19 research outputs found
Midwife of An-arché: Toward a Poetics of Becoming-with-Woman
This project explores the connections between midwifery and the ethical demands
attendant to poetic practice. Through verse and prose, I unfold a figuration of the
midwife that traverses the boundaries between Levinasian heteronomy and
Deleuzian heteromorphism, and is a constitutive factor in sites of resistance to the
biomedical territorialisation of the creative body.
Chief archival and methodological components that inform the thesis include: a
historiography of childbirth - tracing the development of âholisticâ and
âinterventionistâ paradigms, and the ideological underpinnings of the phallocratic
takeover of the birthing room in certain Western countries; idiographic insights
gathered from dialogues with maternal practitioners and mothers, including residents
of The Farm in Tennessee - where I participated in a midwifery workshop week; an
experiential inquiry into Holotropic Breathwork - to facilitate access to non-ordinary
states of consciousness; and a negotiation between Marxist-feminist and poststructuralist
articulations of ethico-political agency.
Subject matter ranges from a consideration of the ethical import of the placental
economy to the bio-intelligent tissue of the psoas, the banishment of Anne
Hutchinson from Massachusetts Bay to the legacy of the âTwilight Sleepâ
movement. Sustained critical attention is devoted to Mina Loyâs âParturitionâ, and
contemporary poets that have acknowledged Loy as an influence, such as Lara
Glenum. I suggest that, despite the absence of a birth attendant on the symbolic
level, Loyâs poem resonates with the investments of midwifery, instating a âsubjectin-
processâ that woks through and against abstruse and instrumental discourses,
defying both the technocratic erasure of maternal knowing and the fetishistic
reduction of labour to an end-product. Artâs capacity for opening up a corporeallycharged
zone of between-ness is further elaborated in an essay on Andrei
Tarkovskyâs Stalker - through which the treatment of spatiotemporality is aligned
with the imperatives of midwifery guardianship.
On the Verge of Photography: Imaging Beyond Representation
Imaging Beyond Representation is a provocative and bold rethinking of photography in light of the digital transformation and its impact on fine art, culture and society. Addressing the centrality of the digital image to our contemporary life, the fourteen new essays in this collection challenge the traditional categories of photographic theory - that of representation, evidence, documentation and the archive - and offer a fresh approach to its impact on aesthetics, contemporary philosophy and the political. Drawing on the networked human condition of embodiment, social-media, and bio-politics, On the Verge of Photography offers an invaluable resource for sutdents of visual culture, researchers in the field of digital imagining and artists working with new media. Reading this extraordinary book, it becomes clear that so much of what we knew or thought we knew about photography is at one and the same time accurate and obsolete. With digital photography the image can no longer be discussed or defined for what is it is conventionally assumed to be - a distinct visual unit. This is not a crisis, claim the editors of this timely volume, but an opportunity to step away from the representational terminology that has over-determined the discourse of photography in order to address the image's actual modes of being and becoming: being digitally-born, constantly transmitted, mutated and shared. When images are 'digitally networked' they cannot be isolated as viewed as distinct or unique. This book is a must read for anyone who shares with the authors collected in it an urge to acknowledge the contemporary image as a kind of living organism that intervenes int eh world we share not only by and through the ways we share them. -- Ariella Azoulay, Media/Comparative Literature and Modern Culture Brown Universit
Report of the Secretary of War; being part of the message and documents communicated to the two Houses of Congress at the beginning of the second session of the Fifty-fourth Congress, 1896
Annual Report of the Sec. of War. 24 Nov. HD 2, 54-2, v2-9, 5975p. (3478-3485] Pursuit of renegade Apaches; deportation of Canadian Crees; etc