BodyWorks: (Pre)scriptive Embodiment in Diverse Educational Spaces

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Educational practices can cultivate particular beliefs about bodies, ascribe value to particular bodies over others, render aspects of embodiment invisible, identify certain bodies as evidence of social or moral decay, and create the conditions of possibility that allow only particular embodied practices to emerge (Author 4, 2017). Gender is a central force in such personal, educational, and political “bodywork.” In this panel, members focus on contemporary practices in Western (mis)education through which institutions define, discipline and regulate human bodies. We consider how gender operates in prescriptive roles of the body to make visible education’s potential to re-script socio-cultural possibilities in educational settings.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Research on Women and Education

Chair

• Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University

Papers

• Avatar Skins: Rescripting a Female Body in a Virtual Learning Space, Second Life - Janet Handwerk, Oklahoma State

• Becoming Healing Hands: The Embodiment of Nursing Touch - Elizabeth J. Diener, Oklahoma City University

• Gendered Bodies as Architects of Experience: Creating Selves - Becky M. Atkinson, The University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa

• Embodied Interactions: Resisting the Erasure of Embodiment in Discourses of Faculty Labor - Lucy E. Bailey, Oklahoma State University