BODY POLITICS AND THE FICTIONAL DOUBLE

In recent years, questions concerning "the body" and its place in postmodern discourses have taken center stage in academic disciplines. Body Politics joins these discussions by focusing on the challenges women face when their externally defined identities and representations as bodies―their body fictions―speak louder than what they know to be their true selves.

Racialized, gendered, or homophobic body fictions disfigure individuals by placing them beneath a veil of invisibility and by political, emotional, or spiritual suffocation. As objects of interpretation, "female bodies" in search of health care, legal assistance, professional respect, identity confirmation, and financial security must first confront their fictionalized doubles in a collision that, in many cases, ends in disappointment, distress, and even suicide.

The contributors reflect on women’s day-to-day lives and the cultural productions (literature, MTV, film, etc.) that give body fictions their power and influence. By exploring how these fictions are manipulated politically, expressively, and communally, they offer reinterpretations that challenge the fictional double while theorizing the discursive and performative forms it takes.

Contributors include Trudier Harris, Maude Hines, S. Yumiko Hulvey, Debra Walker King, Sue V. Rosser, Stephanie A. Smith, Maureen Turim, Caroline Vercoe, Gloria Wade-Gayles, and Rosemary Weatherston.

Debra Walker King is Associate Professor of English at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Author of Deep Talk: Reading African American Literary Names, her articles and reviews have appeared in Names: the Journal of the American Name Society; Philosophy and Rhetoric; and African American Review. She also contributed essays to the Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts, edited by Dolan Hubbard.