Embodiment and Agency

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Minding Bodies

Letitia Meynell

Part I: Becoming Embodied Subjects

1. Emotional Metamorphoses: The Role of Others in Becoming a Subject

Kym Maclaren

2. Racial Grief and Melancholic Agency

Angela Failler

3. A Knowing That Resided in My Bones: Sensuous Embodiment and Trans Social Movement

Alexis Shotwell

4. The Phrenological Impulse and the Morphology of Character

Rebecca Kukla

5. Personal Identity, Narrative Integration, and Embodiment

Catriona Mackenzie

6. Bodily Limits to Autonomy: Emotion, Attitude, and Self-Defense

Sylvia Burrow

Part II: Embodied Relations, Political Contexts

7. Relational Existence and Termination of Lives: When Embodiment Precludes Agency

Susan Sherwin

8. A Body No Longer of One’s Own

Monique Lanoix

9. Premature (M)Othering: Levinasian Ethics and the Politics of Fetal Ultrasound Imaging

Jacqueline M. Davies

10. Inside the Frame of the Past: Memory, Diversity, and Solidarity

Sue Campbell

11. Collective Memory or Knowledge of the Past: “Covering Reality with Flowers”

Susan E. Babbitt

12. Agency and Empowerment: Embodied Realities in a Globalized World

Christine Koggel

List of Contributors

Index

“The essays contained in this volume offer fascinating philosophical, religious, scientific, historical, and political reflections on what it means to express (and fail to express) agency in and through one’s bodily interactions with other bodies. Above all, Embodiment and Agency reveals the diverse ways in which the experience of agency is always already embodied, thereby countering traditional liberal views that identify agency with conscious activity or a particular set of cognitive capacities.”

—Gail Weiss, George Washington University