The (in)visible scar. Representation of the body in blogs by women with breast cancer

In this paper we analyze the representation of the body in blogs by women with breast cancer. Taking into account both texts and images, we study the representation of the body on the basis of the body problems proposed by Frank (1995): control, body-relatedness, other-relatedness and desire. In the blogs studied we find a desiring and dyadic body, which is understood as part of a network of affection and care. The diagnosis of cancer can generate both dissociation, when the body is experienced as a threat, and association, a wish to be connected to it. In relation to control, a clear will of predictability is observed but traces of assumption of contingency also appear.

The body, the device, the sleepwalkers. On the spinozian uses of experience as a critics of the cartesian concept of freedom

In this paper I discuss one of the most significant strategies in Spinoza’s theoretical approach against those that entrave its understanding in a very powerful way. As well as Descartes, Spinoza uses the inmediate or unreflexive experience for developing his conception of free will or the distinction between body and soul, but he does so in order to prove that the experience is useful to demonstrate some purely anti-Cartesian thesis that express the core principles of Spinozism.

Light-color and body-mass. The subjectivity of the Argentinean nation, according to the painting of Pío Collivadino

Pío Collivadino was a highly recognized painter in life, occupying the most important charges in the artistic field and receiving awards in his country and abroad, which turned him into an inescapable reference of young Argentinean artists who earned recognition throughout the twentieth century. Why, then, with the time, his work began to fall to the wayside? In response to this question, the present article, based on the analysis of the work of that artist, proposes to problematize the notion of subjectivity, both in its individual dimension and its national character, underlining the role that the figure of the artist meets for its formation. Developing the concepts of light-color and body-mass, from Collivadino painting, this article will attempt to explain the relation between the emergence of an Argentinean subjectivity, at the beginning of 20th century, and the art, not only at the level of the issues addressed, but, especially, taking into consideration its formal characteristics.

‘Close as a kiss’: Gyn/Affection in Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s novella The Penelopiad (2005) seemingly celebrates Penelope’s agency in opposition to Homer’s myth in The Odyssey. However, the twelve murdered maids steal the book to suggest the possibility of what Janice Raymond calls gyn/affection, a female bonding based on the logic of emotion that, in Atwood’s revision, verges on Kristevan abjection, the sinister and the fantastic, and serves a cathartic effect not only in the maids but also in the reader. This essay aims to question the generally accepted empowerment of Atwood’s Penelope and celebrates the murdered maids as the locus of emotion, where marginal aspects of gender and class merge to weave a powerful metaphorical tapestry of popular and traditionally feminized literary genres that, in plunging into and embracing the semiotic realm, ultimately solidify into an eclectic but compact alternative tradition of women’s writing and myth-making.