Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism - Tapa blanda

Winner, Gleebooks Prize for Cultural and Literary Criticism, NSW Premier's Awards, 1995 Volatile Bodies is based on a risky wager: that all the effects of subjectivitiy, psychological depth and interiority can be refigured in terms of bodies and surfaces. It uses, transforms and subverts the work of a number of distinguished male theorists of the body (Freud, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, Schilder, Nietzsche, Foucault, Lingis and Deleuze) who, while freeing the body from its subordination to the mind, are nonetheless unable to accomodate the specificities of women's bodies. Volatile Bodies explores various dissonances in thinking the relation between mind and body. It investigates issues that resist reduction to these binary terms - psychosis, hypochondria, neurological disturbances, perversions and sexual deviation - and most particularly the enigmatic status of body fluids, and the female body.

Elizabeth Grosz is one of Australia's best-known feminist theorists and currently teaches in Philosophy, Women's Studies and Critical Theory at Monash University in Melbourne. She is the author of Sexual Subversions: Three French feminists and Jacques Lacan: A feminist introduction, and editor of six collections of feminist theory.