"Corpos e crise"

Muito tempo ausente! Nem era minha intenção, mas gente do ceu, quanto trabalho tive nestes meses!!! Vou postar um pedaçinho de uma resenha que escrevi, que logo sairá publicado...


Bodies in Crisis: Culture, Violence and Women’s Resistance in Neo-liberal Argentina, by Barbara Sutton. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. 256 pp. ISBN: 9780813547404 $25.95


The history of contemporary feminism the world over has been characterized by practical struggles and political debate which bring women’s bodies into focus. At the theoretical level, this has included the critique of a disembodied, universal enlightenment notion of the human being (“man”), portrayed as fully human insofar as “he” is revealed to be a subject of reason and fully in control over the “messier side” of existence (body, emotions, etc.) and perpetuating a dichotomy in which women are ultimately defined as Other: body, emotion and the danger of all that threatens to escape disciplinary control. This of course has been a contradictory cultural legacy, one in which women were (are) exhorted or expected to “be [just] the body”… yet certainly not a body of their [our] own; rather, a body to be constantly shaped and redefined according to the vicissitudes of the patriarchal imaginary, according to openly or surreptitiously imposed codes and languages of “what a woman is” – whether domestic servant, wife (and mother), piece of property, Playboy bunny, prostitute or “ human dictaphone”, as Gayle Rubin ironically commented in her pioneering text (1975). It also enables us to understand why a political-discursive focus on re-thinking and re-claiming our bodies became such an important focus of late 20th century feminism.
Argentine-born and raised, sociologist Barbara Sutton provides a unique account of the social and political conjuncture in her country at the beginning of the 21st century that is both a brilliant attempt to theorize women’s lives and struggles by bringing the body clearly “back” into the picture, and a rendering of a concrete story of oppression and resistance in which women come to life as embodied (and rational/reflective and emotional) subjects of history...