Avowing that love awakens one’s attention to the material world and to one another, Corinne provides a theory for establishing human–nonhuman connection, the energizing and curative praxis of belonging with. The heroine’s thing therapy positively associates women with materiality and, while exercising her right to connect with things, she sustains her élan vital. This chapter argues that she harnesses her feminist thing theory to teach her lover to respect the female body’s integrity and rights and to challenge his repressive politics: If Oswald could belong with materiality by sensuously responding to things, he could remedy his commitment to abstraction and his nationalistic gender proscriptions. Diagnosing Oswald’s melancholy as also emerging from his identification with “modern” (post Renaissance) art, associated with Napoleon’s tyranny and a self-absorptive grief that paralyzes creative potential, Corinne offers a remedy: companionship with classical art. Her thing theory has political ramifications, for it provides a workshop for practicing an embodied cosmopolitanism that itself ameliorates nationalism’s intolerances.

This chapter examines how the Venus de Medici entered the historical storylines of eighteenth-century models of gender, and – once plundered by Napoleon and whisked to Paris – the narrative of artistic restoration and political liberty. The statue generated complex thing–human interactions, for viewers collapsing boundaries between marble and human flesh imagined the Venus as both a withdrawn ideal yet intimately connected to them: touching her, they measured her proportions and gauged her sexual “motives” while debating whether she met British standards of female modesty. Belinda, which alludes to the Venus, also engages in these activities as characters “measure” each other; the novel, however, incorporates those travelers’ debates about the Venus’s modesty, sexuality, and virtue to emancipate female characters from calculating standards that produce negative consequences such as racism and gender stereotyping. Embedded in Belinda, the Venus obliquely restores the right for Lady Delacour to her body and to invoke nonperfection and nonconformity as a just privilege.

With animal embodiment, the project of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature comes full circle: The opening selection of text on space and time end with twin terms – place and movement – and in animal embodiment we finally get the natural phenomenon that does justice to both. The animal body is the first physical body to have three properly distinguished dimensions, and it is only in virtue of those qualitative, organic dimensions that we can abstract away a three-dimensional Euclidean space in which such bodies are taken to appear and to move. Hegel divides his discussion of the animal into discussions of its formation, assimilation, and species-process, and the chapter adopts that categorization as its structure. As a first pass, it says that form (die Gestalt) gives us the special point 0 for time and the step from the plane to an enclosing surface for space; assimilation gives us the order of time and the step from line to plane for space; and the species process (Gattungsprozeß) gives us the linearity of time and the step from point to line for space. These combinations display the animal body as the spatio-temporal object par excellence, and thus the object by reference to which all spatiality and temporality is understood.

Chapter 1 offers a radical reinterpretation of the gender of Michael Psellos, one of Romanía’s most well-known scholars as well as one of few figures from the Middle Byzantine period to have received extensive gender analysis. The chapter starts with biographical information about his education and personal life. It continues with the role that learning played in his self-definition and his depiction of others, especially in his many encomia. It argues that, in his writings, education and learning could act as ‘masculine capital’, which, when accumulated, could be used to allow for less masculine behaviours in other areas of life, both propping up and subverting hegemonic ideals of physical strength. Finally, it considers the implications of this for Psellos’ work, from his descriptions of hunting and warfare to his emotional life.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

This chapter explores the perceptual acts modelled by John Clare’s poetry, especially in encounters with the more-than-human world. Rather than foregrounding the ways a perceiving ego shapes a landscape, Clare details situations and perspectives readers can imaginatively enter and emphasizes the ways that the situations themselves invite receptivity. He normalizes ecologically attuned modes of perception by presenting them as enabled by the places, plants, and animals his speakers encounter more than the speakers themselves. Focusing on poems that place speakers among or beneath birds and weeds, including ‘To an Insignificant Flower’, ‘The Fens’, and some shorter bird poems, Falke describes the poetic means through which Clare encourages epistemological humility and other-directedness. She then articulates a mode of reading Clare’s poetry based on these same perceptual habits.

• Practicing self-compassion – kindness towards ourselves, an understanding of our common humanity, and mindfulness – can be an important contributor to the development of a positive body image.

• There are many ways to practice self-care that extend beyond grooming practices and may include nurturing our social relationships.

• Examining what it is that adds meaning to our lives and working to enhance our eudaimonic well-being can also enhance our body image.

Embodiment is a key concept in the social sciences and has been particularly useful in discussions of the body, health, and disease. Embodiment allows us to connect the subjective experiences of the body, as well as its lived materiality, to broader social contexts. The concept also helps researchers make sense of the ways in which the body is inscribed with history, politics, and culture. This chapter explores the concept of embodiment in the social sciences and its potential use in DOHaD. We argue that it is important to integrate concepts/tools from the social sciences, in this case embodiment, as biosocial collaborations compel cross-disciplinary legibility and a shared vocabulary. Moreover, this integration of concepts and tools would allow DOHaD as a field to deepen awareness and understanding of the kind of influence environmental experiences can have on the development of health and disease over the lifecourse. We suggest that this deeper awareness and understanding achieved through employing the embodiment concept can make DOHaD research and interventions more socially just and socially sensitive.

This chapter analyzes the stepwise formation of the functional germ cell concept of sustainable mobility for elderly home care clients, following the principle of ascending from the abstract to the concrete. During a lengthy process of intervention research, a new instrument called mobility agreement was introduced to facilitate the inclusion of regular mobility exercises in home care visits and in the daily lives of the clients. In encounters between home care workers and their elderly clients, aimed at implementation of the mobility agreement, the new concept of mobility began to emerge. The simple action of standing up from the chair is the core of this concept. The formation and expansion of the germ cell took place primarily by means of bodily movements and sensations, supported by simple pictorial artifacts.

This chapter discusses how writing emerging out of Gay Liberation in the 1970s offered an alternative to the masculine heteronormativity that dominated the Australian literary tradition. Emphasised that the personal was political, it foregrounded private sensuality, an exploration of the everyday, and a critique of gay discrimination. The chapter traces the development of a diversifying community in the 1980s through writing collectives, anthologies, and journals. A broadening of the spectrum of LGBTQ+ poetry in the 1990s and 2000s was informed by queer understandings of sexuality. It saw lesbian writers test the limits of lyrical poetry and an era of mainstream popularity, as exemplified in Dorothy Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask. The chapter considers how LGBTQ+ poets of colour have critiqued ideas of national belonging and white subjecthood. It then discusses the exploration of embodiment, including the turn to autotheory by contemporary trans and genderqueer writers, resistance of ableist discourses, and the navigation of illness, such as AIDS, mental illness, and chronic pain.

Through close analyses of a wide range of Minoan animalian things, we have explored the specificity of their involvements in the experiences of people, and how those engagements contributed to the unique character of sociocultural life in the Aegean, on various levels. Here we draw out key points from across the foregoing analyses. Special attention has come to the objects’ inter-corporeal relationships with living humans and the connections that would have been realized through the objects’ particular qualities—connections with other animals, things, and spaces. Such relations were afforded through different dynamics, including bodily juxtaposition, cultivation of formal assonance, the sharing of specific features (e.g., a forward gaze), and embodiment with the same substances, as well as through similarities in size, composition (e.g., in friezes), and contextualization. Moreover, by working beyond an implicit focus on the design of the objects, to instead emphasize people’s actual experiences with them, we have opened the space for appreciating how both intended and unintended associations involving these complex things were in play together. We should view these not as alternative lenses on the objects, but as forces working concurrently, and upon one another, in the creative realizations that the animalian objects were.

The sociocultural spaces of the “Minoan” Aegean were teeming with animal bodies. Many of these animals were alive, but many were not—and never had been; the latter are our focus here. Realized across a range of media, such as zoomorphic vessels, frescoes, and seal stones, animals’ bodies took on a rich diversity of material and spatial qualities that could afford distinctive interactive experiences that the notion of “representations” fails to capture. By recognizing both biological and fabricated entities as real embodiments of animals, which could coexist and interact in Aegean spaces, the nature of our discussion changes. We see that the dynamics of representation were caught up in a much wider field of relationships involving these crafted bodies, which characterized their engagements with people. Doing so moves us beyond questions of signification and intentional design, and toward a fuller recognition of people’s actual experiences of animalian bodies. Looking closely at a variety of venues, ranging from palatial courts to a modest house bench, our focus thus can turn to how the world of animalian things was a crucial part of social life in Aegean spaces, and how direct interactions with these other animal bodies were central, yet often overlooked and minimized, components of human relations with nonhuman beasts.