Talking Bodies III: Transformations, Movements and Expression

The body, sexuality and gender continue to be subjects of much debate in contemporary culture and within academia. The study of the self is a central concern across disciplines, and as with the Talking Bodies conference, we hope this book demonstrates the value in cross- and inter-disciplinary spaces. In 2019 and early 2020 as the editors and contributors prepared this manuscript we could not have imagined the circumstances in which we would be finalising the text. The coronavirus crisis worsened from a severe, but seemingly distant to many, new disease into a global pandemic which saw swathes of the global population placed into varying degrees of isolation and self-reflection. As we write from the UK and Netherlands in early 2021 this book is more than an abstract academic project. It represents the vitality and inspiration that comes from sharing knowledge with colleagues within our respective disciplines, and without them. Even before our social and professional lives became mediated through video calls, cross-disciplinary and international research offered vital windows into moments of human transformation, movement and expression. This collection of activist-academic essays scrutinises varied questions relating to the way we understand and (re)present ourselves and others, and at its core represents hope and determination that a different world is possible.

The main chapters are listed here:

Jess McArdle, Teresa Arias and Hannah Rayment-Jones, Body Awareness and Orientation in Midwifery: Moving Towards LGBTQ+ Inclusive Practice

Nancy Hansen, Bodies in Migration Marked for Exclusion

Esther De Dauw, The Bulletproof Black Body: Luke Cage and the Politics of Race and Respectability

Sonja Boon, It’s Not Over Until the Fat Professor Sings: Teaching Fat Studies in the ‘Fattest Province in Canada’

Chloe Dominique, Techniques of the Body as Techniques of the Self: Taking Sex Seriously

Alice Churm, “Older Women Masturbate Too”: Feminism, Sexuality and the Older Woman in Grace and Frankie

Michelle D. Ravenscroft, From Little Women to the ‘New Woman’: Representations of Female Adolescent Identity Formation in the Late Nineteenth Century

Hannah Rose Bayer, Between Gender and Tradition: How Normative Crafts-man-ship Causes Role Conflicts for Travelling Craftswomen

Justyna Wierzchowska, “My body is your vehicle”: Mothering, Relationality and the Transgenerational Bond in Janine Antoni’s Embodied Art

Beth Flanagan, “Speak of me as I am”: Regendering Othello