-irrelevant human body stimuli capture awareness when attention is occupied by a primary task (Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998). Inattentional blindness. London: MIT Press). Silhouettes and stick figures of human bodies, and silhouettes of hands, were compared to control stimuli including object silhouettes, object stick figures, and scrambled silhouettes of bodies, body parts, and objects. Participants were significantly better able to detect a human figure relative to the control stimuli. These results suggest that the human body, like the face, may be prioritized for attentional selection. More generally, they are consistent with the proposal that the visual system assigns attentional priority to types of stimuli that are also represented in strongly selective cortical regions.     

Bodies and Persons: Theological Reflections on Transhumanism

While cautioned by Ted Peters’ critique of the more radical brand of transhumanism, in this article the author affirms a greater openness on the part of Christian theology toward the transhumanist/posthumanist program. A key concern will be the place of the human body. Christians affirm an eschatological resurrection of the body. This stands in contrast to radical transhumanists who seek cybernetic immortality—that is, disembodied intelligence. Yet, such intelligence could manifest in a virtual or robotic body. Therefore, it turns out that a posthuman entity, whether an upload or superintelligence, can have a body, albeit qualitatively different from the familiar flesh and blood body. If a pothuman entity can also have personhood, then why could not the promise of God apply?     

Bodies and their parts

How do we think about the space of bodies? Several accounts of mental representations of bodies were addressed in body part verification tasks. Animagery account predicts shorter times to larger parts (e.g., back < hand). Apart distinctiveness account predicts shorter times to more discontinuous parts (e.g., arm < chest). Apart significance account predicts shorter times to parts that are perceptually distinct and functionally important (e.g., head < back). Because distinctiveness and significance are correlated, the latter two accounts are difficult to distinguish. Both name-body and body-body comparisons were investigated in four experiments. In all, larger parts were verified more slowly than smaller ones, eliminating the imagery/size account. Despite the correlation between distinctiveness and significance, the data suggest that when comparisons are perceptual (body-body), part distinctiveness is the best predictor, and when explicit or implicit naming is involved, part significance is the best predictor. Naming seems to activate the functional aspects of bodies.     

Anarchic Bodies: Foucault and the Feminist Question of Experience

The article shows that Michel Foucault's account of the sexual body is not a naive return to a prediscursive body, nor does it amount to discourse reductionism and to the exclusion of experience, as some feminists have argued. Instead, Foucault's idea of bodies and pleasures as a possibility of the counterattack against normalizing power presupposes an experiential understanding of the body. The experiential body can become a locus of resistance because it is the possibility of an unpredictable event.     

Reconfiguring Gender with John Dewey: Habit,Bodies, and Cultural Change

This paper demonstrates how John Dewey's notion of habit can help us understand gender as a constitutive structure of bodily existence. Bringing Dewey's pragmatism in conjunction with Judith Butler's concept of performativity, 1 provide an account of how rigid binary configurations of gender might be transformed at the level of both individual habit and cultural construct.     

Disembodied Souls or Soul-Less Bodies: Spirituality as Fragmentation

SUMMARY

‘Soul’ and ‘body’ are two linguistic expressions of one and the same reality, the human being. In pastoral care, aged care, and palliative care the stated aim is always to care for the whole person. An increasing focus on ‘spirituality’ has also led to objectifying and measuring what is ultimately beyond calculation. To care for each person as an ‘ensouled body’ and ‘embodied soul’ is to acknowledge we are in the service of one another. In entering one another's stories, words like impose, define, and manage are replaced by trust, love, and faithfulness. Measurable outcomes are then replaced by risk, ambiguity, and mystery: the heart and soul and body of human care.     

Rigidity,instability and dimensionality

The paper takes a detailed look at a surprising new aspect of the dynamics of rigid bodies. Far from the usual consideration of rigid body theory as a merely technical chapter of classical physics, I demonstrate here that there are solutions to the conservation equations of mechanics that imply the spontaneous, unpredictable splitting of a rigid body in free rotation, something that has direct implications for the problem of causality. The paper also shows that the instability revealed in indeterminist splitting processes does not depend solely on the bodies’ inertial properties but also on the number of dimensions of the physical space they inhabit. The paper concludes with a conjecture on the behavior of rigid bodies in four-dimensional space.     

Immoral Bodies: The Implicit Association Between Moral Discourse and the Body

Three studies examined the ways in which cognitive appraisals of health and the condition of the body use moral discourse derived from Christianity. Study 1 indicated that people explicitly rated health-related behaviors such as exercising and dieting as more pious and less sinful than their negative counterparts. Studies 2 and 3 elaborated upon these results using the Implicit Association Test, a cognitive procedure for examining automatic (or implicit) associations that may exist outside of conscious awareness. Results indicated that people have a strong implicit association between morality and the condition of the body. Furthermore, this implicit association remained significant once potential overlap with standard evaluative terminology was statistically controlled. These results suggest that people implicitly evaluate the condition of the body using moral discourse, and that the use of such rhetoric reflects the cognitive appraisal of obesity as immoral, rather than as simply negative in a standard sense.     

Animated Bodies in Immunological Practices: Craftsmanship,Embodied Knowledge,Emotions and Attitudes Toward Animals

Taking up the body turn in sociology, this paper discusses scientific practices as embodied action from the perspective of Husserl’s phenomenological theory of the “Body”. Based on ethnographic data on a biology laboratory it will discuss the importance of the scientist’s Body for the performance of scientific activities. Successful researchers have to be skilled workers using their embodied knowledge for the process of tinkering towards the material transformation of their objects for data production. The researcher’s body then is an instrument of measuring as well as a kind of archive of knowing. Their body becomes a disciplined instrument which has its own place and function inside the laboratory. Furthermore, the appresentational apperception of Bodies (Husserl) is being discussed as a basis for the emotional and ethical concerns towards laboratory-animals. Attitudes towards animals in the laboratory setting (as well as elsewhere) are highly emotional. Nevertheless, following the literature of the sociology of the body, those emotional reactions still follow certain cultural patterns which themselves can be understood as embodied ways of knowing “right” or “wrong”. Besides as an instrument, the scientist’s body can also be understood as a resource of emotional attachment towards animals. It is an instrument for performing transformation as well as one for caring.     

Setting the bar: divergent sociocultural norms for women's and men's ideal appearance in real-world contexts

Research suggests that exposure to sociocultural norms for idealized appearance can reduce both women's and men's body satisfaction. Despite comparable effects for both genders in the lab, in the “real-world” women's body satisfaction is chronically lower than men's. Real-world gender differences may arise from discrepancies in men's and women's everyday exposure to norms. Across eight studies using a variety of content analysis, survey, and experimental methods, we examine differences in sociocultural norms for ideal appearance pertaining to women and men in “daily life” contexts. We demonstrate that appearance norms encountered by women in daily life are more rigid, homogenous and pervasive than those for men, and that more messages implying the attainability of the ideal appearance are directed at women. Finally, experimental results show that homogeneous, rigid norms (like those typically encountered by women) are more harmful to body image than heterogeneous, flexible norms (like those typically encountered by men).     

Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity

This essay shows that Jean‐Luc Nancy's reconceptualization of corporeality in such texts as L'Intrus and Corpus can be an important ally to feminist theories of body. I introduce Nancy's ontology and argue that his rejection of the unified, integrated body of humanist discourses in favor of dis‐integrated bodies constituted by multiple alterities and his consequent reinterpretation of body as a “being‐exscribed” begin the task of thinking bodies beyond traditional dualisms and their ahistorical and rationalist frameworks. I then address three potential criticisms of Nancy's work and suggest that though there may be reasons to move cautiously in adopting the framework he provides, his work harbors resources directly beneficial to critiques of prevailing forms of gender normativity. Quel étrange moi! —Jean‐Luc Nancy, Corpus     

Heavenly Bodies: Religious Issues in Cognitive Behavioral Treatment of Eating Disorders

Minimal attention has been given to the role that religion may play in the development, maintenance, and treatment of eating disorders. Many religions espouse specific doctrines about the nature and purpose of the body as well as prescribe particular body grooming and eating practices. These doctrines and practices influence individuals' schemas and experiences of the body and eating, which can either contribute to or provide protection from eating disorders. This paper describes pathways through which religious beliefs and practices may impact risk for and maintenance of eating disorders. Methods for integrating religious concepts, practices, and resources into standard cognitive-behavioral treatment for eating disorders are discussed, including interventions that address purported religiously oriented contributory and protective factors. Treatment of a religious client with an eating disorder is described to illustrate the incorporation of religiously oriented interventions in practice.     

Bodies as open projects: reflections on gender and sexuality

Abstract

This article argues that the social constructivist paradigm falls into the same dualistic trap as biological essentialism when attempting to respond to questions of gender and sexuality. I argue that social constructivism, like biological determinism, presumes a ‘split’ world, where subjective lived experiences are separated from the world of socio-cultural forces. Following a phenomenological approach, grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological view of the body, this article attempts to move beyond the dualistic metadiscourses of social constructivism in maintaining that identity is a fully embodied process. I see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and corporeally constituted. In the light of this, I propose an understanding of gender and sexuality that focuses on the centrality of the body as open project. This approach sees gender and sexuality as embodied processes that are enmeshed with the complex fabric of lived everyday experiences and concurrent socio-cultural and historical processes. Drawing on real-life examples, I conclude that gender and sexual embodiment are not one-dimensional according to a binary system of male versus female. Rather, given the documented experience of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of human existence, there are a variety of possible embodiments of humankind.     

Bodies at Menarche: Stories of Shame, Concealment, and Sexual Maturation

This study examines the embodied nature of menarche through a focus on themes of shame, concealment, and sexual maturation. Using a narrative analysis, it examines menarche stories of 155 undergraduates in the Pacific Northwest, USA, aged 21 years and younger, who started their periods between 1999 and 2003 and who grew up in a culture with changing attitudes and practices about women and the body. Unlike findings from past studies and those with older participants, women reported more positive experiences of menarche. While these data provide evidence for changing attitudes and practices associated with menarche, they may also reflect cultural changes that increasingly commodify the female body and encourage girls to identify the maturing female body as an asset.     

Early Development of Mushroom Bodies in the Brain of the Honeybee Apis mellifera as Revealed by BrdU Incorporation and Ablation Experiments

In the honeybee the mushroom bodies are prominent neuropil structures arranged as pairs in the dorsal protocerebrum of the brain. Each mushroom body is composed of a medial and a lateral subunit. To understand their development, the proliferation pattern of mushroom body intrinsic cells, the Kenyon cells, were examined during larval and pupal stages using the bromodeoxyuridine (BrdU) technique and chemical ablation with hydroxyurea.     

Bodies in Skin: A philosophical and Theological Approach to Genetic Skin Diseases

This contribution evolved from my work in a European network and is dedicated to the rare genetic skin diseases. To gain a deeper knowledge about the question, what it means to suffer from a genetic skin disease, I have discussed the concepts of skin in philosophical and theological anthropology. Presuming that ancient interpretations of skin diseases (moral and cultical impurity) are still relevant today, feminist Christian theology shows the ways of deconstructing stigmatizing paradigma by using the body as a hermeneutic category. Skin becomes the “open borderline” of the human being, pointing out both the social vulnerability and the transcendent capacity of the human person.