This dissertation starts with a hugely popular healer Nerka, a Bosnian "Queen of Health," (Kraljica Zdravlja), who heals with her hands without touching and without a price; it ends with a chapter visiting her excessively generous and tactless practice to raise a question more p…
Autofiction has been the subject of much critical investigation in France, yet little of this theory extends to contemporary texts. Furthermore, autofictional theory has, until now, neglected the study of ludic performance – an important feature within the genre –, and this thes…
This thesis examines a cluster of recent films that feature people of Maghrebi heritage and position corporeality as a site through which subjectivity and self-other relations are constituted and experienced. These films are set in and between the countries of the Maghreb, Franc…
This thesis is about the processes and practices that underpin everyday life in a Bangladeshi qawmi madrasa, a rather contentious faith-based Islamic schooling system that is very popular among the rural poor. Based on 15 months of ethnographic fieldwork that took place in Biswa…
Commentary about solid or whole body part transplantation, transfusion and donation is well documented and has added to discourse about who gives and receives and how. Commentary about another body part – blood – is, it is argued here, less well developed (Sanner, 2001; Lock, 20…
This thesis offers a theoretical investigation into concepts of beauty, the sculptured body and myths of Venus and Medusa, primarily through the works of Igor Mitoraj and Marc Quinn. These themes are transformed and inverted in the Looking-glass towards the trans-body, which is …
At the beginnings of the Gothic, in the eighteenth century, there was an anxiety or taboo surrounding consumption and appetite for the Gothic text itself and for the excessive and sensational themes that the Gothic discussed. The female body, becoming a commodity in society, was…
The Body and Social Theory provides a clear, critical analysis of the new sociological literature on the body and an introduction to the most important traditions of thought that have informed social theories of human embodiment. In recent years, contemporary societies have bee…
The Body and Social Theory provides a clear, critical analysis of the new sociological literature on the body and an introduction to the most important traditions of thought that have informed social theories of human embodiment. In recent years, contemporary societies have bee…
Contains reflections on body, sexuality, and gender in African literary texts. While the sections 'Gifted Bodies' and 'Queered Bodies' show new developments in viewing body and sexuality as creative powers, the sections 'Tainted Bodies' and 'Violated Bodies' comprise essays that…
"HBO's Girls and the Awkward Politics of Gender, Race, and Privilege is a collection of essays that examines the HBO program Girls. Since its premiere in 2012, the series has garnered the attention of individuals from various walks of life. The show has been described in many te…
This is a comparative study of three of Herman Melville's novels: Moby-Dick (1851), Benito Cereno (1855) and Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853). Though these three novels seem to be loosely associated, I argue that they are closely connected. The three characters, Ahab, Babo and the…
The intention of this project is to explicate several arguments advanced in the esoteric treatise Al-Risalah al-Ad[dotbelow]h[dotbelow]awiyya fi amr al-Mac ad , Avicenna's treatise par excellence on the subject of resurrection. This study of Ad[dotbelow]h[dotbelow]awiyya is prim…