Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter
Edited by Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman
ABSTRACT
Broadening the landscape of body and embodiment theory, the essays curated and juxtaposed in this edited collection draw attention to the processes and problems of understanding bodies within and across different social contexts and interpretive frameworks. The range of analytic perspectives employed by the book’s contributors offers a unique opportunity to investigate the conjunctions and disjunctions between different interpretive traditions’ respective approaches to grasping the meaning and matter of bodies and social life. The theoretical paradigms advanced within the volume challenge the limits of what we know about bodies and interpretation and highlight the promise of interpretation as a focal metaphor for analyzing bodies and embodiment. Interpretation as a concept advances the study of the body as a simultaneously material and semiotic entity. It directs us to consider how and why some aspects or details of the body and embodiment emerge as more notable or important than others, thus revealing how patterns of social, moral, and political salience generate the attentional topography of the body’s materiality. This explicit attention to interpretation as process is part of what distinguishes interpretation from prior concepts of the social construction of the body, which, when centered in systems of language, tend to overlook the structural or material processes and mechanisms through which the social construction of the body takes place.
Keywords: attention, body, embodiment, frameworks, interpretation, materiality, meaning, social construction, theory
Cover Artwork by Juana Almageur
