Thinking through original empirical research, this book explores the relations between girls' bodies and images from a Deleuzian perspective. Holding in suspension models of cause-and-effect and of subject(ivity)/object(ivity) it asks, what do images make possible for the becoming of bodies?

Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

"Volatile Bodies demonstrates that the sexually specific body is socially constructed: biology or nature is inherently social and has no pure or natural 'origin' outside culture. Being the raw material of social and cultural organization, it is subject to the endless rewriting and inscription that constitute all sign systems. Grosz demonstrates that the theories of, among others, Freud and Lacan theorize a male body. She then turns to corporeal experiences unique to women--menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, menopause--to lay the groundwork for new theories of sexed corporeality."--Back cover.

The Bodies That Remain is a collection of bodies and absences. Through biography, experimental essay and interview, fictional manifestation, and poetic extraction, The Bodies That Remain is a collection of texts and images on the bodies of artists and writers who battled with the frustration of their own physicality and whose work reckoned with these limitations and continued beyond them. The Bodies That Remain looks back at how the identity of these bodies was shaped by the spaces around them, through the retelling of memory, through stories told by others; of how their work, processed by their body, made it possible for others to experience sensations - mourning, desire, or a nostalgia that could not belong to another, to another's body and in capturing this ability, their work confirms the body's urgency. Amongst others, The Bodies That Remain tells the story of Emily Dickinson's decay, the missing grave of Valeska Gert, the voice and sound of the body of Judee Sill, and the derailed body and its work of Jane Bowles. It questions the absent body but broken organs of JT Leroy as they find themselves scattered across texts, and also interrogates the loss of distinction of illness for Jules de Goncourt as syphilis riddled his nervous system. It retrieves the illusory body of Kathy Acker through dream and through horror, sees the morphing body of Michael Jackson in becoming all of the bodies he was asked to be, and looks toward Sylvia Plath and the language of her own body. Contributions include texts and images by: Lynne Tillman (on Jane Bowles), David Rule (on Michael Jackson), Mairead Case (on Judee Sill), Claire Potter (on the Lads of Aran), Jeremy Millar (on Emily Dickinson), Chloé Griffin (on Valeska Gert), Phoebe Blatton (on Brigid Brophy), Susanna Davies-Crook (on Sarah Kane), Travis Jeppensen (on Gary Sullivan), Karen Di Franco (on Mary Butts), Tai Shani (on Mnemesoid), Philip Hoare (on Denton Welch), Heather Phillipson (on a dead dog), Uma Breakdown (on Guage Fanfic), Linda Stuppart (on Kathy Acker), Sharon Kivland (on Jacques Lacan), Harman Bains (on Wilhelm Reich), Pil & Galia Kollectiv (JT Leroy), Kevin Breathnach (on Jules de Goncourt), and Emily LaBarge (on Sylvia Plath).

Always in the process of becoming, inherently incomplete, the child is a remarkably malleable figure. In Figurations, Claudia Castañeda shows how this malleability is itself generated—how the child is "made" by different constituencies and how the resulting historically, geographically, and culturally specific figures are put to widely divergent uses, often to very powerful effect. Situated at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, cultural, and science and technology studies, this book provides a remarkable map of the child's meaning and movement across transnational circuits of exchange. Castañeda investigates the construction of the child as both a natural and cultural body, the character of its embodiment, and its imaginative appeal in various settings. The sites through which she tracks the bodily production and deployment of the child include nineteenth-century developmental science; cognitive neuroscience in the late twentieth century; international adoption; rumors and media coverage of child-organ stealing; and poststructuralist theory. Her work reveals the extent to which the child's cultural significance and value lie in its status as a body whose incompleteness makes it "available" for such varied uses. Figurations establishes the child as a key figure for understanding and rethinking the politics of nature, culture, bodies, and subjects in changing "global" worlds.

Esteemed Psychotherapist and writer Susie Orbach diagnoses the crisis in our relationship to our bodies and points the way toward a process of healing. Throughout the Western world, people have come to believe that general dissatisfaction can be relieved by some change in their bodies. Here Susie Orbach explains the origins of this condition, and examines its implications for all of us. Challenging the Freudian view that bodily disorders originate and progress in the mind, Orbach argues that we should look at self-mutilation, obesity, anorexia, and plastic surgery on their own terms, through a reading of the body itself. Incorporating the latest research from neuropsychology, as well as case studies from her own practice, she traces many of these fixations back to the relationship between mothers and babies, to anxieties that are transferred unconsciously, at a very deep level, between the two. Orbach reveals how vulnerable our bodies are, how susceptible to every kind of negative stimulus--from a nursing infant sensing a mother's discomfort to a grown man or woman feeling inadequate because of a model on a billboard. That vulnerability makes the stakes right now tremendously high. In the past several decades, a globalized media has overwhelmed us with images of an idealized, westernized body, and conditioned us to see any exception to that ideal as a problem. The body has become an object, a site of production and commerce in and of itself. Instead of our bodies making things, we now make our bodies. Susie Orbach reveals the true dimensions of the crisis, and points the way toward healing and acceptance.

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and LitHub Winner of the 2021 Science in Society Journalism Book Prize A fascinating and provocative new way of looking at the things we use and the spaces we inhabit, and a call to imagine a better-designed world for us all. Furniture and tools, kitchens and campuses and city streets—nearly everything human beings make and use is assistive technology, meant to bridge the gap between body and world. Yet unless, or until, a misfit between our own body and the world is acute enough to be understood as disability, we may never stop to consider—or reconsider—the hidden assumptions on which our everyday environment is built. In a series of vivid stories drawn from the lived experience of disability and the ideas and innovations that have emerged from it—from cyborg arms to customizable cardboard chairs to deaf architecture—Sara Hendren invites us to rethink the things and settings we live with. What might assistance based on the body’s stunning capacity for adaptation—rather than a rigid insistence on “normalcy”—look like? Can we foster interdependent, not just independent, living? How do we creatively engineer public spaces that allow us all to navigate our common terrain? By rendering familiar objects and environments newly strange and wondrous, What Can a Body Do? helps us imagine a future that will better meet the extraordinary range of our collective needs and desires.

The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Water is the element that, more than any other, ties human beings in to the world around them – from the oceans that surround us to the water that makes up most of our bodies. Exploring the cultural and philosophical implications of this fact, Bodies of Water develops an innovative new mode of posthuman feminist phenomenology that understands our bodies as being fundamentally part of the natural world and not separate from or privileged to it. Building on the works by Luce Irigaray, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze, Astrida Neimanis's book is a landmark study that brings a new feminist perspective to bear on ideas of embodiment and ecological ethics in the posthuman critical moment.