Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism, and Feminism

Explores the dynamic relationship between bodies and the world around
them.

What if we lived across and through our skins as much as we
do within them? According to Shannon Sullivan, the notion of bodies in transaction
with their social, political, cultural, and physical surroundings is not new. Early
in the 20th century, John Dewey elaborated human existence as a set of patterns of
behavior or actions shaped by the environment. Underscoring the continued relevance
of his thought, Sullivan brings Dewey into conversation with Continental
philosophers -- Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty -- and feminist philosophers -- Butler
and Harding -- to expand thinking about the body. Emphasizing topics such as the
role of habit, the discursivity of bodies, communication and meaning, personal and
cultural structures of gender, the improvement of bodily experience, and
understandings of truth and objectivity, Living Across and Through Skins
acknowledges the importance of the body's experience without placing it in
opposition to psychological, cultural, and social aspects of human life. By focusing
on what bodies do, rather than what they are, Sullivan prompts a closer look at
concrete, physical transactions that might be changed to improve human experiences
of the world.