One of my old professors was fond of saying that in his class we take the first several weeks to chuck a whole bunch of balls in the air and we then spend the rest of the semester learning to juggle them. This is an attempt at juggling. I’m throwing 20 different ideas in the air and am desperately hoping to catch two or three. So you’re warned in advance if this feels a bit ambitious/excessive. Also, cross posted at Notes from a Small Place.
Last week I referenced Foucault’s argument in the opening chapter of Discipline and Punish in which he says that the western mind has shifted in recent centuries away from an emphasis on the physical body and toward the question of ideals, privileging what Foucault terms “the abstract conscious” over the much more physical human body.
One point that especially interests me in all of this is how this privileging of the abstract conscious over the body manifests itself in the way we view gender and body image. Here’s my intuition: In the pre-modern mind the body and the senses played a radically different role than they do the modern. But it’s not simply an issue of body and soul, but of physical and abstract.
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