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In times like these, a new ethico-political ideal is required to contest the adequacy of dominant understandings of social interaction as matters of choice and rational decision-making and in contesting these understandings encourage us to imagine social alternatives. We wish to make a contribution to this project of expanding the universe of political discourse as a means to invigorating ethico-political debate. A range of existing vocabularies — the languages of trust (and relatedly respect), care and associated concepts, including corporeal generosity — are currently put forward as the means to contest the dominance of neo-liberal premises about `atomistic individualism'. While many of these accounts focus on nation-states, others attend to an emerging global community. Nevertheless, we have some reservations about these languages and their premises. In our view they tend frequently to locate the `problem' in the character of citizens. We also make the case that such languages and their associated political agendas reinstate aspects of social hierarchy that mimic neo-liberal conceptions of autonomous individualism. Central to our critique is the claim that the problematic aspects of these existing languages of (inter)connection are due to an attenuated understanding of embodiment and an inadequate dialogue between the socio-political and embodiment. It is this inadequate dialogue we wish to redress. In this paper we offer a new ethical ideal called `social flesh' to ground an alternative politics for reconfiguring exploitative social relations. As an ethico-political starting point, `social flesh' highlights human embodied interdependence and in the process configures a new, more transformative political vision. It draws attention to shared embodied reliance, mutual reliance, of people across the globe on social space, infrastructure and resources. Insistence upon this shared reliance underpins a profoundly levelling perspective, a radical politics.

This article explores the relationship between netizens and the Chinese Communist Party by investigating examples of "flesh searches" targeting corrupt officials. Case studies link the initiative of netizens and the reaction of the Chinese state to the pattern of management of social space in contemporary China.

I give an argument for veganism by drawing parallels between a) bestiality and animal fighting, and b) animal product consumption. Attempts to draw principled distinctions between the practices fail. The wrong-making features of bestiality and animal fighting are also found in animal product consumption. These parallels give us new insight into why popular objections to veganism, such as the Inefficacy Argument, are inadequate. Because it is often difficult to enact significant life changes, I hope that seeing the parallels between animal product consumption and acts we are already so strongly motivated to avoid can help us abstain from animal products.

The past decades have witnessed a surge of sociological interest in the body. From the focal point of aesthetic investment, political regulation and moral anxiety, to a means of redefining traditional conceptions of agency and identity, the body has been cast in a wide variety of sociological roles. However, there is one topic that proves conspicuously absent from this burgeoning literature on the body, namely its role in the everyday (re)production of class-boundaries. Distinctions in the Flesh aims to fill that void by showing that the way individuals perceive, use and manage their bodies is fundamentally intertwined with their social position and trajectory. Drawing on a wide array of survey-data - from food-preferences to sporting-practices and from weight-concern to tastes in clothing - this book shows how bodies not only function as key markers of class-differences, but also help to naturalize and legitimize such differences. Along the way, it scrutinizes popular notions like the obesity epidemic', questions the role of the media' in shaping the way people judge their bodies and sheds doubt on sociological narratives that cast the body as a malleable object that is increasingly open to individual control and reflexive management. This book will be of interest to scholars of class, lifestyle and identity, but also to social epidemiologists, health professionals and anyone interested in the way that social inequalities become, quite literally, inscribed in the body.

Liminality is an anthropological concept that has been influential in contemporary social studies. This article is written from an organisation culture and studies perspective wherein liminality has been seen: (i) as something that must be controlled, (ii) as a utopian call to creativity, and (iii) as a dystopian entrapment. Liminality has to do with whether the study of practice has been excessively cognitive whereby the human is reduced to concepts of control, efficiency and profit; and whereby the soma (Gr.) of the physical body is marginalised as mind, spirit, and ideation are prioritised. Thus, what of sarx (Gr.) or the flesh of existence (see Merleau-Ponty, Klossowski)? In this article we explore liminality evaluating its relationship to bodily-ness / bodyless-ness, affect and text. We start with a discussion of liminality as originated by the anthropologists van Gennep and Turner, and as pushed aside by Weick, but lionised as creativity by Kostera, and denounced as stagnation by Szakolczai. This is followed by an auto-ethnographic case study. The case study points to the unheimisch2of liminality which we examine via Pierre Klossowski's manifoldness. Realising that text about liminality and its embodiment easily becomes paradoxical (unembodied and affectless), we present a non-textual (i.e., not written) visual reaction to the case; again, in the spirit of Klossowski; and we conclude with reflections co-inspired by Maurice Merlau-Ponty on the physical affectivity of liminality.

Drawing on contemporary trans* scholarship, I highlight an incorporeal, affective dimension of trans* embodiment, which I argue operates nonlinearly, enmeshing a past-present-future becoming. I show that the dynamic movement underlying both trans* and matter suggests their mutual imbrication—a mutual imbrication that trans*es materiality. Through the concept of autopoiesis, or the ability of systems to self-organise, I link trans*ed materiality at the micro level (cellular and quantum) to the social processes of trans* assemblages. Autopoiesis emerges as an affective realm, a dimension of trans*ed materiality and a process of trans* assemblages, all of which are integral in the production of space and time. As trans* bodies materialise, they create unique temporal embodiments that challenge universal frameworks of chronological time, highlight the nonlinear resonation of matter and enmesh past-present-future in open-ended becomings. The resulting ontogenetic, 'involutionary' processes of creative evolution produce unique temporalities that form the basis of new embodiments, new subjectivities, and new potentials for existence. As autopoietic processes produce new entities, the uniqueness of each becoming-trans* transforms the spatial and temporal context in which the becomings occur. Keeping in mind that becoming is never complete, I conclude that trans* temporalities are nonlinear, affective processes involved in the production of becoming-trans*. Trans* temporalities are, thus, entangled in an open-ended past-present-future.

Racism, collective violence, sickness, environmental catastrophe, body obsession, greed, and accelerated life concern everyone. They are also the subject matter of this book. Here, however, they are not viewed as social problems to be solved by technical experts. Instead, they are viewed as products of the joint transference of aspects of ourselves onto objects independent of ourselves

This book focuses on the hyper-scripturalization (or the persistent degradation) of Black flesh, with the phenomenon of masquerade conceptualized as analytical wedge that makes a compelling case for seeing how our ongoing modern realities, with mixed and too often devastating consequences, are constructed.

This article investigates the role of state-nationalist discourse in the rise of online nationalism by looking at case studies of nationalist flesh searches. Nationalist flesh searches target those seen as traitorous, anti-China or anti-government, and expose the victims' private information as well as their alleged crimes, to the online public. Through examination of this activity, the study contextualizes the rise of online nationalism within the historical and political context of the Party's renewed emphasis on nationalism in education and state media, and the role that this state-nationalism plays in social management. Case studies follow the development of nationalist flesh searches, examining the motivations, language and goals of these online nationalists, as well as the actions of those targeted and the role, if any, of the state and the state media. (J Contemp China /GIGA)

Discusses Ann Petry's short story, "Like a Winding Sheet" (1946), in the context of black feminist literary theory, exploring the possibility of developing a reading strategy that does not replicate the effacement of black women's subjectivities. Petry's story is read as a delineation of the impossible position of black female flesh in US cultural discourse; the black female subject is erased & simultaneously constructed as ungendered flesh. It is suggested that black feminist literary criticism has failed to create a vocabulary that speaks to the specificity & diversity of African American women's experiences in the US. Instead, it has worked against the available cultural categories to reduce the complexity of black female lives to the status of incoherent differences. Merely being heard will not solve the problem of black female unrepresentability; a theorization of the discursive conditions that allow complex subjects to be rendered as singular social agents is advocated. D. M. Smith

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