Space, Time and Perversion

This contribution to the debate surrounding bodies and "body politics" both celebrates and resituates the body in the space between feminism and philosophy, feminism and cultural analysis, and feminism and critical thought. Exploring architecture, philosophy, and, in a controversial way, queer theory, it shows how these knowledges have stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. It investigates the work of Michael Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingis, examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. The possibilities of thinking of bodies "positively", thinking through and as bodies, and thinking as a mode of bodily doing are explored; as well as the relationship between the "knowledge" of difference and the way that knowledge validates and valorizes subjects.