Translation: Iftiglish to Romanian

3fy be cited to support an alternative interpretation of his intellectual itinerary in which we might question the

relevance of the texts from the so-called archaeological period for the task of giving systematic account of his 'genealogical project* of practices. In the same vein, and perhaps more importantly, one might raise the question of die sense and status of the subject implied in the epistemological perspective of archaeology on the one hand, and in the ethics of truth-telling on the other. (Ross 2008: 62-3) Laurent de Vos, 'To See or Not Co See: The Ambiguity of Medusa in Relation to Mulisch's The Procedure* (Image f&J Narrative. An Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative 5 (Jan. 2003). 30 Jun. 2003 <http://wwwjimgeancmarrati Among the mythological figures that have come down to us from Antiquity, Medusa occupies a principal position. Throughout the ages she shows up in the cultural, social and political ideologies of each period, continually adapting herself to the ever-changing landscape surrounding her. Understandably, her presence is not always explicit, sometimes she stays hidden in the bushes, like a snake. Finally, it is hardly a surprise that, depending on the accents and perspectives, several interpretations can belascribed (to the archetype which do not necessarily have to exclude one another. Although it may seem that Medusa has largely disappeared from the scene since the beginning of the twentieth century and the emergence of psychoanalysis, her implicit presence and power can still be felt in several domains... In a short note about Medusa, Freud traces the psychoanalytical aspects behind the myth. He considers Medusa's decapitation as (he visualisation of the castration complex... Medusa's male observer is struck dumb 1 for two reasons: he is enthralled by the Freudian castration fear on the one hand, and by his sexual fa^rcmationoiT the other. Medusa repels and attracts at the same time. She is a snake monster but equally a femme fatale. She unites the beauty and the beast. The sexual connotation we ascribe to Medusa is not merely Freud's invention. No one less than Ovid makes the association with her sexuality in his opus magnum Metamorphoses at the beginning of our calendar ______________________ Minerva recuperates the Medusa head and its paralysing power. Who else man the virgin goddess with her chaste eyes, in Greece celebrated as Pallas Athena, can claim the magic cloak? The snakes on the Medusa head prove to be an extremely efficient protection of her sexuality. The shift from the sexual to the visual scope is also explicit in the comparison of Medusa with the myth of Baubo, dealing with a female body without head or breast, with the face on the belly. Surrounded by hair this 'face' refers to the female genitals even more explicitly....

# One last example of the sexualisation of Medusa, perhaps somewhat closer to home, can be found in contemporary medical terminology. Beside a number of other meanings, Medusa also lends her name to the medical denotation of a ygeath-shaped distension of the veins around the navel. The twisting course of veins is indeed reminiscent of the movement of snakes, but again we are dealing with a switch of the upper body to the lower body in the medical area. t Medusa is literally and figuratively an ambiguous being. She is the only one of the Gorgons that is not immortal, but she is not human either. Staying at the gates of Hades she lingers in the twilight zone between life and death. She represents a no man's land between the visible and the invisible, between order and chaos or ratio and folly. Medusa is an anthropomorphic and humanised monster. Depending on the period the serpent woman is pictured differently. She makes her appearance most often in turbulent eras, periods in which human knowledge and the belief in ratio are being questioned. Then she represents chaos auJii^ng mankind to the Kks o f nature. When man is living in the illusion that he can dominate chaos by means of reason, in that era Medusa takes on the role of a charming and attractive woman. She is, however, not always

Maf Doug'**5* Parity and Danger: An Analyst* of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London! Routledge,

Tf(1966))

Comparative religion has always been bedevilled by medical materialism. Some argue that even the most 3pgi of ancient rites have a sound hygienic basis. Others, though agreeing that primitive ritual has hygiene for its object, take the opposite view of its soundness. For them a great gulf divides our sound ideas of hygiene from the primitive's erroneous fancies. But both these medical approaches to ritual are fruitless because of a failure to confront our own ideas of hygiene and dirt.... If we can abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place. This is a very suggestive approach. It implies two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order. Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity. We can recognize in our own notions of dirt that we are using a kind of omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered system. It is a relative idea. Shoes are not dirty in themselves, but it is dirty to place them on the dining-table; food is not dirty in itself, but it is dirty to leave cooking utensils in the bedroom or food bespattered on clothing; similarly, bathroom equipment in the drawing room; clothing lying on chairs; out-door things in-doors; upstairs things downstairs; under-clothing appearing where over-clothing should be, and so on. In short, our pollution behaviour is the reaction which condemns any object or idea likely to confuse or contradict cherished classifications. We should not force ourselves to focus on dirt Defined in this way it appears as a residual category, rejected from our normal scheme of classifications. In trying to focus on it we run against our strongest mental habit. For it seems that whatever we perceive is organized into patterns for which we, the perceivers, are largely responsible. Perceiving is not a matter of passively allowing an organ - say of sight or hearing - to receive a ready-made impression from without, like a palette receiving a spot of paint Recognizing and remembering are not matters of stirring up old images of past impressions. It is generally agreed that all our impressions are schematically determined from the start. As perceivers we select from all the stimuli falling on our senses only those which interest us, and our interests are governed by a pattern-making tendency, sometimes called schema. In a chaos of shifting impressions, each of us constructs a stable world in which objects have recognizable shapes, are located in depth, and have permanence. In perceiving we are building, taking some cues and rejecting those which fit most easily into the pattern that is being built up. Ambiguous ones tend to be treated as if they harmonized with the rest of the pattern. Discordant ones tend to be rejected. If they are accepted, the structure of assumptions has to he modified. As learning proceeds, objects are named. Their names then affect the way they are perceived next time: Once labelled they are more speedily slotted into the pigeon-holes in future. As time goes on and experiences pile up, we make a greater and greater investment in our system of labels. So a conservative bias is built in. It gives us confidence. At any time we may have to modify our structure of assumptions to accommodate new experience, but the more consistent experience is with the past, the more confidence we can have in our assumptions. Uncomfortable facts, which refuse to be fitted in, we find ourselves ignoring or distorting so that they do not disturb these established assumptions.... Granted that disorder spoils pattern; it also provides the materials of pattern. Order implies restriction; from all possible materials, a limited selection has been made and from all possible relations a limited set has been used. So disorder by implication is unlimited, no pattern has been realized in it, but its potential for patterning is indefinite. This is why, though we seek to create order, we do not simply condemn disorder. We recognize that it to existing patterns; also that it has potentiality. It symbolizes both danger and power

^j|

B|MMM||iftp||idWI JUijiHsh to Romanian

Consider beliefs about persons in a marginal state. These are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable. Take, for example, the unborn child. Its present position is ambiguous, equally its future. For no one can say what sex it will have or whether it will survive the hazards of infancy. It is often treated as both vulnerable and dangerous.... Levy-Bruhl did not generalize that danger lies in marginal states, but Van Gennep had more sociological insight He saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states; simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others. The danger is controlled by ritual which precisely separates him from his old status, segregates him for a time, and then publicly declares his entry [into] his new status.... To plot a map of powers and dangers in a primitive universe, we need to underline the interplay of ideas of form and formlessness. So many ideas about power are based on an idea of society as a series of forms contrasted with surrounding non-form. There is power in the forms and other power in the inarticulate area, margins, confused lines, and beyond the external boundaries. If pollution is a particular class of danger, to see where it belongs in the universe of dangers we need an inventory of all the possible sources of power. In a primitive culture the physical agency of misfortune is not so significant as the personal intervention to which it can be traced. The effects are the same the world over: Drought is drought, hunger is hunger; epidemic, child labour, infirmity most of the experiences are held in common. But each culture knows a distinctive set of laws governing the way these disasters fall. The main links between persons and misfortunes are personal links. So our inventory of powers must proceed by classifying all kinds of personal intervention in the fortunes of others.... Pollution powers ... inhere in the structure of ideas itself and ... punish a symbolic breaking of that which should be joined or joining of that which should be separate. It follows from this that pollution is a type of danger which is not likely to occur except where the lines of structure, cosmic or social, are clearly defined. A polluting person is always in the wrong. He has developed some wrong condition or simply crossed some line which should not have been crossed and this displacement unleashes danger for someone. Bringing pollution, unlike sorcery and witchcraft, is a capacity which men share with animals, for pollution is not always set off by humans. Pollution can be committed intentionally, but intention is irrelevant to its effect - it is more likely to happen inadvertently.... The fact that pollution beliefs provide a kind of impersonal punishment for wrong-doing affords a means of supporting the accepted system of morality.... 1. When a situation is morally ill-defined, a pollution belief can provide a rule for detennining post hoc whether infraction has taken place or not. 2. When moral principles come into conflict a pollution rule can reduce confusion by giving a simple focus for concern. 3. When action that is held to be morally wrong does not provoke moral indignation, belief in the harmful consequences of a pollution can have the effect of aggravating the seriousness of the offence, and so of marshalling public opinion on the side of the right 4. When moral indignation is not reinforced by practical sanctions, pollution beliefs can provide a deterrent to wrongdoers. Some pollutions are too grave for the offender to be allowed to survive. But most pollutions have a very simple remedy for undoing their effects. There are rites of reversing, untying, burying, washing, erasing, furuigating, and so on, which at a small cost of time and effort can satisfactorily expunge them, rhe cancelling of a moral offence depends on the state of mind of the offended party and on the sweetness of nursing revenge. The social consequences of some offences ripple out in all directions and can never be reversed. Rites of

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reconciliation which enact the burial of the wrong have the creative effect of all ritual. They can help to erase the memory of the wrong and encourage the growth of right feeling. There must be an advantage for society at large in attempting to reduce moral offences to pollution offences which can be instantly scrubbed out by ritual. (Douglas 1984: 30, 36-7, 95-7, 99,104, 136-7)

Bryan S. Timer, 'Social Fluids: Metaphors and Meanings of Society' (Body and Society 9.1 (2003): 1-10)

The dominant concerns and anxieties of society tend to be translated into disturbed images of the body. The fluidity of the body, its origins, maturation and decay, is a generic disturbance.... Disturbances in society are reflected in the metaphors by which we understand our mental and physical health. Hence, we live in a modern society that often appears to be out of joint. Body metaphors illustrate the fact that we use the body as a convenient way for talking or thinking about the moral and political problems of society. Our sense of good and evil has also drawn heavily on bodily metaphors since what is sinister (sinistre) is related to left-handedness, the illegitimate or evil side.... Concepts of social order and disorder are often seen in terms of the balance or imbalance of the body. In the 18 th century, when doctors expressed their views about the body in scientific terms through mathematical measurement, the body was understood to be a hydraulic system of pumps, whose motions could be precisely calculated. The heart was the engine that controlled the ebb and flow of the blood. The heart of Harvey's medicine was an ejaculatory organ, but when the blood was flowing the medical metaphors of circulation were essentially domestic. The phallic heart ministered within an internal patriarchy to the female outer body. In sickness, the pumping of blood through the veins was constrained by blockages and harmful debris, and the therapeutic bleeding of patients was to assist these hydraulic mechanisms of the body, and to relieve pressure on the mind. Severe collective disturbances in society were often reflected in poor digestion of the individual body. These assumptions about social unrest producing disorder in the gut are illustrated in the basic idea of the need for a government of the body. Obesity and melancholy were associated with high rates of suicide in lS^-century England and thus symptomatic of a society that was out of control. In an age when gout and diabetes were already afflictions of the rich, George Cheyne's The English Malady of 1733 prescribed diet and exercise to regulate the body and the government of society. In modem management jargon, a lean and mean corporation needs a healthy management team.... The modern idea of government was originally taken from the diverse meanings of diet that stands for both a political regime and a government of the body. Regulating the body, disciplining the soul and governing society were merged in political theories of the state. A good diet is necessary for a body to achieve order and equilibrium, and good government is necessary for a society to be peaceful and stable. In the Hobbesian vision of politics, fear of death was a necessary inspiration of virtue, and the state of nature drove men to create sovereign power. Obesity is a loss of sovereignty over the body and it has typically been regarded as both a measure of moral laxity in the individual and a sign of social corruption. Rationing is part of the basic economy of the body and society. The more disturbed the governance of society, the more bizarre the bodily metaphors. Orcagna's fresco of the Triumph of Death in the church of Santa Croce in Florence, painted shortly after the Black Death, pictures noble men and women at an alfresco feast before open graves* where lepers and the blind plead unsuccessfully with Death to release them from suffering. The extraordinary imagination of Hieronymus Bosch expressed the torments of the 15th century through a series of images of bodily defecation in which the sinful beings of this world are finally expelled in the form of faeces, vomit and spew. In modern art, Francis Bacon's paintings of screaming popes and hanging meat are manifestations of a disturbed and disrupted social order in which tyrannical regimes have tortured their way into history. Bacon's art hangs between two

undecidable planes - 'the primal social scene and mat of the mobile body' (Boyne, 2001: 97), in which the undecidability of the body is constantly flooding out of the canvas.... As human beings, much of our early education is an attempt to inculcate a management of our bodily processes. Over the centuries, the polite management of human deposits - excrement, urine, spit and sperm i is fundamental to the civilizing process. The very cusp of the 'civilizing process* was the management of the 'natural functions* and, by the late 16th century, the 'frontier of embarrassment' was such that a nobleman who had to choose between health (relieving wind) and social decorum (good behaviour in company) would opt for manners (Elias, 2000: 109). Forks were introduced to help nobles to eat food daintily, the spittoon was removed from the dining room and the urinal became an essential facility of domestic architectural refinement Bodily secretions that are involuntary cause us public embarrassment, and hence we fear senility in which we may be unable to control our bodily functions. These bodily betrayals may force us to shun public spaces, because we are threatened by a loss of face, and soiled clothes and bed-wetting haunt us from early childhood (Hepworth, 2000:42).... ... We live in a 'somatic society' in which our present political problems and social anxieties are frequently transferred to the body. The social problems of young women are often expressed through anorexia nervosa, a condition emerging in the 1890s that recognized the arrival of consumer society, where the body beautiful carries such a heavy burden of significance. Ascetic anorexia emaciates the body, disrupts menstruation and returns young women to a status of child-like dependency where the home becomes a 'golden cage'. The cultural aesthetic of modern society is itself an anorexic one, in which slimming down is morally valuable. By way of contrast, ageing bodies threaten to undermine the economic growth of modem society as compulsory retirement produces a greying society that intensifies the 'ratio of dependency'. At the same time, cosmetic surgery, viagra and hormone replacement therapy promise to give us the appearance or functions of an eternal and sexy youth. In the US, the use of daily injections of human growth hormone is widespread as an anti-ageing strategy for improving fitness and performance. Our social world is being transformed by genetic and medical technologies that reconstruct social connections, and offer us genetically modified bodies and designer babies. In particular, new reproductive technologies are remaking the generative connections between parents and children, and reconstructing the family as a space of reproduction. These scientific innovations in reproduction and the unintended social changes they produce cannot easily be understood within the vocabularies that are derived from previous generations. (Turner 2003:1-4,6)

Michael Atkinson, 'Exploring Male Femininity in the "Crisis": Men and Cosmetic Surgery9 (Body and Society 14.1 (2008): 67-87) Once exclusively interpreted as the embodiment of docile femininity, cosmetic surgery is now inserted into the body modification practices of more Canadian men. An inspection of the most common invasive (e.g. rhinoplasty, eyelid surgery, liposuction, hair transplantation and breast reduction) and non-invasive (e.g. chemical peels, hair removal, Botox and collagen injections, and microdermabrasion) cosmetic procedures highlights how men aesthetically modify their bodies as veritable 'masks of masculinity' (Atkinson, 2006). In building on ethnographic, interview and archival data gathered on men's involvement in cosmetic surgery in Canada in the past five years, this article discusses how shifts in postindustrial work patterns, power relations between the genders, and ideologies of technological-scientific consumption impact some men's understandings of acceptable corporeal performance. These men's preferences for and sensibilities about cosmetic surgery are contextualized within a perceived 'crisis of masculinity' in Canada, and linked to Norbert Elias's description of fftlizing processes. Narratives offered by the men indicate mat cosmetic surgery is a response to a collectively felt loss of established masculine hegemony in a range of figurational contexts, and reconciled as civilized masculine practice.... Since the year 2000, men's cosmetic surgery practices in Canada have mushroomed. Estimates suggest that over 10,000 Canadian men have received aesthetic surgery in the past 10 years, with participation rates rising sharply in the past three years alone - a 20% increase in participation (Medicaid, 2004). The collective willingness of men to experiment with surgical intervention in the pursuit of more youthful, vibrant, attractive and healthy-looking bodies (especially around the face) perhaps signifies that these men's collective sensibilities, or hahituses, are shining; stated differently, it may symbolize how men are presently negotiating traditional parameters of'established' masculine identity performance to include cosmetic bodywork....

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While mere has been a reinvigorated interest in masculinity research, there is a paucity of extended, standpoint investigations of men's experiences with aesthetics and body modification that do not attempt to theoretically dissect the practice from either feminist or pro-feminist viewpoints - save, perhaps, for the literature on men and masculinity in the sociology of sport, or within the burgeoning literature on gay/metro masculinities. The lack of theoretically innovative research symbolizes, as Connell (2005) suggests, a general tendency to view masculinity as a singularly constructed and unproblematic gender identity. Masculinity still tends to be framed by gender researchers along very narrow conceptual lines, as Grogan and Richards (2002) illustrate. Dominant constructions of masculinity are either interpreted as rigidly hegemonic/traditional (Garlick, 2004), or drastically alternative and deeply marginalized (Hise, 2004). Neither of these polar positions accurately captures how clusters of men often wrestle with and negotiate established constructions of masculinity in novel ways.... Crisis-inspired research has been challenged along empirical and theoretical axes. Gill et al. (2005) raise doubts about the presence of a masculinity crisis at all, suggesting that crisis-inspired analyses are theoretically 'lazy', part of a cultural backlash against feminism(s), unreflective of social-structural conditions largely underpinned by a masculine hegemony, a product of media amplification, and generally unreflective of men's experiences with gender and the micropolitics of body representation. These scholars rightfully point out that any identified social trend like a 'crisis of masculinity' is of course a discursive construction, and subject to deconstruction. Gill et al. (2005) prefer to ascribe doubts about the body, its construction and representation as part of a general ontological instability in postmodern cultures and the dissolution of tradition/truth, where neoliberal discourses of self-improvement and reflexive individualism reign supreme. Yet in doing so we may, and one might argue 'lazily', disavow the ontological stability of hegemonic masculinity per se and the ways in which male body modification is dialogical with shifting power balances between men and women. Stated differently, one must caution against a blanket empirical assumption that male body modification is a latemodern and hyperindividualistic/consumption-oriented practice divorced from sociogenic transformations in the structural and cultural relationships between men and women; or that forms of body modification are merely communicative gestures shared among men to reconfirm a collectively extolled brand of normative masculinity (see Pope et al, 2000). ||| (Atkinson 2008:67-9)

Elizabeth G. Liles and Stephen C. Woods, 'Anorexia Nervosa as Viable Behaviour: Extreme Self-deprivation in Historical Context* (History of Psychiatry 10 (1999): 205-25) Anorexia nervosa (AN) is often touted as a singularly complex psychiatric illness, in part because of the combined physical and mental afflictions associated with the self-induced starvation The widespread pathology throughout the body draws the attention of physicians in diverse specialties of medicine, and scholars from as disparate Melds as women's studies, psychology and neurology have researched its aetiologies! causes. AN seems to be the quintessential psychobiological illness, a pathological result of cultural injustice, psychiatric inferiority, and/or familial vulnerability. Yet perhaps the most peculiar feature of AN is its severity, as sufferers literally starve themselves, often for much of their lives, and often to death.... A curious aspect of AN is its apparent increase in incidence in Westernized countries in the past fifty years or so (though it remains an uncommon illness). This increase in mainly industrialized countries suggests that culture has a significant role in its aetiology. Neither historical nor modem contexts of food refusal pinpoint the causes of this prolonged, tortuous self-starvation, though they illustrate universal sociocultural factors that seem to perpetuate it A multidisciplinary approach to consideration of the increase in cases reveals the complexity of this cultural role. (Liles and Woods 1999: 205-6)

Karma Lochrie, Margery Kempe and Translations of the Flesh (Philadelphia: University o f Pennsylvania Press, 1991) 'Writing the body" is a phrase I borrow from contemporary feminist theory. In using the phrase, however, I am not adopting contemporary understandings of what it means for a woman to "write her body." Instead, 1 want to argue that Jean Gerson is objecting to a kind of ecriture feminine in the Middle Ages, that is, a feminine writing of the body. This writing of women mystics, continental as

well as English, must be viewed, in turn, against the suppression of the female body in language. While all such suppression exists within - and in the service of - patriarchal culture, it varies through languages and cultures and across time.... When mysticism takes to the streets, it becomes "common," with all the earmarks of class, social conditioning, and historical corruption. Its mystery is clearly in danger, according to mis way of thinking Furthermore, ignorance and women's excessive emotionalism are blamed by Gerson in the 15th century and Huizinga in the 20* century for the literalism of mystical language, the physicality of its images and practices, and its emphasis on Christ*8 suffering.... Recent interest in the ecstatic practices of 15^entury mystics has contributed to revising our understanding of their mysticism. Andre* Vauchez in particular has argued that the attraction of late medieval piety to women, with its emphasis on the physical aspects of mystical experience, is due in part to its providing them with a "privileged communication" with God and an access to religious mystery otherwise denied them. Vauchez recognizes that feminine mysticism in the late Middle Ages was "profoundly subversive** because of the extent to which it drew attention to the rupture between divine love and intellectual understanding. Bynura likewise emphasizes the way in which late medieval spirituality provided women with a new access to divine love. She characterizes the rationale behind some of the more disturbing late medieval mystical practices with the idea that "bodiliness provides access to the sacred.9* This is the point where a feminist interrogation of the body and writing, or language, in medieval culture is helpful, for we cannot understand what "bodily access to the sacred" actually means for the Middle Ages without first determining what and whose body we are talking about, and how that body is situated in patriarchal culture. My point is that the body is not something we can take as a "given," nor something which is the same for the Middle Ages as it is for us in the 1990s. The body, particularly the female body, is itself a construct of sciaooe, medicine, theology, literature, education, the clothing industry, advertising, and fitness centers. Except for the last two industries, the same is true for the Middle Ages. The female body, simply put, has a history; and that history is deterrnined by social and religious values, institutions, and pauwchal power structures. As Susan

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Translation: English to Romanian id-blood entity, but that of a symbolic construct

Dawn MaHc Hayes. Body and Sacred Place im Medieval Europe, 1100-1389 (New York & London: Routledge, 2003) A fundamental tension existed in the formulation of a medieval conception of sacred place due to the inherent contradictions within Biblical authority. The Old Testament tradition enshrined the physical space of the temple as the holy locus for worship ["But 1... will enter your house, 1 will bow down toward your holy temple in awe of you." (Psalm 5:7)], while the New Testament was rilled with language ["Do you not know that you are God's temple and mat God's Spirit dwells in you?... God's temple is holy, and you are that temple." (1 Cor. 3:16-17)] that personalized and particularized the individual Christian's body as a temple. The baptized Christian body even consumed the mystical body of Christ in the Eucharist in the bodily act of eating. Learned medieval Christians, therefore, nurtured two distinct views of sacred place. They had to. Focusing on churches while neglecting the role of the temple of the soul in worship would have been a rejection of New Testament tradition. On the other hand, cultivating the importance of the human body in worship while ignoring the tradition of buildings would have rendered impossible a catholic Christian church.... Peter Abelard's privatization of sin made it more difficult to determine whether a church had been profaned. It was no longer a cut and dry decision that could be made solely by an investigation of material circumstances. Now at least part of the evidence that determined whether a church had been profaned rested within the agent's mind. What is particularly striking about Abelard's contribution is that it was in conformity with the spirit of the New Testament. He asserted the importance of inner will at the expense of external circumstance. As Mary Douglas notes, Christianity made a theoretical break with Judaism over the need for material purity. She argues, though, that the concern for pollution characteristic of Mosaic law survived in early Christianity. She argues that later on when canon law was codified, measures for ritual purity were not incorporated The few examples of concern for ritual uncleanness that remain, Douglas asserts, were later interpreted as having symbolic spiritual meaning... (Hayes 2003:3,6)

Donna Haraway, "Investment Strategies for the Evolving Portfolio of Primate Females" (Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science, ed. Mary Jacobus, Evelyn Fox Keller and Sally Shuttleworth, New York & London: Routledge, 1990,139-62) Deferring direct discussion of Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's writing, let us begin with the topic that seems to pervade Hrdy's scientific stories most literally: sexual politics. The salience of sexual politics to major social controversies in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s is undeniable. Sexual politics is a polyvalent term covering a host of life-and-death issues and struggles for meanings. A list suggested by the term "sexual politics* defies termination: abortion, sterilization, birth control, population policy, high technology-mediated reproductive practices, wife beating, child abuse, family policy, definition of what counts as a family, the sexual political economy of aging, the science and politics of diet "disorders*' and regimens, compulsory heterosexual ity, heterodox sexual practices among lesbian feminists, sexual identity politics, lesbian and gay histories and contemporary movements, rape, pornography, transsexuality, fetal and child purchase through

contract with pregnant women ("surrogacy* seems a hopelessly inadequate word), racist sexual exploitation, single parenting by men and women, feminization of poverty, women's employment outside the home, unpaid labor in the home, covertly gendered norms for professional careers, restriction to populations of one sex in health research on non-scx-limited diseases, domestic divisions of labor, class and race divisions among women, high theory in the human sciences, technologies of representation, social research methodologies, the ties of mascul inism to militarism and especially to nuclear politics, psychoanalytic accounts of gender and culture - and on, and on. What principle of order could reduce such a list to coherence? It is possible to argue, nonfacetiously, that every major public issue in the last two decades in the United States has been pervaded by the symbols and stakes of sexual politics. It is in this cultural and political environment that feminism and antifeminism have emerged in nearly every area of collective and personal life, contesting the constructions and representations of gender.... In her analysis of the ideological development of "second wave" feminism in the United States in the context of the postwar revolution in female (especially mothers' and married women's) labor force participation, controversies about personal and family life, and decline of the cultures of domesticity among white middle- and working-class women, Judith Stacey argued that feminism has often been credited or blamed for transformations, insecurities, and freedoms rooted in the vast rearrangements of "postindustrial" society. Feminism has been a shaper of, but also deeply shaped by, fundamental historical rearrangements of daily life in late-industrial society. The ideologies and symbols associated with woman as mother, with woman constituted as object of another's desire and pleasure, and with the female body as the stakes in the contest for honor among men have all been problematized by other cultural discourses on gender and sex. Only some of these challenging moves have been feminist But in general, the power of the image of woman as natural mother a being consumed and fulfilled by dedication to another; a being whose meaning is the species, not the self; a being less than and more than human, but never paradigmatically man - has declined in nearly every discursive arena, from popular culture to legal doctrine to evolutionary theory. Attempts have repeatedly been made since World War 11 to rehabilitate the ''traditional" (i.e., white, bourgeois. Western, nineteenth-century) images of the female body organized around the uterus, social motherhood, and domesticity; but they have had the feel of a backlash, of a still-dangerous but defeated ideology. At the same time, the languages and issues of reproductive politics have intensified in material and symbolic power. Both symbolically and practically, the fights over reproductive politics are carried out paradigmatically in and on and over the bodies of real women. But they are also carried out in the images and practices of scientific and technological research, science-fiction film, metaphoric languages among nuclear weapons researchers, and neo-liberal and neo-conservative political theory. Reproductive politics provide the figure for the possibility and nature of a future in multinational capitalist and nuclear society. Production is conflated with reproduction. Reproduction has become the prime strategic question, a privileged trope for logics of investment and expansion in late capitalism, and the site of discourse about the limits and promises of the self as individual. Reproductive "strategy" has become the figure for reason itself - the logic of late-capitalist survival and expansion, of how to stay in the game in postmodern conditions. Simultaneously, reproductive biotechnology is developed and contested within the story of the final removal of making babies from women's bodies, the final appropriation of nature by culture, of woman by man. Symbolically, reproduction displaced to the laboratory and the factory becomes no longer the sign of the power of personal and organic bodies, preeminently the site of sexual politics, but the sign of the conquest of still another "last" frontier in the ideology of masculinist technology and industrial politics. Reproduction, strategic reasoning, and high technology come to inhabit the same sentences in social discourse. This is decidedly not the syntax of maternalism and domesticity.... From Western points of view, the premises of individualism and self-sufficiency break down most dramatically and inescapably in sexual reproduction by men and women. At its simplest, sexual reproduction

takes twilt ao how much the theories of masculine potency in Western philosophy and medicine attempt to evade the matter. Phrased in the discourse of biology, there is never any reproduction of the individual in sexually reproducing specie*. Short of Cloning, that staple of science fiction, neither parent is continued in the child, who fs a randomly reassembled generic package projected into the next generation. To reproduce does not defeat death any more than producing other memorable deeds or words does. Maternity might be more certain than paternity, but neither secures the self into the future, In short, where mere is sex, literal reproduction is a contradiction in terms. The issue from the self is always (an)other. The scandal of sexual difference for the liberal conception of the self is at the heart of the matter. Sexual difference founded on compulsory hetcrosexuality is itself the key technology for the production and perpetuation of Western man and for the assurance of this project as a fantastic lie. In the major Western narrative for generating self and other, one is always too few and two are always too many. In that dialectic lies the fiction made into reality of the escalation and repressive sublimation of combat as the motor of personal and collective history....

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Translation: English to Romanian

But - also at its simplest - so far, only women get pregnant Pregnant women in Western cultures are in much more shocking relation than men to doctrines of unencumbered property in the self. In "making babies," female bodies violate Western women's liberal singularity during their lifetimes and compromise their claims to full citizenship. For Western men in reproduction, setting aside the "problem" of death, the loss of self seems so tiny, the degrees of freedom so many. Ontologically always potentially pregnant, women are both more limited in themselves, with a body that betrays their individuality, and limiting to men's fantastic self-reproductive projects. To achieve themselves, even if the achievement is a history-making fantasy, men must appropriate women. Women are the limiting resource, but not the actors. In the late twentieth century, this continuing narrative of the embattled and calculating mortal individual elaborates the fantasy of the breakdown of already fantastic "coherent" subjects and objects, including the Western self, for both men and women. All subjects and objects seem nothing but strategic assemblages, proximate means to some ultimate, theoretic end achieved by replicating, copying, and simulating - in short, by the means of postmodern reproduction. No wonder cloning is the imaginary figure for the survival of self-identity in cyborg culture. (Haraway 1990: 140-3)

Peter McLaren, "Schooling the Postmodern Body: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Enfleshment" (Journal of Education 170.3 (1988): 53-83) The term "body" is a promiscuous term that ranges wildly from being understood as a warehouse of archaic instinctual drives, to a cauldron of seething libidinal impulses, to a phallocentric economy waging war on women, to a lump of perishable matter, to a fiction of discourse. In this essay 1 will refer to the body as a *<body/subject," that is, as a terrain of the flesh in which meaning is inscribed, constructed, and reconstituted. In this view, the body is conceived as the interface of the individual and society, as a site of embodied or "enfleshed" subjectivity which also reflects the ideological sedimentations of the social stracture inscribed into it Furthermore the body, as a form of socially inscribed intentionality, does not so much constitute a text as it does various modes of intertextuality (what I refer to later as "modes of subjectivity"). Here I must sound my further hesitation with respect to the Baudrillardian tendency to dissolve the subject almost entirely into media text and the tendency of other critics of modernity to render the empirical world into complex strands of discourse. Both these positions are complicitous in the devitalization and derealization of the body and its reductive cancellation; furthermore, they solemnly strip bodies of intentionality and volition and their capability of resisting the image systems which help shape their subjective awareness. It is a position which maligns the lived body as a material referent for the construction of oppositional subjective forms, material

pfaitfaf, and cultural formations - what I call "Zone* of emancipation." hi effect, postmodern culture has taken me body into custody where it Hjg become liquidated to the currency of signs. It is as if the flesh has been numbed fl order to avoid the unspeakable terror of its own existence*.*. jj j fWJe are freed B the postmodern "torn of affect" which occurs when language attempts to "capture Che ineffable** experience of the Other (Yudice 1988c 225). There is also a danger of textualizing gender, denying sexual pip or treating difference as merely a formal category with no empirical and historical existence, problems which Teresa de Lauretis (1987: 25) has discovered in the work of Deleuze, Foucautt, Lyotard, and Derrida. The warnings sounded by [Alan] Meg] II and de Laurens bring into important relief the fact mat we cannot and should not - escape the empirical referent As Charles Levin points out, the body is inescapable and cannot be deferred or lost in a chain of reference, or split into signifier and signified; we cannot adequately capture the reality of the body in terms of difference, indeterminacy, or the ideological constitution of the subject (Levin 1987: 108).... Terry Eagleton (1986: 97) makes a similar point that while discourse functions to broaden and intensify the body, the body can never be fully present in discourse. Eagleton adds: It is part of the very nature of a sign to "absent" its referent The symbol, as Jacques Lacan once remarked, is the death of the thing, in language we deal with the world at the level of signification, not with material objects themselves. (1988:97)

It is important to acknowledge further the relation between linguistic meaning and "real" bodies, a relationship explicated by Kaja Silverman (1988: 146): not only is the subject's relation to his/her body lived out through the mediation of discourse, but that body is itself coerced and molded by both representation and signification. Discursive bodies lean upon and mold real bodies in complex and manifold ways, of which gender is only one consequence. Even if we could manage to strip away the discursive veil that separates the subject from his/her "actual" body, that body would itself bear the unmistakable stamp of culture. There is consequently no possibility of recovering an "authentic" female body, either inside or outside language. ... Yet bodies are always already cultural artifacts even before they are molded discursively. Since we cannot put on new bodies before we desocialize our old ones, the task at hand requires us to provide the mediative ground for a re fleshed corporality. This means the creation of embodied knowledges that can help us refigure the lineaments of our desires and chart the path toward the realization of our collective needs outside and beyond the suffocating constraints of capital and patriarchy. This knowledge cannot be objectively known in advance but rather only from a subject position or perspective which is always partial (Haraway 1988:585).... [Donna] Haraway is arguing for a politics and epistemology of location, positioning, and situating where rational knowledge claims are based on partiality and not universality, what Haraway (589) refers to as "the view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, stmcturing, and structured body, versus the view from above, from nowhere, from simplicity.*9... ... Taking seriously [Brian] Fay's insight, it is important to recognize the essentially nondiscursive penetration of flesh through both the physical positioning and the cultural tattooing of the body (in schools an example of the former would be the panoptic space of the school and the latter its dress codes). Culture in this sense is inscribed both on and in the body by the sartorial extension of the flesh according to the market-enforced logic of the fashion industry - which is no small matter in a youth culture in which stressed leather bomber jackets become couture style, conjuring a "sons of Yale" (see Higgs 1987) era of patriotic reverie: "flyboys" in sheepskin and silk scarves and bush pilot adventurers emancipating us from the pressurized yoke of

|P Translation: English to Romanian 1980a yuppiedom 1 and by the inscription into the musculature and skeletal system of certain postures, gaits, or "styles of flesh.*' This is our bodily knowledge, the memory our body has about how our muscles should move, our asms should swing, and our legs should stride. It is a way of being in our bodies. Enfleshment (the dialectical relationship between the material organization of interiority and the cultural forms and modes of material production we inhabit subjectively) occurs not just at the level of the materiality of the flesh, but through both the corporeal embodiment of symbols and metaphors into the flesh and the "fleshing out" of ideas at the level of cultural forms and social structures. That is, the body both incorporates ideas and generates them. This process is, of course, a dialectical one. It is important here to recognize that words and symbols are physiognomic and just as much a part of our bodies as our flesh. What this means is that language is not a disembodied mode of communication but rather constitutes what Denys Turner calls "an intensification of the bodily powers" (1983: 17) as well as an extension of these powers. By being inserted into the abstractive power of language, our bodies become intensified and extended. Ideas, therefore, have a "social materiality" (Turner 1983: 182); they are enfleshed in ideologies and historical and cultural forms of subjectivity. Enfleshment can be conceived here as the mutually constitutive aspect (enfolding) of social stracture and desire. Discourses do not sit on the surface of the flesh or float about in the formless ether of the mind but are enfolded into the very structures of our desire inasmuch as desire itself is formed by the anonymous historical rules of discourse. It is in this sense, then, that the body/subject becomes both the medium and the outcome of subjective formation. Enfleshment, as 1 have been articulating it, refers not only to the insertion of the subject into a pre-existent or preconstituted symbolic order (what Silverman calls "discursive interiority," 1988; 149) but also an investment on the part of the subject of what Grossberg (1986b) calls "affect" Affective investment transpires during the subject's insertion into or engagement with various fields of discourse. To be enfleshed is not only to appropriate symbols but it is to be identified with the symbol that one is appropriating; that is, it is to identify oneself with that selfsame symbol and also to arrive at a correspondence between the subject position provided by discourse and the subject It is, in other words, to mistake authorship of such a position with the anonymous historical rules which have constituted it; furthermore, it is to fail to see (to repress, to forget) the contradictions between the body/subject and the discursive position or multiple positions one has assumed. To unproblematically identify with the symbol which one has appropriated or the subject positions made available within any discursive field, is to be in a state of enfleshment. Resistance to enfleshment can be accounted for, in this case, not by the randomness of the signifier or the surplus of meaning (polysemy) attached to any symbol but rather because of what Colin McCabe (1981: 214) refers to as "the body and the impossibility of its exhaustion in its representations the specific positioning of the body in the economic, political and ideological practices." (McLaren 1988: 57-9,61-2)