From sex objects to sexual subjects

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Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick

Price and Shildrick bring together over 40 important feminist thinkers to discuss key arguments and issues concerning the body. It includes articles on race, cyberspace, theatre, classics, transsexuality, reproductive technologies, illness, rape, plastic surgery, and disabilities. The articles cover many different areas with a stress on the interdisciplinary links of contemporary feminist thought with philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and queer studies. What unites the various approaches represented is the understanding of the body as a site of contestation, the place where feminism can engage directly with the devaluation of women and move on to mobilize strategies of resistance.

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John Deely

"This volume solves the problem of the subjectivity/objectivity couplet, making an indispensable contribution both to semiotics and to philosophy. American philosopher John Deely offers the first sustained and theoretically consistent interrogation of the means by which human understanding of 'reality' will be instrumental in the survival - or destruction - of planet Earth."--Jacket.

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Originally published in

Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. In this shimmering manifesto against dialectics, Jean Baudrillard constructs a condemnatory ethics of the "false problem." One foot in social science, the other in speculation about the history of ideas, this text epitomizes the assault that Baudrillard has made on the history of Western philosophy. Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists. - Courtesy of M.I.T Press

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Ira G. Zepp, Jr

In The New Religious Image of Urban America, Zepp adopts a novel way of looking at things around him - circles, crosses, squares, trees, fountains, flags, stone monuments - and how these objects are symbols of human community. In the same way, he relates the architecture of shopping malls - including fountains, streams, and trees - to the archetypes of human and religious traditions. Zepp asserts that for many people the shopping mall represents a substitute for ancient sacred centers. If religion, schools, and families (our three major institutions) fail us, we will seek other spaces to fulfill basic human needs. It is not accidental, he argues, that malls contain the same structures, objects, and symbols that give ancient centers their rich human meaning. The New Religious Image of Urban America: The Shopping Mall as Ceremonial Center is the only book that deals with the religious dimension of malls. First published in 1986, it has been updated and expanded to include a new chapter on airports and ballparks as forms of the mall, and a critical response.