Dennis S. Erasga is a Professor of Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Behavioral Sciences, De La Salle University (DLSU), Manila, Philippines. He has authored articles on social theorizing and localist sociology. He is currently writing a book on the nativist Filipino sociology Pilipinong Sosyolohiya. Professor Erasga is a Salzburg Global Seminar Fellow and a sitting Research Fellow at the Social Development Research Center (SDRC) of DLSU.
By focusing on “new materiality,” this edited volume offers new optics on the affordance of women’s physical and objective body. The interdisciplinary essays assembled in the book interrogate the concepts of corporeality and embodiment by interpreting them as material enactivism of a woman’s physical body geared toward performance and demonstration, respectively. The book situates body/bodily movements as agentic initiatives to make sense of women’s bodies (in) motion. Although flesh in its constitution, a woman’s body is the very material entity that does not only perform what it is expected to do (for its many audiences as in spectacle) but also its corporeality imputes a demonstrative kinetics hitherto associated with the objective body in recent social theorizing.
Go to the bookPart of the book: Sociological Landscape
This chapter is a sociological rendition of the body-mind issue explored within the context of feminism and agency. Being central to the entire ecology of the feminist claims, bringing the body back into the discursive field allows the appreciation of hitherto emerging insights from the ranks of feminist scholars, notably in the area of new materiality. Problematizing the classical divide between the body and the mind as distinct yet nested spheres of one’s social being pegs the discussion in the language of performance and demonstrability, thus highlighting the agency intrinsic to the body and its movements as a material facticity.
Part of the book: Feminism
Part of the book: Feminism