Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-ttngx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-23T03:37:26.029Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Bodily Disorientation and Moral Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Ami Harbin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Neglect of the moral promise of disorientation is a persistent gap in even the most sophisticated philosophies of embodiment. In this article, I begin to correct this neglect by expanding our sense of the range and nature of disoriented experience and proposing new visions of disorientation as benefiting moral agency. Disorientations are experienced through complex interactions of corporeal, affective, and cognitive processes, and are characterized by feelings of shock, surprise, unease, and discomfort; felt disorientations almost always make us unsure of how to go on. I argue that experiences of disorientation can strengthen the moral agency of individuals. I begin by clarifying experiences of felt ease and orientation. I then characterize disoriented embodiment by investigating select experiences that often involve or accompany disorientation, focusing throughout on how disorientation prompts changes in motivation and action. I conclude by charting how disoriented embodiments can help individuals become better moral agents overall, in part by challenging norms that restrict embodiment and undermining dualistic conceptions of the self.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 27 , Issue 2 , Spring 2012 , pp. 261 - 280
Copyright
Copyright © 2012 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Babbitt, Susan E. 2001. Artless integrity: Moral imagination, agency, and stories. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield.Google Scholar
Bartky, Sandra. 1990. Femininity and domination: Studies in the phenomenology of oppression. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Brison, Susan J. 2002. Aftermath: Violence and the remaking of a self. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Calhoun, Cheshire. 2008. Losing one's self. In Practical identity and narrative agency, ed. Atkins, Kim and Mackenzie, Catriona. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cappello, Mary. 2007. Awkward: A detour. New York: Bellevue Literary Press.Google Scholar
Card, Claudia. 1996. The unnatural lottery. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Casey, Edward S. 1987. Remembering: A phenomenological study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Clare, Eli. 1999. Exile and pride: Disability, queerness, and liberation. Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press.Google Scholar
Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders text revision (DSM IV TR). 2000. Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing.Google Scholar
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1996. The souls of black folk. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. Black skin, white masks. New York: Grove Press.Google Scholar
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1994. Volatile bodies: Toward a corporeal feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row.Google Scholar
Heyes, Cressida. 2007. Self‐transformations: Foucault, ethics, and normalized bodies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Koggel, Christine. 2009. Agency and empowerment: Embodied realities in a globalized world. In Embodiment and agency, ed. Campbell, Sue, Meynell, Letitia and Sherwin, Sue. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
Lucretius. 1994. On the nature of the universe. Trans. Ronald E. Latham. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Lugones, María. 2003. Pilgrimages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Maclaren, Kym. 2009. Emotional metamorphoses: The role of others in becoming a subject. In Embodiment and agency, ed. Campbell, Sue, Meynell, Letitia and Sherwin, Sue. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
McWhorter, Ladelle. 1999. Bodies and pleasures: Foucault and the politics of sexual normalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Merleau‐Ponty, Maurice. 2008. Phenomenology of perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Meyers, Diana Tietjens. 2004. Being yourself: Essays on identity, action, and social life. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Meynell, Letitia. 2009. Introduction: Minding bodies. In Embodiment and agency, ed. Campbell, Sue, Meynell, Letitia and Sherwin, Sue. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
Nestle, Joan, ed. 2002. Genderqueer: Voices from beyond the sexual binary. New York: Alyson Books.Google Scholar
Salamon, Gayle. 2010. Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Scheman, Naomi. 1996. Feeling our way toward moral objectivity. In Minds and morals: essays on cognitive science and ethics, ed. May, Larry, Friedman, Marilyn and Clark, Andy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Servan‐Schreiber, David. 2009. Anti‐cancer: A new way of life. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Shotwell, Alexis. 2009. A knowing that resided in my bones: Sensuous embodiment and trans social movement. In Embodiment and agency, ed. Campbell, Sue, Meynell, Letitia and Sherwin, Sue. University Park, Pa.: Penn State University Press.Google Scholar
Shrage, Laurie, ed. 2009. You've changed: Sex reassignment and personal identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Sokolowski, Robert. 2008. Phenomenology of the human person. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charles. 1989. Embodied agency. In Merleau‐Ponty: Critical essays, ed. Pietersma, Henry. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America.Google Scholar
Tronto, Joan C. 1994. Moral boundaries: A political argument for an ethic of care. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining transgender: An ethnography of a category. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Walker, Margaret Urban. 2007. Moral understandings: A feminist study in ethics, 2d edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weiss, Gail. 1999. Body images: Embodiment as intercorporeality. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. 2005. On female body experience: “Throwing like a girl” and other essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar