Cultural phenomenology embodiment: agency, sexual difference, and illness

Abstract

The article presents the notion of corporeality, relating to the dimensions of agency, of sexual difference and sickness. The author comes from the phenomenological anthropology to perform what he calls a cultural and phenomenological analysis of the Self. He contrasts the notion of the body

as material object with the corporeality as flesh mutually shared, implicated and never completely anonymous. This notion of corporeality reframes the body as a source of the existence and location of the world experience. The article constructs a scheme of body-world relations and explore their implications for the concept of embodiment. Articulates the notion of agency since Merleau-Ponty, Bourdieu and Foucault and the notion of sexual difference from feminist theories in Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Maxine Sheets-Johnstone. In the final section the author completes the outline with a discussion of three diseases – phantom limb, chronic fatigue and environmental illness – as an illustration of different dynamics of embodiment.