Snippets

Embodiment. The Erstwhile Medievalist informed me that, through no fault of my own, I cause him irritation because my actions, questions, and reminders embody for him the gnats of obligation swarming his head. It's clear enough for me now that general use of the term embody indicates giving form to. It's not clear to me what it means to be a person in a body. Is a person a soul that is given form by being in a body? Is a person some admixture of soul and body? We covered this in my modern philosophical questions class, spring 2005. (But it was a survey, full of indifferent twenty-year-olds, and I was working fulltime and trying to figure out whether marrying the Erstwhile Medievalist, or marrying at all, would result in a life of oppression and squelching... So I didn't give the thing my whole attention.)

From embodiment to gender... (geez, give it a rest, will ya? Me and Myself sometimes say to I.) What does it mean to be embodied not just person, but female, or male? This question formed as I realized that discussions of gender I've encountered run immediately to questions of gender relations and not at all to gender as such. (Note to self, rescue The Woman in the Body from its dust-gathering spot on my bookshelf.)