Embodiment and the Self

1. Embodiment and the Self Adolescent Literature Lecture Dr. Meghann Meeusen Western Michigan University

2. Poststructuralism STRUCTURALISM • The individual is sacred • The mind as the realm of meaning • Universal laws and essences • Inherent universal meanings that precede the text POSTSTRUCTURALISM • The “subject” is a cultural construct • Mind created from interactions as situated symbolic beings • Truth is “local”; language creates reality • Meaning is intertextual, determined by social discourse; changes with history

3. Queer Theory • Gender and sexuality not “essential” to identity • Socially constructed • Mutable and changeable • Self shaped by language, signs and signifiers • Sex as (1) animal instinct and (2) socially constructed behavior shaped by ethics/morals • Western ideas of sexual identity come from science, religion, economics and politics and were constructed as binary oppositions

4. Queer Theory • Queer theory deconstructs all binary oppositions about human sexuality. • Encourages the examination of the world from an alternative view. • Allows for the inclusion of gender, sexuality, race and other areas of identity by noticing the distinctions between identities, communities, and cultures. • Challenges heterosexism and homophobia, in addition to racism, misogyny and other oppressive discourses while celebrating diversity.

5. Gender and Sex • In Volatile Bodies: Toward A Corporeal Feminism, Elizabeth Grosz (1994) contrasts theorists she categorizes as social constructionists with the work of theorists such as Irigaray, Cixous, Spivak, Butler and others who consider questions of sexual difference. • “Instead of seeing sex as an essentialist and gender as a constructionist category, these thinkers are concerned to undermine the dichotomy” (p. 18)… “the binary opposition between the cultural and the natural—needs careful reconsideration” (p. 21).

6. Cognitive Science: Psychology Backdrop • Up until the 1950s, Behavioralismdominates the field of experimental psychology (skinner, inputs/outputs, stimulus and response), but led to essentialism. Essentialism is the belief that there are a set of attributes that define a certain entity (such as a group of people). • Then, scholars and theorists began demonstrating how inadequate Behaviorism was in explaining human thought, consciousness; how can you explain memory, fear, hysteria, language acquisition, or consciousness in terms of Behavioralism? • Cognitive Science became interdisciplinary, incorporating other fields, and new ideas and perspectives emerged.

7. Cognitive Science & Embodiment • Social constructionists say everything comes from outside, but we aren’t disembodied series of thoughts, we are restricted to the body. • Cognition is embodied—you can’t separate thought from the body. • An individual’s lived experience within the confines of a body plays a significant role in what makes a person a person and how he/she conceptualizes that selfhood.

8. Raymond Gibbs Raymond Gibbs (2006), notes that “bodily experiences matter greatly in mental life…[because] mind and body are deeply intertwined,” an idea he characterizes as “representative of a second wave in the history of cognitive science that dramatically differs from the traditional view of mind as purely symbolic, computational, and disembodied” (p. 275).

9. Hart and Wolfe • Elizabeth Hart (2001) considers “the ‘embodiment’ of mind; that is, of the mind’s substantive indebtedness to its bodily, social, and cultural contexts” (p. 315). • Cary Wolfe (2010), similarly writes of humanities awareness of its “embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind and so on” (p. 120).

10. YA Literature Critics Robyn McCallum writes “the idea of an essential, unique and individualized self has been systematically interrogated and deconstructed virtually since its inception,” and yet “postructuralist visions of socially constructed and fragmented selves are as fictionally, and as ideologically inscribed, as those fictions they seek to dismantle and replace” (p. 255-256).

11. YA Literature Critics Kerry Mallan (2008) similarly considers whether adolescent science fiction encourages “a reconceptualization of the ‘human’ subject and a rethinking of what ‘being human’ means, especially problematizing conventional humanist mind/body dualisms and representation of dialogic interplay between cognition and the body” (p. 178).