ONLINE SEMINAR
October 24 | Bold Brilliant Broads: Written in the Bones — Embodied Knowledges

Description

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LEADER

Dr. Wendy O’Brien is a philosopher with over 30 years’ experience teaching in academic and non-academic environments, including Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Wilfrid Laurier University, the University of Waterloo, Harvard, Oxford and the Art Gallery of Ontario. Her work explores subjects including power, violence, the relation to the Other, home, silence, and creativity. She is presently working on a long-term project on the concept of wonder. An active member of the Ontario literary scene, she has been an interviewer for organizations including By the Lake Book Club, the Toronto International Festival of Authors and GritLit, as well as hosting Bourbon and Books book club in both Toronto and Hamilton.

READINGS

Participants will receive PDFs of the readings.

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The divide between mind and body has informed much of philosophical history. The privileging of the mind over the body has framed ethics and metaphysics, and also epistemology. Contrary to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that “the body is our general medium for knowing the world,” the body has been considered as a medium for, at best, distracting us from knowing the world and, at worst, as a medium for sabotaging the very possibility of knowing the world. And when the body has been considered, it has often been the male body that has been the model and standard by which perceptions and experiences are judged. What have we missed as such? What is written in the bones? Written in the flesh and on the skin? How do gender and sex shape and influence our answers to these questions? What can we learn, what can we know in and through the female body?

In this seminar, we take up these questions, exploring women’s experiences of their bodies, and women’s experiences of writing their bodily experiences. Considering accounts of movement/dance, weight, sex, motherhood, pain, and aging, we will reflect on what the body knows — on how the body, the female body, specifically, thinks. Using as our starting point concepts from Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, we will investigate embodied knowledge through the writings of authors that include Iris Marion Young, Elaine Scarry, Roxanne Gay, Jen Gunter, Shelia Heti, Laura Maguire, Fran Lebowitz and Vivian Gornick.

All online seminar payments are nonrefundable. All discount codes must be used at the time of purchase; no retroactive discounts will be issued.

All seminars are subject to minimum enrollment of 7 participants. Click the link for full terms and conditions for Classical Pursuits online seminars.

Classical Pursuits does not record seminars. By participating in any seminar, registrants agree not to make their own seminar recordings and to abide by the Classical Pursuits code of conduct.

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