Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality and Phenomenology in Constructive Body Theologies

Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience requires understanding experience as bodily perceptual orientation, as perceptual bodily and cultural acts involved in socially and historically situated contextual meaning-making processes. This shift expands phenomenological concepts such as intentionality and habit, and allows for a comparative investigation of historical and cultural differences in embodied experiences through examples found in sensory anthropology. Body theology, framed as principles, strengthens theological projects (such as those by Carter Heyward and Marcella Althaus-Reid, as well as new constructive possibilities) through opening dialogical avenues of exploration into embodied being in the world. Body theology principles help us conceive of and address how our bodily experiencing--our feeling, tasting, hearing, imaging, remembering and other sensory knowledge --comes to matter in our lives, especially where oppressive forces viscerally affect embodied life

Defining the terrain for responsible management education: gender, gender equality and the case of marketing

Despite the existence of significant links between gender, marketing and consumer research, and despite a wide-spread recognition of women’s complex relationship with marketing and markets, the concept of gender equality has been widely neglected in this subject discipline. This chapter seeks to provide some understanding of what gender equality may mean through an exploration of various marketing practices, studies and teaching. It begins with a brief overview of marketing’s disciplinary developments, followed by explorations of feminist influences in this development. The difficulty of finding appropriate definitions for gender equality in marketing leads to a discussion of how marketing institutions and practices contribute to persistently unequal gender relations. The chapter concludes by offering suggestions for how to address these inequalities, with a particular focus on agents of change, specifically within marketing teaching. Despite a growing momentum of gender equality awareness in marketing practice, teaching and scholarship, we need to realize the challenges that remain in achieving real change for women and men across the developed and developing world

05-04 "Rationality and Humanity: A View from Feminist Economics"

Does Rational Choice Theory (RCT) have something important to contribute to the humanities? Jon Elster and others answer affirmatively, arguing that RCT is a powerful tool that will lend clarity and rigor to work in the humanities just as it (presumably) has in economics. This essay examines the disciplinary values according to which the application of RCT in economics has been judged a “success,” and suggests that this value system does not deserve general approbation. Richness and realism must be retained as important values alongside precision and elegance, if anti-scientific dogmatism and absurd conclusions are to be avoided.

Making the invisible become visible: Recognizing women's relationship with technology

This discussion paper explores a new rhetoric that might help to increase our understanding of women’s relationships with information and communication technology. We have often heard the claim that women have to give up part of their femininity in technological contexts. However, it is not always femininity women have to "give up", the author argues, but rather their close bond with technology – a "something else" that has no precise name, and which for that reason can slip away in an almost invisible way. This paper claims that we need to make this "something else" become visible, suggesting the concept of "technicity" as a place to start the discussion.publishedVersio