The wheelchair is an unmistakeable sign of bodily damage. It is the universal symbol of disability. How then do wheelchair users feel about themselves? How do they manage their relationship with others? How do people maintain a satisfactory self-image in the face of the highly visible chair and its associated symbolism? Some people will always see the wheelchair as a tool, just like any other piece of equipment that they may use to get a job done. However, for other people, wheelchair is more than just a tool; it becomes embodied, it becomes a part of them.

This study explores women’s experiences of sex with men. It is based on qualitative data collected from eighteen life history interviews. Such an approach provides means for examining women’s sexual experiences over time. The study finds that women give meaning to their sexual experiences through two main discursive representations: the passive, “proper” and sexually obliging girlfriend or wife, and the active and “sexually equal” woman. However, these representations do not capture the entirety of women’s sexual experiences. The life history analysis demonstrates that women are not simply inscribed by discourse. Rather, they are embodied beings actively engaged in pursuing sexual identities. Central to the process is a relationship between the practice of sex and self-reflexivity over time. Finally, the study demonstrates how the process of gaining sexual subjectivity is shaped by the material conditions of women’s lives. For instance, the praxeological circumstances of women’s class or race are powerful in recasting discourses of feminine sexuality, the meanings women ascribe to them, their access to broader sexual experiences, and the kinds of relationships they have with their male partners.

This thesis explores how law is performed in daily life through physical acts. I propose that the body expresses, generates and is intertwined with an understanding of legal normativity. That is to say that law is developed through embodied acts of communication. The thesis, which takes the form of a website, provides a lens through which to see how corporeality shapes our legal landscape. I use text, video and live performance to propose ways to engage with this landscape. I demonstrate that in even the most banal gestures there is a microcosm of norm generation and reproduction processes that can be highlighted by paying closer attention to our daily life practices.

One of the primary images for ecclesiology is Paul's "body of Christ" metaphor. The contemporary church, as the body of Christ, sometimes struggles with its sense of identity and mission as well as with its relationship with other social bodies in the world. This study examines the intersection of ecclesiology, disability, embodiment, and liturgy and offers possibilities for developing a general ecclesiology of disability that is grounded in human embodiment and embodied practices. The interconnections between disability theory and theology are explored, followed by an examination of the "body of Christ" metaphor, starting with Paul's context and continuing with an analysis of how the metaphor functions linguistically. A review of how body theology developed and functioned in church history is presented, and then consideration is given to how the work of theologians such as Louis-Marie Chauvet and Edward Schillebeeckx is grounded in a theology of the body. A brief history of ecclesiology is followed by an assessment of the embodied ecclesiology of Chauvet, Schillebeeckx, John Howard Yoder, and Stanley Hauerwas. The relationship among embodiment, liturgy, and Christian formation is probed using the work of Don Saliers, Gordon Lathrop, and James K. A. Smith. Finally, principles are proposed that answer the question, "What would it mean for the church to be a disabled body?" The intention of these principles is to help churches dis-able those beliefs and practices that keep them from being the message of the kingdom of God and from embodying the new social reality of the gospel that challenges the values of other social bodies in the world. / 2017-05-30T00:00:00Z

Networked Public Spaces: An Investigation into Virtual Embodiment is an exploration of issues surrounding networked public spaces in relation to three artworks created by the author between 1995 to 2000: Virtual Concrete, (1995); Bodies© Incorporated (1996-2000); and Datamining Bodies (initiated in 2000). All three works have several key things in common: each exists on the Internet; each is conceptually connected to the idea of online identity and virtual embodiment, and each required extensive research to inform and inspire the creative practice. The projects are presented within three main sections, each of which attempts to link personal experience and history to a larger cultural context within which the works were produced. The first section, "Breaking with Tradition," provides an overview of historical events that have influenced the changing relationship between artist and audience and argues that the foundations for networked art were laid largely by conceptual artists working during the 1960s and 1970s. The second section, "Distributed Identity," examines the emergence of identity in online public spaces, focusing specifically on issues surrounding the appropriation and use of the term "avatar," and the current cultural preoccupation with databasing and archiving. The third and final section, "Visualizing the Invisible," explores the various efforts to map cyberspace, particularly paying attention to the implicit intersection of network data visualisations and biological systems, and the popular trend toward developing more "intelligent" networks through use of autonomous agents.

In 2009 five avatar-themed films were released, one of which became the highest grossing film to date, signaling that in addition to their popularity in videogames and virtual worlds, avatars are culturally salient figures which demand scholarly attention. Avatars, virtual environments, and user behavior have evolved significantly since virtual reality captured public and academic attention at the close of the twentieth century, and this dissertation is an attempt to theorize the avatar in contemporary digital culture. By interlacing new media philosophy and analyses of cinematic texts I situate the avatar at the nexus between digital images and interactive bodies, with implications for both cinema and virtual environments. Avatarial interfaces position users in an embodiment of connections which in some ways evokes the cyborg body, but the avatar as a theoretical figure places greater stress on the relation between human embodiment and (digital) images, as well as suggesting a move from cyborg fragmentation toward an avatarial gestalt. Avatars are also fruitful bodies for thinking through agency and gender in contemporary society, and engaging the lost `body' of the picture as film has been supplanted by digital imagery. In this regard, virtuality, as a conceptual state pertaining to images, embodiment, technology, and philosophy, serves as the connective theoretical tissue linking bodies and images. Ultimately, in this dissertation I employ the avatar in an exploration of the ways in which we are already virtual, and how we have become avatarial in our own skin.

Our contemporary culture is the product of enlightenment movements that have produced a discursive mode that favors skepticism, abstraction, and a mistrust of the body. This crisis of meaning has produced subjects that have lost the capacity for convincing symbolic exchanges. This project aims to reveal the vital importance of the imaginary for our possibilities of community, culture, and connectedness. I will use the work of Julia Kristeva to explain how we benefit from a symbolic that is supported by a robust and dynamic imaginary that springs from our embodied life. My thesis is that the foundation of the imaginary is best conceived as acoustical rather than visual. The contemporary experience that best recovers these representational capacities is found in our making, hearing, and sharing music. The current crisis of meaning can be ameliorated and subjectivity can be restored when aesthetic experiences and artistic practices rehabilitate the semiotic body as a source of meaning.

This thesis elaborates a notion of Bergsonian personhood that is particularly well suited for understanding the corporate person. Personalists have contributed much to the study of personhood, but they also fail to fully embrace the image of the embodied person offered by Bergson, from which their work appears to emerge. My concern for freedom is part of what animates this study, but I am not framing a new theory of freedom. Rather, I am trying to bring a broader conception of what freedom means to bear on the subject of personhood. To this end, I present the work of Bergson. I distinguish the terms ‘self’ and ‘person,’ defending self as being more properly outlined by the subjective and fleeting nature of the individual. Then, I discuss Bergson’s connections to personalism, with particular attention to the tradition that grew out of Boston University at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, I give a Bergsonian account of personhood that emphasizes the self’s freedom of creative expression, richly connected to its environment, which is elaborated over time in a movement of becoming personal. I make the case that Bergson’s treatments of self and person greatly aid our investigations into personhood socially, legally, and philosophically.

Karate is a sensuous martial art-come-sporting practice. Through a combinations of tacit exchanges of kicks and punches, sweaty touches, sweaty smells, aggressive shouts, communal laughs and helping tweaks of the body karate practitioners come to develop their practice, know their body and one-another, and assert their status in the karate hall. As a combative bodily practice, karate replicates an imagined, and often real, source of men’s power over, and distinction from, women. Yet in practice karate is an arena where women and men spar, sweat, and laugh together whereby, through inter-bodily, sensory, interactions, women can, and often do, out perform men. As such, karate presents a fruitful arena for exploring the sensory formation of gendered relations and embodiments of gender. Despite the integral role of the body and the senses to embodied participation in sport, and indeed in our gendered performances of self and distributions/assertions of power between women and men, exploration of the role of the senses in our sporting and gendered embodiment is largely absent from existing literature. This thesis argues that to understand gendered embodiment within karate requires reflection to these multidimensional, multi-sensory threads spun between sportsmen and women in embodied play. Building a sensory ethnographic framework for conducting the research, data was gathered from 9 months of ‘sensuous participation’ at 3 karate clubs engaging in mixed-sex and a women-only classes, 6 photo-elicitation interviews and 11 semi-structured interviews with women and men from across the three clubs, and reflections from my own embodied history as a karate athlete. The findings suggest that in both mixed-sex and women-only classes karate practice could ‘undo’ conventional performances of gender, and in turn gendered embodiments, through asking its participants to engage in a range of sensory bodily motions that are conventionally seen as masculine – such as combative movements and aggression – and feminine – such as control, elegance, and artistic performance. These embodied ways of being held magnified gender subversive potential in mixed-sex karate practice whereby ideas of men’s inherent superiority in sport could be challenged, and ideas of distinction between women and men could be challenged. Recognition of similarity as karate practitioners through shared physical engagements side-lined the importance of gender to practitioners embodiment. Together the findings of this thesis point towards the role of the minute, mundane, and thus often overlooked or unconscious elements of our bodily practice in ‘naturalising’, reproducing, or subverting gendered arrangements of power. In this way, this thesis contributes to sociological understandings of both embodiment and gender.

Embodied learning is a holistic approach to education that takes into consideration the inclusion of the body in learning, students’ awareness of self, and their connection with place and those around them. The current study sought to uncover ways in which elementary school teachers in British Columbia were adapting classroom spaces to engage student bodies in learning process. Two teachers from different regions of the province were interviewed about their experiences with embodied learning. Physical hurdles such as the restrictive nature of the space within which they worked, and systemic hurdles such as student / teacher expectations about teaching and learning experiences and relationships, assessment and pedagogy practices, and a lack of clarity about the purpose of education were identified as challenges that teachers hoping to embrace embodied learning would have to overcome. / Graduate