Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Embodiment'
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Vadamootoo, Kavi. "Theory of art therapy : dys-embodiment and embodiment." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2005. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.418942.
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Rambusch, Jana. "Embodiment and situated learning." Thesis, University of Skövde, School of Humanities and Informatics, 2004. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-904.
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Cognition has for a long time been viewed as a process that can be described in terms of computational symbol manipulation, i.e. a process that takes place inside people’s heads and is largely unaffected by contextual aspects. In recent years, however, there has been a considerable change in the way researchers look at and study human cognition. These changes also have far-reaching implications for education and educational research. Situated learning is a theoretical framework in which sociocultural aspects of cognition and learning are strongly emphasised, that is, the context in which learning takes place is an important part of learning activity. The concept of activity is central to situated learning theories, but activity has been considered an exclusively sociocultural process in which the body only plays a minor role. In embodied cognition research, on the other hand, there is an increasing awareness that mind and body are inextricably intertwined and cannot be viewed in isolation. Findings in cognitive neuroscience provide additional evidence that cognition is tightly linked to perception and action. The aim of this thesis has been to investigate the role of the body in situated learning activity by integrating these different perspectives on cognition and learning. The analysis suggests that, like individual human conceptualization and thought, situated learning is in fact deeply rooted in bodily activity. In social interactions the body provides individuals with a similar perspective on the world, it functions as a means of signalling to others what cannot (yet) be expressed verbally, and it serves as a resonance mechanism in the understanding of others.
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Juntunen, M. L. (Marja-Leena). "Embodiment in Dalcroze Eurhythmics." Doctoral thesis, University of Oulu, 2004. http://urn.fi/urn:isbn:9514274024.
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Abstract The purpose of the present study was to interpret and understand the manifestation and meaning of embodiment in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Dalcroze Eurhythmics is an approach to music education that builds on the ideas of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and aims at developing musicianship in a broad sense. Following Maurice Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, in this study embodiment refers to experiencing and knowing the world subjectively through the living body-subject. The perspective of embodiment accounts for how human beings think and act holistically and how the body can be considered a constitutive element of cognition and creativity. The research questions were formulated as follows: 1. What aspects of embodiment can be found in Dalcroze Eurhythmics? 2. What are the theoretical accounts in support of the practice of applying body movement in music education from the perspective of embodiment? These questions have been approached through research material drawn from the essential writings of Jaques-Dalcroze, commentary books, articles and studies about Dalcroze Eurhythmics, and the talk of some selected Dalcroze master teachers. The dissertation is an overview of four substudies. In the theoretical substudies, the research questions have been examined in relation to the philosophical question of the body-mind in practical music education, and in dialogue with Merleau-Ponty's notions and recent literature on embodiment. From the perspective of embodiment, Dalcroze Eurhythmics primarily teaches habits of musical action or, more generally, 'a bodily way of being in sound', rather than a conceptual, or abstract knowledge of music. Equally, the study sheds light on the meaning and importance of consciously reflecting on 'lived experience'. It illuminates how Dalcroze teaching engages embodiment in ways that aim to reinforce the mind-body connection and facilitate personified, holistic involvement and, thus, embodied learning. The study discusses how Dalcroze Eurhythmics offers a ground for examining music's felt qualities and their relation to musical knowledge and how it turns our attention and interest towards students' lived experiences in relation to musical practices. It challenges music educators to consider that musical learning can profitably make use of holistic bodily experiences and that bodily involvement can facilitate developing a wide range of kinds of musical knowing. Furthermore, the study offers a critical viewpoint and new vocabulary in music education for explaining the practice of Dalcroze teachingTiivistelmä Tämän tutkimuksen tarkoituksena oli ymmärtää ja tulkita kehollisuuden ilmenemistä ja merkitystä Dalcroze-rytmiikassa. Dalcroze-rytmiikka on musiikkikasvatuksen lähestymistapa, joka perustuu Émile Jaques-Dalcrozen ideoille ja joka pyrkii kehittämään muusikkoutta laajassa merkityksessä. Merleau-Pontyn filosofiaa myötäillen, tässä tutkimuksessa kehollisuus viittaa maailman subjektiiviseen kokemiseen ja tuntemiseen elävän keho-subjektin kautta. Kehollisuuden näkökulma selittää sen, kuinka ihminen ajattelee ja toimii kokonaisvaltaisesti ja kuinka kehoa voidaan pitää kognition ja luovuuden keskeisenä tekijänä. Tutkimuskysymykset muotoiltiin seuraavasti: 1. Mitä kehollisuuden näkökulmia voidaaan löytää Dalcroze-rytmiikasta? 2. Mitkä ovat kehollisuuden näkökulmasta teoreettiset argumentit liikkeen käyttämiseksi musiikkikasvatuksessa? Näitä tutkimuskysymyksiä lähestyttiin tutkimusaineiston kautta, joka sisälsi Jaques-Dalcrozen keskeisiä kirjoituksia, Dalcroze-rytmiikkaa käsitteleviä kommentaareja, artikkeleita ja tutkimuksia sekä muutamien valittujen Dalcroze-mestariopettajien puhetta. Väitöskirja pohjautuu neljään osatutkimukseen. Teoreeettisissa osatutkimuksissa kysymyksiä tarkasteltiin suhteessa mielen ja kehon suhdetta koskevaan filosofiseen kysymykseen käytännön musiikkikasvatuksessa sekä dialogissa Merleau-Pontyn käsitteiden ja viimeaikaisen kehollisuutta käsittelevän kirjallisuuden kanssa. Kehollisuuden näkökulmasta Dalcroze-rytmiikka opettaa ensisijaisesti musiikillisia toimintatapoja, tai yleisemmin, 'kehollista tapaa olla musiikissa', eikä niinkään käsitteellistä tai abstraktia musiikista tietämistä. Toisaalta tutkimus valottaa 'eletyn kokemuksen' jatkuvan reflektoinnin merkitystä ja tärkeyttä. Se tuo esille, miten Dalcroze-opetus oppilaiden kokonaisvaltaisen ja omakohtaisen kehollisen aktivoimisen kautta pyrkii vahvistamaan mielen ja kehon yhteyttä ja siten edistämään kokonaisvaltaista oppimista. Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan miten Dalcroze-rytmiikka tarjoaa pohjan musiikin laadulliselle kokemiselle ja sen yhdistämiselle musiikilliseen tietämiseen ja miten se suuntaa huomiomme ja kiinnostuksemme oppilaan elettyyn kokemukseen musiikin käytännöissä. Tutkimus haastaa musiikkikasvattajat ottamaan huomioon, että musiikillisessa oppimisessa voidaan hyödyntää konaisvaltaisia kehollisia kokemuksia ja että kehollinen osallistuminen voi edistää musiikillisen tietämisen useiden eri osa-alueiden kehittymistä. Lisäksi tutkimus tarjoaa kriittisen näkökulman ja uutta sanastoa Dalcroze-opetuksen käytännön selittämiselle
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Johnson, Mary Vaughan. "Space, embodiment and abstraction." Thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/1853/24102.
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Menos, Kristopher G. (Kristopher Gerard). "Post-mordial : esoteric embodiment." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/111468.
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Thesis: S.M. in Architecture Studies (Architectural Design), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Page 180 blank.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 172-176).
This thesis speculates that common funerary practices do not reflect a wide enough range of contemporary cultural attitudes towards religion, spirituality, and mortality. As human beings increasingly embrace the paradigms of bioinformatics and digital fabrication, this thesis proposes that alternative funerary practices will arise to reflect these cultural attitudes, with individuals taking on increasing levels of both personal and collaborative agency in the design of their own memorial artifacts, and those of their loved ones. Through a series of speculative models, this thesis projects a scenario in which a group of humans embrace their corporeal materiality and its internalized information as precious and sacred, to produce memorial artifacts that are constructed from their own biomatter, and that formally encode streams of genetic information. The artifacts become esoteric 'post-mordial' emodiments of human being, existing as totems of their lineage, and 'momento mori' for remaining humans.
by Kristopher G. Menos.
S.M. in Architecture Studies (Architectural Design)
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Clinnin, Kaitlin Marie. "Beyond Binary Digital Embodiment." Thesis, Virginia Tech, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10919/32341.
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The late 20th and early 21st centuries have seen the creation of new forms of subjectivities that represent the integration of digital and information technologies into construction of the self and bodies. I argue that to this point there has not been a satisfactory theoretical framework for the experience of bodies in virtual environments that does not default to problematic binaries of physical and virtual, real and unreal, and meaningful and meaningless. These dualistic constructions render experiences of bodies within virtual settings meaningless. In order to examine how this power differential between physical and virtual came to be, I engage with Katherine Haylesâ evaluation of information as a disembodied entity. I argue that Haylesâ humanist principles prevents her from fully understanding the experience of bodies within virtual spaces as meaningful and important. I then deconstruct the materialist basis of representation in order to demonstrate how information can be reconceived as an embodied force. I further analyze digital media art installations, specifically dance performances, to examine how digital bodies are currently experienced in relationship to corporeal forms. I finally offer two new theories of Master of Arts
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Graf, Jaz. "Geographies of ancestral embodiment." Thesis, University of Iowa, 2019. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6748.
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Throughout history, humankind has looked to the natural world for understanding the foundations of life and the essence of existence. Emphasizing states of sedimentary material, as physical and metaphorical reference to the cyclical complexion of life/death, growth/decay, transformation/stasis…I investigate the meaning of familial roots, reimagining humanity’s relationship to earth. The ways in which this connection can be understood are dependent on visual or symbolic representations and through experiential knowledge of sensing physicality and materiality.
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Khang, Jonathan H. L. "An investigation of embodiment modelling." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.409733.
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Hale, Jonathan. "Architectural interpretation : philosophy, technology, embodiment." Thesis, University of Nottingham, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.503906.
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Cordell, Tami. "Wilderness Women: Embodiment in Nature." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2000. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc2649/.
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Virginia Woolf makes clear in her book A Room of One's Own that "[A] woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write…." This statement extends to all endeavors by women, including sport. The gap between men and women's sports is not bridged by monetary compensation. The domination of women exists in conceptual ideals and how those are expressed through our roles in this world. I use Val Plumwood's ecological feminist theory to expose the blatant masculinity imposed upon sport. I shall argue that sport is an arena of constant struggle over basic social conceptions of men and women. My endeavor is to implore traditionally masculine territory, and show sport as the domain of no single gender, but a field of simplicity and cooperation.
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Eppinette, Franklin Matthew. "Bodiless exultation? transhumanism and embodiment /." Online full text .pdf document, available to Fuller patrons only, 2004. http://www.tren.com.
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Svensson, Henrik. "Notions of Embodiment in Cognitive Science." Thesis, University of Skövde, Department of Computer Science, 2001. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-588.
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Cognitive science has traditionally viewed the mind as essentially disembodied, that is, the nature of mind and cognition is neither affected by the ¡Èsystem¡É it is implemented in nor affected by the environment that the system is situated in. But since the mid-1980s a new approach emerged in artificial intelligence that emphasized the importance of embodiment and situatedness and since then terms like embodied cognition, embodied intelligence have become more and more apparent in discussions of cognition. As embodied cognition has increased in interest so have the notions of embodiment and situatedness and they are not always compatible. This report has found that there are, at least, four notions of embodiment in the discussions of embodied cognition: software embodiment, physical embodiment, biological embodiment and human(oid) embodiment.
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Hensley, Shannon Shanelle. "The embodiment of rumba in Cuba." Thesis, Open University, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.500604.
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Xinari, Charis. "Bare essentials : gender fictions, embodiment matters." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/29430.
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If sex and gender, and ultimately our bodies are discursive constructions, then where is woman’s subjectivity grounded and what are the implications of such an approach to subjectivity for political efficacy? According to Meleau-Ponty ‘existence realises itself on the body’. If the body is the locus of subjectivity then it is to the matter of embodiment, as substance and as point of concern, which we need to turn in order to discuss the development of subjectivity, and gender subjectivity in particular. This thesis deals with the notion of gender as embodied practice and looks at the transgender subject – both transvestite and transsexual – as addressing the matter of embodiment located primarily in transsexuality’s desire to occupy material body. In the association that it establishes between gender practices and an experience of the ‘flesh as the flesh itself’ as defining subjectivity, the transsexual body, ‘the matter of embodiment’ as it has been argued, opens up a space for the reconsideration of the matter of embodiment altogether. Such concerns are addressed through a reading of the transsexual body via the work of Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler in the first part of the thesis. The second part develops the ideas stemming from these readings through the work of Angela Carter with a particular focus on embodiments of woman/hood in Nights at the Circus and The Passion of New Eve. Carter’s interest in the material conditions of woman, her concern with ‘demythologising’ women, as well as the bodily resistance – the body’s resistance to be consumed by and within discursive powers – embodied in her work, serve as the space for a re-examination of the role of the body in the development of gender subjectivity.
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Keynes, Laura. "William Hazlitt : an aesthetics of embodiment." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2010. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.669977.
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Reeves, Dale. "The embodiment of learning through drama." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape7/PQDD_0019/MQ56816.pdf.
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Sundén, Jenny. "Material virtualities : approaching online textual embodiment /." Linköping : Tema, Univ, 2002. http://www.bibl.liu.se/liupubl/disp/disp2002/arts257s.pdf.
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Heavy, Head Ryan, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Feeding sublimity : embodiment in Blackfoot experience." Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Science, 2005, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/621.
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Hawksley, Sue. "Dancing to an understanding of embodiment." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/7918.
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This practice-led research employs choreographic and somatic practices, and their mediation through performance and/or technologies, to facilitate critical engagement and apprehension of notions of embodiment. The core concerns are movement, dance and the body, as sites of knowledge and as modes of inquiry, with particular focus on lived experience approached from a nondualist perspective. Central themes are action, attention, bodyscape, tensegrity, improvisation, interactivity, memory, language and gesture. Taking as a starting point the position that knowledge and mind may be embodied, and that the movement habits and stress markers which pattern bodyscape may in turn inform cognition, the choreographic practice seeks to illuminate, rather than explicate or demonstrate, aspects of embodiment. The methodological approaches are (en)active, heuristic and reflective. Dance, as a exemplar of movement, and choreography, as a mode of creative and critical engagement with dance, are the primary research tools. Somatic approaches to practice, performance and philosophy are investigated for their potential to develop or reveal embodied knowing and awareness. Technological mediation is employed to inform and augment perception and apprehension of the embodied experience of dance, from the perspectives of choreographer, performer and audience. The thesis comprises five dance-based performance works and a written text critically engaging the concepts behind and emergent from this praxis.
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Atayurt, Zeynep Zeren. "'Excessive' embodiment in contemporary women's writing." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.487703.
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The 'obese' female body has often been portrayed as the 'other' to the slender body. However, this process of 'othering', or viewing as different, has created a repressive discourse, where 'excess' has increasingly come to be studied as a 'physical abnormality' or a signifier of a 'personality defect'. A tendency to stabilise the implications of obesity through medical, biological or statistical data has been a recurring characteristic of Westem society's current cultural view of obesity.
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Thanem, Torkild. "Disrupting boundaries : rethinking organisation and embodiment." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/56370/.
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This thesis attempts to disrupt the boundaries of how we think about organisation and embodiment. From an investigation into five organisational regimes of Western public health, it argues that the body is a problem for organisation. The body does not come ready organised, but is a nonorganisational, messy and carnal matter of flesh and blood, pains and pleasures, habits and desires. Although modem discourses and institutions seek to organise how we live with our bodies in everyday life, they never do so fully and completely. Bodies are powerful, creative and unpredictable and disrupt the boundaries of organisation. Asking how organisation theory deals with the problem of the body, the thesis seeks to take the discipline further by developing an approach to how it should deal with the body, and by identifying what implications this might have for our thinking about organisation. Utilising the conceptualist philosophy of Canguilhem, Foucault and Deleuze, this is done by analysing the concept of "organisation" and the concept of the "body" across organisation theory and related fields. Five ways of dealing with the body are identified: (i) not dealing with it at all, which is mostly the case with mainstream research on formal organisations and more radical research on organisational processes; (ii) reducing the body to an organismic metaphor, which is what much classical and some contemporary mainstream research does; (iii) studying how embodiment enables the successful management of formal organisations; (iv) studying how bodies are organised within and without formal organisations; and (v) studying nonorganisational embodiment, i.e. how bodies disrupt and exist independently of organisation. Whereas the third and fourth themes have been investigated in some organisation theory, little attempt has been made to think about nonorganisational embodiment. Using material in Deleuze, Foucault, feminism and current organisation theory, this thesis appreciates the ways in which bodies disrupt the boundaries of organisation and the ways in which bodies live under the conditions imposed by these boundaries. From this perspective, organisation is less powerful, less stable and more fragile than we often think, and bodies are more powerful, more dynamic and more creative. This conceptualist interest in organisation, nonorganisation and the body gives rise to a theory and philosophy of organisation that might provide the underpinnings of a radical approach to everyday problems of organisation and embodiment, such as aesthetic labour and impression management; virtual organisations; culture, subcultures and resistance at work and in public space; health and safety; and gender, race and sexuality.
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Stubbs, Michael. "Digital embodiment in contemporary abstract painting." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2003. http://research.gold.ac.uk/175/.
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This thesis re-investigates Clement Greenberg’s discredited abstract expressionist claim that painting should seek its own purity through the acknowledgment of its material. I argue that Greenberg’s physical, bodily determination of painting (but not its purity) is re-located as a criticality in contemporary practice because of the changes brought about by the simulacrum and the digital. By utilizing the particularities of ‘painterly’ issues such as materiality, depth and opticality into the virtual, this claim responds to Arthur C. Danto’s ‘end of history’ theories where he argues that artists are no longer bound to the dictates of grand master narratives of art. For Danto, contemporary art has irrevocably deviated from the narrative discourses which define it such as Greenberg’s. Not satisfied with either postmodern strategies of parody in painting that claim a linear end to the modernist canon, or with recent claims that contemporary painting is beyond postmodernism, I convert Greenberg’s physical determinism using Andrew Benjamin’s notion that contemporary abstract painters, through making, accept and transform the historical/modernist premise of the yet-to-be-resolved object/painting by staging a repetition of abstraction as an event of becoming. This ‘re-styling’ of abstract painting is then examined as an ontological conjoining of Greenberg with Merleau-Ponty’s claim that the painter transforms the relationship between the body and a painting by overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects. I argue that contemporary painting can offer a philosophical dialogue between the painter’s subjectivity as a mirroring of the painter’s personal style through objective ornamental materiality. This dialogue is developed through Stephen Perrella’s Hypersurface theory which proposes a non-subjective, deterritorialised, architectural parallel of the digital as a transparent, fluid system of multi-dimensional signs in which the contemporary subject traverses. Consequently, I suggest, the symbolic virtual changes the body’s sensuous relation to time and space and is central to contemporary painting’s criticality.
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McIntyre, Robert Louis. "Recognizing actions using embodiment & empathy." Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2014. http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/91697.
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Thesis: M. Eng., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2014.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-85).
Here I demonstrate the power of using embodied artificial intelligence to attack the action recognition problem, which is the challenge of recognizing actions performed by a creature given limited data about the creature's actions, such as a video recording. I solve this problem in the case of a worm-like creature performing actions such as curling and wiggling. To attack the action recognition problem, I developed a computational model of empathy (EMPATH) which allows me to recognize actions using simple, embodied representations of actions (which require rich sensory data), even when that sensory data is not actually available. The missing sense data is imagined by combining previous experiences gained from unsupervised free play. The worm is a five-segment creature equipped with touch, proprioception, and muscle tension senses. It recognizes actions using only proprioception data. In order to build this empathic, action-recognizing system, I created a program called CORTEX, which is a complete platform for embodied AI research. It provides multiple senses for simulated creatures, including vision, touch, proprioception, muscle tension, and hearing. Each of these senses provides a wealth of parameters that are biologically inspired. CORTEX is able to simulate any number of creatures and senses, and provides facilities for easily modeling and creating new creatures. As a research platform it is more complete than any other system currently available.
by Robert Louis McIntyre.
M. Eng.
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Popielinski, Lea Marie. "Noncorporeal Embodiment and Gendered Virtual Identity." The Ohio State University, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1339450867.
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Wilford, Beatrice Kate. "Embodiment and allegory in 'Piers Plowman'." Thesis, King's College London (University of London), 2015. http://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/theses/embodiment-and-allegory-in-piers-plowman(4666dde8-b7a9-479e-a909-dbf74e57f045).html.
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This thesis argues that Langland's bodies are of fundamental importance to his allegory. Langland sees the body as the principle vehicle through which the words and ideas in his poem can be explored. He understands language as deeply embodied. Piers Plowman establishes a hermeneutics of flesh in which concepts are explored through their effects on bodies. The apparent opposition in Piers's allegory between the material and the abstract is a result of Langland's belief in the importance of the body and the influence it has on meaning. Ultimately, the body represents union with God through the incarnation and so understanding and using its insights is paramount. The first chapter explores representations of the body and the soul, the incarnation, and the relationship between personifications and words to establish how the poem theorises the interaction of flesh with matter. The second chapter argues that clothing and signs on the body are rejected as ways of displaying meaning by Langland in favour of depictions of meaning upon the bodies of personifications and other characters. The third chapter describes the 'capture' of bodies by meaning as a violent process endemic to allegory that Langland openly explores as a way of understanding how bodies interact with the conceptual. In the final chapter, the idea of Langland as a poet concerned with the bodily is examined through metaphor theory. Piers emerges as a poem that uses its reader's own body as a basis for its complex ideas, thus establishing a physical link between Langland and his readers. This thesis finds, in Langland, a poet who believes the body should be at the centre of textuality and who uses allegory to open up and explore the intersections between bodies and words.
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Särnstedt, Emmie. "Knowing Bodies : Emotive Embodiment in Feminist Epistemology." Thesis, Uppsala universitet, Centrum för genusvetenskap, 2011. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-162433.
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The aim of this thesis is to examine how the boundaries of the body are renegotiated byapproaching emotive bodies as the power charged foundations of knowledge. Introducing thesubject, I describe the subordination of bodies and emotions in Western thought as gendered andraced. While the dichotomy between bodies and knowledge prevail in many feminist paradigms,the postmodern feminist interest in the mutually constitutive role of bodies and knowledgeproduction is seen as a dissolution of dichotomies such as nature/culture, body/mind andemotion/reason. With embodied reading as a methodological point of departure, I first analyzethe role of emotions in academic writing, and then turn to exploring the concept of the livedbody, as developed in feminist phenomenology. I touch on the intersectional potential ofemotive, embodied knowledge in my concluding discussion, “Intersecting Bodies”.In the first analytical theme, “Emotive Academic Writing”, I explore the chicana feminist MaríaLugones emotive imagery as a renegotiation of the boundaries between the bodies of writers,readers and written text. I describe emotions as materialized through embodied relations betweenwriters and readers, arguing that they are sources of knowledge about the power structures thatgovern knowledge production. I see restructuring the emotive, intersubjective relations betweensubjects of knowledge as a way to change the hierarchical differentiation of bodies in knowledgeproduction. In the second theme, “The Lived Body”, I argue that the phenomenological take onbodies and knowledge as mutually constitutive renegotiates the boundaries within bodies,between bodies, and between bodies and their surrounding world. I argue that the powersensitive approach to embodiment in feminist phenomenology opens up for feminist reliance onembodied experience, without reinstating it as essentially tied to differentiated bodies.
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McLeod, Shaun, and shaun mcleod@deakin edu au. "Chamber: Dance improvisation, masculine embodiment and subjectivity." Deakin University. School of Communication and Creative Arts, 2002. http://tux.lib.deakin.edu.au./adt-VDU/public/adt-VDU20061207.114658.
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Ploeg, Ymkje Hilda van der. "Prosthetic bodies female embodiment in reproductive technologies /." [Maastricht : Maastricht : Universiteit Maastricht] ; University Library, Maastricht University [Host], 1998. http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=6824.
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Thornton, Anna C. "Constraint specification and satisfaction in embodiment design." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 1993. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.386171.
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Stoate, Robin. "Reading cyberspace : fictions, figures and (dis)embodiment." Thesis, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10443/1129.
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My thesis tracks the human body in cyberspace as a popular cultural construct, from its origins in cyberpunk fiction in the 1980s to the pervasion of cyberspatial narratives in contemporary fictions, along with its representations within wider cultural texts, such as film, the mainstream media, and on the Internet. Across the two respective sections of the thesis, I focus upon six recurring literal-metaphorical characters, entities or motifs which serve as points of collision, entanglement and reiteration for a wide variety of discourses. These figures—the avatar, the hacker, the nanotechnological swarm, the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—have varying cultural functions in their respective representations of the human/technological interface. Informed by theorists such as Donna Haraway (1991, 2008), N. Katherine Hayles (2001) and others, I trace both their origins and their shifting and (often increasingly prolific) representations from the 1980s to the present. This allows me to uncover these figures’ registering of contextual discourses, and permits, in turn, an interrogation of the extent of their normative character, along with measuring how and to what extent, if any, these figures may offer alternative visions of human (and other) subjectivity. It also permits a rethinking of “cyberspace” itself. Section One analyses three figures that depict the human/technological interface as a space for reinscribing and reifying Cartesian dualistic views of human subjectivity, along with the exclusive and marginalising implications of the remapping of that dualism. The figures in Section One—the avatar, the hacker, and the nanotechnological swarm—have their roots in the 1980s, and have stratified over time, commonly deployed in describing the human/technological interface. These figures function in first evoking and then managing the threats to the unified masculine subject posed by the altering human/machine relationship, policing rather than collapsing the subjective boundaries between them. They maintain and reiterate their attendant logics of identity, recapitulating an image of technology as the object of human invention, and never a contributor to the substantiation of the human subject. Science fiction–especially cyberpunk—has at least partially set the terms for understanding present-day relationships between humans and technologies, and those terms are relentlessly humanistic and teleological, despite their putatively postmodern and fragmentary aesthetic. The threat of the technological other is almost invariably femininecoded, and my work in this section is explicated particularly in the light of Haraway’s work and feminist theories of embodiment, including the work of Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Margrit Shildrick (1997, 2002). Section Two analyses three emerging figures—ones not so clearly and widely defined in fiction and popular culture—that depict the human/technological interface as fundamentally co-substantiating, rather than the latter being the product of the former. Acting as nodes of connection and constitution for various phenomena both depicted in fiction and enacted/performed at the human/technological interface itself, these three figures—the fursona, the caring computer, and the decaying digital—demonstrate potential ways to understand the human/technological interface outside of conventional, dualistic discourses of transcendental disembodiment of a bounded subject-self. Deploying theoretical work on concepts such as Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (2004) and Brian Massumi’s reading of the “real-material-but-incorporeal” body (2002), as well as Haraway’s later work on companion species (2008), I position these figures as representative visions of technologically-mediated subjectivity that allow us to imagine our relationships with technology as co-operative, open and materially co-substantiating. I argue that they recover the potential to rupture the unified and dualistic mind-subject that is both represented and contained by the figures seen in Section One, while reflecting a more recognisably prosaic, ongoing transformation of subjective participants in human/technological encounters. In opening up these two respective clusters of human-technological figures, I map two attendant visions of cyberspace. The first is the most common: the smooth, Euclidean grid into which the discrete unified consciousness is projected away from the body, which is conflated with (a reductive understanding of) virtuality, and to which access is allowed or denied based on highly conventional lines of gender, race, sexuality and so on. The second vision is emerging: it is possible to view cyberspace as less of a “space” at all, and more of a technologically-mediated field of material implication—one which is not discrete from the putatively offline world, which is implicit in the subject formation of its users and participants, and accounts for, rather than disavowing, the physical, bodily substrate from which it is explicated.
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Panapakidis, Konstantinos. "Drag narratives : staged gender, embodiment, and competition." Thesis, Goldsmiths College (University of London), 2012. http://research.gold.ac.uk/7589/.
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This thesis is the outcome of a practice-based research project into contemporary formations of gender and sexuality through the study of drag performance. It is composed of two elements, the film Dragging the Past (presented on a DVD) and this written text. The film offers a multi-layered view of the drag performances in Koukles Club, Athens, Greece. The written thesis offers sociological analysis of articulations of self, from both performers and audiences. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate productions of the self through the process of viewing, engaging, and performing in a drag show, and also to examine the ways in which subjects negotiate their gender during this process. Moreover, this study illuminates the deployment of drag narratives, by both drag performers and members of the audience, as tools to create a desired self, always in relation to the other. A visual ethnography, that uses participant observation and video elicitation as key methods to gather empirical data, provides the foundation for this study. The ethnographic ‘I’ of the researcher combines with participants in the field and ‘together’ they produce ethnographic knowledge. Video elicitation interviews capture narratives of embodiment and competition; both film and text reflect that visual methods offer new perspectives on the way subjects form their gender and sexuality. This study reveals productions of particular kinds of subjects, specifically those that perform gender in relation to the other, while engaged in the process of competition and embodiment (incarnation), while also interrupting and disrupting the other. These themes proved to be central to the narratives participants deployed to perform the self. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates that photographs and the act of mirroring are important to the forming of gender and sexuality, as they become tools for the production of the self.
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Ray, Murray Padmini. "Gender, nation and embodiment in Byron's poetry." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/2626.
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This thesis will examine how the concepts of gender and nation were inextricably linked for Byron, and how this is demonstrated in his poetry through strategies of gendered embodiment. Byron’s complex relationship with and attitudes towards women displays an ambivalence that characterises his representations of England, due to his perception of the British body politic as a “gynocrasy.” This ambivalence was further exacerbated by Byron’s conception of his own masculinity as one in flux. His literary professionalisation and his status as an outmoded aristocrat contributed to these anxieties regarding his masculine subjectivity. Byron’s poetic fame was particularly influenced by the growing importance of women as readers, writers and arbiters of literary taste in early nineteenth century England. The first chapter will explore Byron’s anxiety about this increased influence of women as competitors and consumers in the literary marketplace, and how this threat manifests in his monstrous configurations of the female body and the body politic in his poetry. Chapter 2 investigates the tensions between Byron’s cosmopolitanism and patriotism in the context of his masculine subjectivity and demonstrates how these tensions shaped Byron’s first commercially successful work Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This chapter also examines how Byron uses this masculine subjectivity in his Turkish Tales in order to assert the authority of his opinions on female sexuality and freedom over those expressed in female-authored works with similarly "exotic" themes. Chapter 3 addresses the post-exilic Byron and how his estrangement from England destabilises his conceptions of subjectivity and influences the poetics of the third canto of CHP. This chapter then goes on to track Byron’s recovery from this disintegration and traces how Byron’s poetic voice takes a new direction in his depictions of gender and nation. He begins to depend more heavily on allegory as a strategy of displacement for his feelings of nostalgia and homesickness and in order to place himself in a national literary tradition, as illustrated in his treatments of women and nation in Don Juan. The fourth and final chapter explores Byron’s feelings towards the domestic and commercial worlds both of which he held as bastions of female authority. Byron examines the ramifications of female influence through the heroines who use sexuality as an assertion of this power against a hapless Juan. This chapter will examine his poem The Island and the poems written just before his death in Greece to demonstrate conclusively how Byron’s struggles to recover his masculine subjectivity are persistently staged as contestations of space.
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Windsor, Carmen. "Embodiment, expression and the experience of music." Thesis, University of Reading, 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493745.
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This thesis aims to show how the notion of embodiment serves to create a robust theory of musical expression. Part I describes 'The Problem' of the disembodied legacy left in the wake of Descartes, and shows that many existing theories of musical expression tend to become unstable and/or incoherent if read in light of a disembodied theory of mind. In Part n, 'The Materials', I gather together relevant and significant insights from Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and introduce the recent neuroscientific research on mirror neurons that I plan to implement in Part III, 'The Solution'.
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Illingworth, Nicola. "Gendered embodiment and the time of infertility." Thesis, University of Stirling, 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/1893/2027.
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Despite recent attempts to retrieve the body within sociology and the assumption of a now 'embodied' framework, how this should be done remains problematic, contentious and disputed. Current tensions more than partially revolve around the difficulty overcoming the limitations of foundationalist and anti-foundationalist approaches, restricting the development of a truly embodied and empirically driven conceptual framework. Remarkably little theory has entered the body and considered the body in terms of its own inner processes, the result of a persistent ontological queasiness concerning bodily interiority. The exclusion of the interior of the body problematises any integration between not just what bodies mean but also what they can do. As a field of location, I address the question of how both the female body and women's embodied experiences within the field of infertility can be both theorised and explored without succumbing to these limitations. Acknowledging the influence of both feminist and hermeneutic perspectives, and situating my approach within a temporal and biographical framework, I acknowledge both the interior and exterior of the female body. An empirical study of 15 women's experiences of infertility treatment was conducted using life story interviews and researcher-solicited diaries. Analysis focused upon the conditions of meaning-making and understanding, emphasising the biographical and temporally-situated of women's narratives in relation to the female body. By overcoming the difficulties admitting the female body into our analyses, this thesis illuminates the process of embodiment itself in the development of a truly embodied and empirically driven theoretical and conceptual framework in this field.
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Simpson, Brenda. "Childhood embodiment : an ethnography of SEN provision." Thesis, University of Hull, 2000. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:4639.
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This thesis explores the experiences of a group of children with a range of special educational needs within two mainstream schools, using a variety of ethnographic methods. The thesis is sited within the relatively new paradigm of the social study of childhood, which acknowledges children as competent social actors. It explores children's capacity for agency within the structural space of the school, and rejects the notion of the disabled child as passive and dependent. Children's own views are discussed, and the thesis demonstrates how they make sense of concepts such as 'difference' and 'disability', noting how children are influenced by factors such as the primacy of the body in consumer culture and wider social attitudes to disability. Central to the thesis, however, is the crucial nature of the body in adult-child and child-child interaction. Within schools, children are 'civilised' and controlled through the medium of the body and, similarly, children draw upon the body as a means of resistance. During social interaction, all children use the body as a signifier of the social self, as a symbolic resource for playing jokes upon their peers, to evidence changes in status, and to highlight aspects of the 'non-standard' body. They also use aspects of bodily difference to wound and taunt. Whilst all children are subject to these onslaughts upon bodily identity, it is those with special educational needs, whose bodies may appear or behave differently, who are potentially more susceptible to their effect. However, the thesis shows that the experiences of children with special educational needs were not necessarily mediated through those needs, but through particular social skills such as empathy or humour. This thesis demonstrates therefore the manner in which the quality of experience for all children, but specifically those with special educational needs, is mediated through their expertise in particular skills of embodiment.
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Dale, Karen. "Under the knife : embodiment and organisation theory." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.272499.
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Furness, S. H. "A reasonable geography : An argument for embodiment." Thesis, University of Essex, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.374706.
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Stroh, Stephanie. "Embodiment and theatricality in post-museum practice." Thesis, Kingston University, 2016. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/39273/.
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A recent shift to a more performative and relational understanding of the museum and its practices can be witnessed in the field of museum studies. This shift reimagines the museum as experience, process or performance, and is reflected in what has been termed the 'post-museum'. The post-museum challenges the representational practices of the museum, and introduces a potential 'liqud imaginary' which dissolves the traditional boundaries of what constitutes a museum. While these ideas point to relevant changes in the way museums are perceived and practiced, the field has so far failed to explore the implications of this shift for the practice of museum research. This study examines the potential of the post-museum for developing new approaches to research practices. It contributes to the field of museum studies by exploring creative research methods that qualify as site-responsive, experimental means of critically engaing with the museum. These creative methods of research are developed on-site at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, London. Under-represented in the museological literature, maritime museums provide potent opportunity as sites for experimentation into creative, more-than-representational approaches to museum research. The study examines creative research methodologies through the embodied mode of inhabitation, which it conceptualises through the notions of dwelling and travelling. Drawing on the concept of the 'mariner's craft' from maritime literary criticism and so-called wet or liquid ontologies from human geography, the research explores the potential of post-museum thinking from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Inhabiting the Museum through creative-experimental doings, the thesis-in-motion maps out an uncertain voyage into the uncharted territories of creative maritime museum research, a voyage of exploration, intervention, and creativity.
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Moore, Charles H. "Grasping Embodiment: Haptic Feedback for Artificial Limbs." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1617107153868166.
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Dietz, Christopher Paul. "Jurisdiction in gender recognition : governing legal embodiment." Thesis, University of Leeds, 2016. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/16707/.
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This thesis examines the impact of the adoption of legislation premised upon the ‘self-declaration model’ of legal gender recognition, which allows legal subjects to make a personal declaration of their gender status and have this granted legal effect. It presents findings from an in-depth fieldwork visit to interrogate how self-declaration is working in Denmark, the first European state to have adopted it in June 2014. These findings draw upon doctrinal analysis of various legislative materials, including parliamentary debates, as well as empirical interviews conducted with 33 respondents – including trans people, activists, politicians, civil servants, and medical practitioners – over the course of the three-month visit. These interviews sought to establish how respondents were professionally involved in, or personally affected by, the process of these reforms. By reading this interview material through a Foucauldian framework which brings socio-, feminist, and trans legal scholarship on embodiment and governance together in an innovative manner, the thesis provides the first empirically-based and theoretically-informed analysis of how self-declaration of legal gender status is working in practice. It argues that jurisdictional boundaries were established and maintained throughout the reform process, limiting the implementation of self-declaration to the administrative sphere. Authorising these boundaries between civil and medical institutions had serious consequences for trans people’s legal consciousness; as a restriction of access to body modification technologies could be justified at the same point in time as the regulations around amending legal gender status were being liberalised. With the list of states that have adopted the self-declaration model now including Argentina, Malta, Colombia, the Republic of Ireland, and Norway – and with Sweden and now the United Kingdom apparently on course to follow – this intervention offers activists and policymakers critical insights which might shape how they respond to these, and other, reform proposals in the future.
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Gaetano-Adi, Paula G. "Performing embodiment: when Life and Art meet." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1277127179.
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Fouad, Noha. "Embodiment of Empathy: Experiencing Disease Through Design." VCU Scholars Compass, 2016. http://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/etd/4136.
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Today, more than 400 million individuals around the world have diabetes. This number is expected to grow to more than 600 million by 2023. However, diabetes is more than just a statistic. It is an incurable, psychologically nuanced disease, with daily battles and far-reaching complications. The lives of those afflicted undergo permanent physical and psychological changes.
Reading the stories of diabetics, or hearing them share their experience may elicit an immediate yet often fleeting sense of realization. How, then, can this brief moment of awareness be prolonged? How can a non-diabetic feel diabetes? More importantly, why should they? This research explores empathy as a tool to achieve that level of understanding. Elements found on the dining table, a place most diabetics are acutely aware of, were redesigned in an attempt to recreate certain aspects of the diabetic experience. These items no longer function in the way they were intended to, but have been transformed into tools that evoke empathy. A non-diabetic will get to experience the struggles associated with four main areas: control, or lack thereof; unpredictable dysfunctionality; a constant state of alertness; and finally, the burden of living with the disease, and the anchoring effect it has on those afflicted.
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Anshuman, Sachin. "Space, objects & embodiment in situated media." Thesis, Glasgow Caledonian University, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.493922.
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The research presented in this thesis looks at situated computing from the embodiment perspective. It presents broader theoretical framework to help understand the notion of embodiment and its relevance to situated computing. It explains in detail how the ethos in current research practice concerning embodiment is somewhat misplaced. It explains what may cause embodied experience in interactive environments, and draws constitutive understanding about the idea of space, objects and their relationships to the human subject in this regard. It denounces tangible computing's claims for physically based interface being a prerequisite for embodied interaction experience and explains the correct relevance of tangibility in interfaces. Thus, it outlines how exactly, tangibility, space, objects or their virtual counterparts (computational metaphors) fit into embodied perspective. The thesis also presents an in-depth analysis of context aware systems' architecture and exposes the limitations of context modelling and context meaning determination processes. It defines what these limitations are, where the problems are located in system design process and shows why they occur.
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Burwood, Stephen Anthony. "Towards a dialectical understanding of human embodiment." Thesis, University of Hull, 1995. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:15293.
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This thesis is essentially programmatic. This is not to say that it should be seen as a prolegomenon to any future metaphysics of body and mind; I can hardly claim such an exulted status for what I have to say. Rather, I am content to raise certain questions and indicate certain directions in which I believe a more systematic investigation of these issues should take us. Equally, I also hope that enough of a case can be made out here for the claim that such an investigation, if not a full-fledged prolegomenon, is essential if we are to free ourselves from a fundamental impasse in contemporary philosophy of mind. It is no exaggeration to say that Cartesianism continues to stride our thought like a colossus, informing and shaping our conceptualisations of what it is to be a subject of thought and experience, as well as our more general conceptualisations of what we take the world to be and what our relationship with it actually is. The Cartesian turn in philosophy has generally left us with a framework of binary categories in which only a divisive account of these conceptualisations is possible. This is because these Cartesian binaries are not simply oppositional but are oppositional in ways such that their terms are construed as being intrinsically autonomous and exclusionary, with a privileging of one of the terms in each case.
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Lyle, Catherine Frances. "An embodiment critique of human tissue markets." Pullman, Wash. : Washington State University, 2009. http://www.dissertations.wsu.edu/Thesis/Spring2009/C_Lyle_042209.pdf.
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Burstow, Stephen Alfred. "The Handheld Image: Art, History and Embodiment." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/18077.
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This thesis investigates how images become present through movement and bodily performance. Inspiring this investigation are the contemporary practices of viewers engaging with still and moving images of people on their handheld screen devices. These practices are not only central to contemporary visuality, they also provide a focus for two wider themes relating to images of people: first, the dynamic tension between image control and circulation; and second, the mutual contestation of the physical and the virtual. To explore the struggle between image control and circulation, this thesis compares the dissemination of the twenty-first-century digital image with two historical instances of the handheld image: the sixteenth-century portrait miniature and the nineteenth-century carte de visite photographic portrait. While the physical control of the portrait miniature was paramount, the carte de visite, as the first form of mass-produced photograph, betrays the social benefits and perils of the shift from control to circulation. These historical forms are augmented through a consideration of contemporary moving-image portraiture that reveals the portrait as an interface for the interrelated demands and desires of artists, portrait subjects, and viewers. Having tracked handheld images through the sixteenth-century bedchamber and the nineteenth-century parlour, this thesis then follows handheld devices into the twenty-first-century bed to witness the contest between the somatic and the virtual: between the vulnerable, fatigued body and the seductions of online screen engagement. This thesis challenges the view that an image becomes more powerful through unfettered circulation. Rather it proposes that the potency of an image is powered by the contestation of meaning and memory, through the struggle between circulation and control. It is through these moments of struggle, and the unstable fluctuations between the actual and the virtual, that the image becomes present.
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Denham, Benjiman. "Gestural sense : art, neuroscience and linguistic embodiment." Thesis, View thesis, 2009. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/46121.
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In introducing this work it’s useful to consider both the thematic threads that link the following chapters and the question of why an artist might choose to engage with the type of critical theoretical writing that is exemplified here. I will start by considering some of the threads that can be used to connect an eight year old reading Wittgenstein, “gesture-haptic writing”, freestyle poetry, and unaided human flight. Two questions can help in identifying those threads. Firstly, what can each of these subjects tell us about the ways in which language acts-on and alters bodies? And secondly what are the implications of those alterations for the process of speculating on how language and the body might continue in a particularly productive and creative relationship of co-evolution? Or, to put it in a slightly more linear fashion, how might various language-based creative practices be employed as agents in the continued evolution of the body.
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Denham, Benjiman. "Gestural sense art, neuroscience and linguistic embodiment /." View thesis, 2009. http://handle.uws.edu.au:8081/1959.7/46121.
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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2009.A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosphy. Includes bibliographies.
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Carrillo, Quiroga Perla. "Embodiment and the senses in travelogue filmmaking." Thesis, University of Westminster, 2013. https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/item/8yyz3/embodiment-and-the-senses-in-travelogue-filmmaking.
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This practice-based research presents an analysis of the representation of embodied experience in the travelogue film genre. It reflects upon the embodied and synaesthesic nature of the cinematic experience by tracing a shift in travelogue filmmaking from the ocular realism characteristic of early travelogue films to the emergence and proliferation of subjective approaches. Moreover, it analyses experimental travelogue films and the capacity of non-linear and non-narrative structures to express sensuous, embodied perception. 9 Meditations is the practice component of this thesis. It is an experimental travelogue film. Through its production this research explores the translation of embodied experience as a multi-sensory process into filmmaking practice. In the field of film studies, the travelogue has not been widely discussed outside historical approaches, and it has certainly never been discussed in relation to phenomenology and embodied sensation. This research articulates a new conceptual framework for both the production and theorisation of the travelogue film, as a form that is intrinsically related to performance, subjectivity and embodied perception. Moreover, this research concerns both the production process in filmmaking practice and the cinematic experience as grounded in synaesthesic, embodied perception. This approach brings to the forefront the capacity of audiovisual practice to both encode and produce sensuous knowledge.
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McAlvage, Katherine. "Romanticism's Moving Bodies: Literary Embodiment and Affect." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/22791.
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Romanticism’s Moving Bodies examines the centrality of the material body to poetry, prose, and visual culture of the so-called Romantic project in British Literature. In this project, I bring together the movement of body representations (how bodies move) and affect theory (how bodies move each other) to demonstrate that movement characterizes much of the thinking in the period about the problems and potentials of embodiment. I first explore body displacements and fantasies of disembodiment in Burke, Percy Shelley, Radcliffe, and Byron, which I posit as aesthetic experiments that hesitate to locate knowledge in a mutable, subjective body or that want to mount an imaginative escape from a body that feels too much. Next, I turn from individual concerns with embodiment to social anxieties about embodiment in public spaces and in the changing landscape of labor by analyzing “indeterminate,” or unpredictably affected, mob and worker bodies, whose corporeality is emphasized because their embodied reactions to new circumstances are unknown. Thereafter, I explore the conceit of the hand to identify movements toward inter-subjective connection by reading Frankenstein and The Last Man as Mary Shelley’s projects of sympathetic inquiry, and I argue that these novels make a case for the centrality of tactile sympathy to human experience and the distress caused by its failures or foreclosures. Finally, I provide an extended reading of William Blake’s Milton to examine the body’s potential as an affective and transformative strategy that can engage and challenge the reader to contemplate their own transformation. Methodologically, this project merges corporeally-focused theories of affect with phenomenological theories of embodiment, a number of which are drawn from dance studies, to account for the circulation of affect in and among bodies and inside and outside of the text. This approach seeks to uncover examples of how sustained attention to the material body produces illuminating readings of canonical and non-canonical texts of the period, to help advance affect theory as an important intervention in literary criticism, and to better understand how British Romantic literature moves its readers.