Refiguring the Ordinary

ISBN: 025335157X

Author: Gail Weiss

Condition: Used

Product Description If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.M. V. Marder, University of Toronto, Feb. 2009 (M. V. Marder, University of Toronto 2009-01-00) Review "While a philosophy book that will surely end up in university courses, Weisss pronouncements about the self, the other, and how we construct reality will no doubt contribute to feminist philosophical theory in a greater way. When taken with healthy doses of history as a foundation to understanding her work, Weisss explanation and subsequent reshaping of the ordinary becomes quite digestible and even a bit delicious.... [R]ecommended for any combination of curious philosopher, cross-disciplinary psychologist, radical feminist, and communication theorist among us." -Brittany Shoot, Feminist Review, November 6, 2008 (Brittany Shoot Feminist Review 2008-01-00)"Articulate, readable, well-researched, and original... one of the best feminist readings and elaborations of phenomenological philosophy thus far published." -Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University (Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University)"[Readers] interested in phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty, and issues of embodiment in general, as well as feminist philosophy, would be interested in this book. It is written clearly and free of jargon." -Thomas Busch, Villanova University (Thomas Busch, Villanova University)In the last decade alone, how many have perceived the "ordinary" has drastically shifted. September 11th, if it can be evoked without vulgar sentimentality, brought a fresh worldview to many around the globe, most significantly to Americans and those living in the occupied Middle East. In literary circles, Joan Didions The Year of Magical Thinking has caused more than a few thoughtful readers to consider that what we believe is pedestrian, everyday, and commonplace may instantly vanish. Even a high school student forced to read Kafkas The Metamorphosis has realized that in an instant, life can be radically altered. "Ordinary" is simply not as we believe it to be, and exists on a spectrum of experience we often fail to consider.Gail Weisss deeply engaging Refiguring the Ordinary comes on the heels of a remarkable decade and at a time when authenticity seems to be quite a buzzword in a world of MySpace-a space you can personalize, show off the essence of who you are-and YouTube, which begs of you to "broadcast yourself." Its easy to understand the power of your own authenticity when weve all long been told that we-as feminists, women, oppressed minorities-have a right to our own voices and stories, that we are the ones who can best speak our truth to power. But what if authenticity itself is merely existentialism gone wrong, subjective judgments that still have little bearing on reality? How are we to be the judges of our own pure interpretations? -Refiguring the Ordinary repositions the ideas of existentialism and begins at a departure from the binary of the self and other in Western philosophy, arguing that perhaps this dichotomy is a lie.Weiss relies on a wide range of philosophers, from the rather anti-femini