Ambiguous Embodiment

The body is at once the contained and the container. To think of the body is to assume its boundaries, the starting point for understanding differences, meanings, and connections to everything within and without. The boundaries of bodies have become the places where meaning is registered or imposed. The body in its transhistorical solidity and historical contingency, its gender identity, and problematic relationship to language, speech, and writing is the common denominator for this study which shows how the body is the paradigmatic intersection of contingency and permanence, fact and ideology, sex and gender, or rather that it is the entity that calls these oppositions into question. Some of the main themes that have emerged from this widespread academic obsession with the body are the body's vulnerability, on the one side, and its transparency on the other. In her study of the German tradition the author points to the maimed as well as to the transparent status of the body in a series of case studies taken from modern German literature and culture. Through these cases a process of construction and destruction can be studied which determines the eventual production of individual bodies in ambiguous terms.