Deserted Medieval Village of Bystřec: On Settlements XX, XXI and XXII Deserted at the End of the 13th Century and New Data about the Origin of the Village.
This text traces the development and implications of strategies of remembering the body in feminist theory, after what could be termed the somaphobia of early second-wave scholarship that saw attention to bodily matters as a potential point of ambush by hostile commentators. In reinstating the corporeal, however, all the conventional tropes of modernism that have both insisted on a conceptual split between mind and body, and recognised only one form of ‘proper’ embodiment, have been critiqued in the light of postmodernist modes of thought. The turn away from the rigid binaries and categories characteristic of the dominant ways of thinking – whether in the humanities or sciences – has mobilised not simply the emergence of a feminist phenomenology of embodiment, but a growing appreciation of the place of the sciences in understanding the materiality of the body. At the same time, the extension of multiple challenging bioscientific technologies directed to the body and its practices indicates that the recovery of fleshiness is not a final step.