Gottsched's “Dynamic” Stage Directions

The article analyzes the novels Ornamento (2015) by Juan Cárdenas and La comemadre (2010) by Roque Larraquy, and argues that the works elaborate a critique of biotechnological modes of production in vivo for aesthetic purposes through the literary representation of a scientific experiment linked with an artistic one. In this way, the notion of bioart allows us to understand the unique confluence of the biopolitical practices of the capitalist system when operating in a radical way on the body.     

What to do with the “Tubby Hubby”?“Obesity,” the Crisis of Masculinity,and the Nuclear Family in Early Cold War Canada

Abstract:  Despite current insistence that obesity is a new problem, obesity and fat were discussed frequently in the medical and popular presses and by state officials during the early Cold War in Canada. Using Kristeva's (1982,  Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection ) concept of abjection, I argue that Cold War anxieties about fat, and specifically the obesity of white, middle-class men, had less to do with the growing girth of bodies than it did with a post-war crisis in masculinity related to the collapse of the public and private spheres. Through an analysis of fitness regimes and female-administered diets for men, I argue that anti-obesity rhetoric served to assuage dominant worries about degenerating masculinity by reasserting both the gendered division of labour and the white, middle-class, nuclear family as Canadian norms.     

“Et nulle autre me faict plus proprement homme que cette cy:” Michel de Montaigne's embodied masculinity

Writing in a period of considerable anxiety about gender roles, Montaigne (1533–92) developed a series of reflections on gender and masculinity in which he destabilized the gender and sexual hierarchies of early-modern France. First, drawing on an increasingly global archive of information about non-European societies, he argued that culture plays a major role in shaping the lives and experiences of women. Secondly, his understanding of nature enabled him to foster a notion of the equality of the sexes, even as he recognized that nature creates certain differences between men and women. Finally, on these foundations, Montaigne constructed a vision of masculinity that stresses it as an ethical value, one that he opposes above all to cruelty. Montaigne's sexual politics were, I suggest, at least in part a response to the Wars of Religion that had led to an excess of barbarity in early-modern France.     

Embellishing Appearances with Fragrant Cosmetic Cases : Transforming Women’s Bodies to Nourish Life in the Late Ming

Through a close examination of late Ming publisher Hu Wenhuan’s Embellishing Appearances with Fragrant Cosmetic Cases, this article shows how beautification techniques became part of the culture of nourishing life. Hu encouraged women to make and use cosmetics as a way of practicing womanly work. For men, these techniques became a means of investigating things and cultivating the self. Hu’s text is an example of amateur experimentation involving medical knowledge in late imperial China that went beyond proprietary expertise. The practice-oriented recipes in Fragrant Cosmetic Cases helped readers to translate written knowledge into practical knowledge, and to circulate them to a broad group of users that included women, the less literate, and even the illiterate. By the early seventeenth century, what Hu marketed as knowledge to nourish the lives of women had become common knowledge for male elites.     

Interpreting Urban Food Supply and Distribution Systems from Faunal Assemblages: An Example from Colonial Massachusetts

Animal bone assemblages from four historical sites in eastern Massachusetts are analysed in a comparative framework to interpret aspects of urban food systems. Characteristics of the urban environment and the nature of food supply and exchange systems are interpreted from taxonomic representation, body part representation, butchery patterns, and age and seasonal slaughtering patterns. These analyses show that specialized husbandry to supply urban markets was limited during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that many aspects of urban food distribution systems followed traditional rural patterns. A model that explores the relation between patterning of bone collections and characteristics of urban areas is applicable to other studies of urban assemblages. © 1997 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.