the locus of the body
The category of gender and the cultural implications of being sexued became one of the central interdisciplinary fields in the humanities in the 1970s and 1980s, although it rose to prominence in Western universities after 1990. The first impulse came from the early waves of feminism, proposing not only to study but also to combat what could be seen at the time as the silence and absence of women in culture. Overall, militancy and intellectual appreciation were always closely knit in this field.
The field broadened and diversified as the analytic endeavor progressed. Along with studies dedicated specifically to women, also men's studies appeared. On the other hand, the idea that women and nature are jointly oppressed, the ecofeminist postulates were voiced in the 1970s and 1980s. The concept of gender broadened the vision of human sexual identity, leading to the proliferation of queer identifications. Nonheteronormative points of view gained attention. What is more, the category of gender is often analyzed at the intersection of other categories connected with the body (such as race or disability) and the social inscription of the human individual (class, nationality, location).
On the other hand, as the body and its physiology occupies such a central place, the field explores a reality that humans share with other living beings, opening new perspectives in human-animal and even human-plant studies (for instance, when the physiology of breathing is explored), giving new points of view on ecocentric interconnectedness. Taking the body for starting point of the analysis, the approaches oscillate between essentialist and performative, constantly reformulating the question of what the body is into what the body does.
The field broadened and diversified as the analytic endeavor progressed. Along with studies dedicated specifically to women, also men's studies appeared. On the other hand, the idea that women and nature are jointly oppressed, the ecofeminist postulates were voiced in the 1970s and 1980s. The concept of gender broadened the vision of human sexual identity, leading to the proliferation of queer identifications. Nonheteronormative points of view gained attention. What is more, the category of gender is often analyzed at the intersection of other categories connected with the body (such as race or disability) and the social inscription of the human individual (class, nationality, location).
On the other hand, as the body and its physiology occupies such a central place, the field explores a reality that humans share with other living beings, opening new perspectives in human-animal and even human-plant studies (for instance, when the physiology of breathing is explored), giving new points of view on ecocentric interconnectedness. Taking the body for starting point of the analysis, the approaches oscillate between essentialist and performative, constantly reformulating the question of what the body is into what the body does.
selected papers
Queer austringers.
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Becoming (in)human. The search for an alternative present in Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk
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periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/desterro/article/view/92216/54061
In 2014, Helen Macdonald published a bestselling non-fiction text, H is for Hawk. Building upon an inherited cultural practice of keeping and taming goshawks, she offered to the readers a compelling presentation of her personal journey of mourning after the death of her father. Macdonald “re-stories” an interspecies practice (the relation between the austringer, i.e. the keeper of goshawks, and the bird of prey) in such a way that it ceases to be instrumentalised primarily as a hunting technique. The manning of the hawk becomes a process of introspection and healing of the bereaved woman in the company of a non-human partner. In parallel to this experience, she reads the personal history of yet another traumatised austringer, the homosexual author T. H. White. This double line of experience counters and deconstructs the dominant male narration and introduces a maternal element in the relationship with the hawk. Finally, having reached a breaking point in her identification with the bird and its predatory instincts, the austringer recovers the balance of the wild and the tame. |
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