Basically, feminists have argued against mind-body duality for very good reasons: because it's been used against women's bodies. We've been invested in "Our Bodies, Ourselves". But for bodies that are suffering and in pain, there are reasons to want to transcend the body, and there is room within feminist frameworks to develop this. *mind explosion*
WOAH. Okay, that is *really* interesting for me. I am thinking more and more that disability studies could potentially be seriously useful for me in doing the work I'm thinking about doing (apart from the fact that it seems like some mind-expanding I should do to myself anyway), and this just confirms that. There's a huge thing about women's Christian spirituality in the thirteenth/fourteenth century and the work they were doing to take control of the way the mind/body dichotimy was set up in Christianity in such a way that spiritual enlightenment was conceived of in such a way as an inherently masculine thing, because women were (in medieval thinking) enslaved to/ rooted in their bodies in a way that men weren't, and so women started performing spirituality *as* rooted in the body, getting into really intensely embodied worship in weeping, fasting, self-mortification, and divinely-sent illnesses and/or visions resulting from near-death sicknesses are a really huge part of that. The classic text on this is Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, if you're interested.
There's also earlier saints - in late antiquity, third and fourth century saints mostly, self-mortification was in, but in the sense that fasting and self-harm were a way to force transcendence from the body, rejecting it by causing it pain - but that's not so much what you're talking about, I think, because I always got the sense that that was more about exercising rigid, vicious control over the body in order to 'defeat' it, while the women's spirituality I was just talking about seems more about sort of immersing oneself in the uncontrollability of the body, like what you're talking about. I know someone has talked about early saints in the context of anorexia, but I don't know of anyone who's talked about any of this stuff through a lens of disability studies, and it seems like it's crying out for it.
Anyway, thank you for this rec! It will go on my summer reading list.
no subject
WOAH. Okay, that is *really* interesting for me. I am thinking more and more that disability studies could potentially be seriously useful for me in doing the work I'm thinking about doing (apart from the fact that it seems like some mind-expanding I should do to myself anyway), and this just confirms that. There's a huge thing about women's Christian spirituality in the thirteenth/fourteenth century and the work they were doing to take control of the way the mind/body dichotimy was set up in Christianity in such a way that spiritual enlightenment was conceived of in such a way as an inherently masculine thing, because women were (in medieval thinking) enslaved to/ rooted in their bodies in a way that men weren't, and so women started performing spirituality *as* rooted in the body, getting into really intensely embodied worship in weeping, fasting, self-mortification, and divinely-sent illnesses and/or visions resulting from near-death sicknesses are a really huge part of that. The classic text on this is Caroline Walker Bynum's Holy Feast and Holy Fast, if you're interested.
There's also earlier saints - in late antiquity, third and fourth century saints mostly, self-mortification was in, but in the sense that fasting and self-harm were a way to force transcendence from the body, rejecting it by causing it pain - but that's not so much what you're talking about, I think, because I always got the sense that that was more about exercising rigid, vicious control over the body in order to 'defeat' it, while the women's spirituality I was just talking about seems more about sort of immersing oneself in the uncontrollability of the body, like what you're talking about. I know someone has talked about early saints in the context of anorexia, but I don't know of anyone who's talked about any of this stuff through a lens of disability studies, and it seems like it's crying out for it.
Anyway, thank you for this rec! It will go on my summer reading list.