Intertwinings presents exciting interdisciplinary scholarship on twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The contributors break new ground by bringing Merleau-Ponty s work into conversation with literary theory, architecture, cultural studies, critical race studies, and current feminist theory and practice. Spanning Merleau-Ponty s early and late thought, this volume focuses on the ontological, ethical, and political implications of his unique emphasis on the constitutive intertwinings of inside and outside, self and other, language and gesture, body and world, and identity and difference. Intertwinings affirms Merleau-Ponty s insight that we should not eradicate, but rather celebrate, the corporeal differences that make our encounters with both human and nonhuman others a source of inexplicable richness and endless fascination."

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009 (M. V. Marder, University of Toronto 2009-01-00)

First published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company. (view table of contents)

Drawing on relevant discussions of embodiment in phenomenology, feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, queer theory and post-colonial theory, Body Images explores the role played by the body image in our everyday existence. (view table of contents)