Revealing Male Bodies is intended to be the first scholarly collection that directly confronts male lived experience. There has been an explosion of work in men's studies, masculinity issues, and male sexuality, as well as a growing literature exploring female embodiment. Missing from the current literature, however, is a sustained analysis of the phenomenology of male gendered bodies. Revealing Male Bodies addresses this omission by examining how male bodies are physically and experientially constituted by the economic, theoretical, and social practices in which men are immersed. Philosophies of embodiment, such as the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, had as a fundamental goal rejecting dualistic philosophy by reconnecting mind and body. An important step in rejecting the mind/body dichotomy was taking seriously the body as the nexus of human experience and understanding. As significant as were these early analyses and their critiques of traditional philosophies of the body, they nevertheless failed in one important respect by assuming a generic, gender neutral body.
Elizabeth Grosz provides the first comprehensive overview of philosophies of the body challenging theorists to consider the full import of gender in Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1994). The small but growing literature on embodiment that attends to gender addresses the particularities of female experience, for example, the phenomenological work of Iris Young (Throwing like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Indiana University Press, 1990)). The most recent feminist explorations of gendered female bodies have begun to reveal the epistemological and metaphysical relevance of the particularity of embodiment. Susan Bordo, in her article "Reading Male Bodies," is the first theorist to investigate male embodiment employing a feminist analysis. Building upon Bordo's work, Revealing Male Bodies consciously responds to the challenge raised by feminist theorists to explore the experience of male lives. Contributors include Susan Bordo, William Cowling, Terry Goldie, Maurice Hamington, Don Ihde, Greg Johnson, Bj'rn Krondorfer, Alphonso Lingis, Terrance MacMullan, Patrick McGann, Paul McIlvenny, Jim Perkinson, Steven P.
Schacht, Richard Schmitt, Nancy Tuana, Craig L. Wilkins, and John Zuern.
Author Biography:
Nancy Tuana is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. She works in the area of philosophy of science, epistemology, and feminist science studies. She has published The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman's Nature and Woman and the History of Philosophy, and is currently at work on Philosophy of Science Studies. She has edited six anthologies including Feminism and Science and Feminist Interpretations of Plato. She is currently co-editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy and series editor of the Penn State Press series Re-Reading the Canon.
William Cowling is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is the author (with Nancy Tuana) of "The Presence and Absence of the Feminine in Plato's Philosophy" in Feminist Interpretations of Plato. Cowling's research interests include the role of embodied narratives in science practice and the manner which narrative structures frame the content, context, and status of scientific theories.
Maurice Hamington received a Ph.D. in Religion and Ethics and a Graduate Certificate in the Study of Men and Women in Society from the University of Southern California and he is currently completing a Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He served as a Research Scholar in the Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles and was the founding Director of the Women's Studies Program at Mount St. Mary's College in Los Angeles. He is the author of Hail Mary? The Struggle for Ultimate Womanhood in Catholicism.He currently teaches at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.
Greg Johnson is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Pacific Lutheran University. His areas of specialty are contemporary Continental philosophy, with special interest in hermeneutics, phenomenology and critical theory. He also teaches political philosophy, philosophy of religion and feminist theory.
Terrance MacMullan s a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Oregon, where he has worked as a Graduate Teaching Fellow for the Departments of Religious Studies, Philosophy, and the Humanities. He is currently completing his dissertation, which develops a pragmatist critique of whiteness in the U.S. His other areas of interest include social and political philosophy, the history of nineteenth and twentieth century American and Continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, and feminist theory.
