Discourse, The Body, and Identity

How is the body articulated in language and discourse? How is the body articulated as discourse? How do individuals and the media represent and define relationships between the body and selves? The eleven new chapters in this book explore how 'discourses of the body' - in talk, text and other semiotics - sustain moral, ideological and practical positions. Using a wide range of data from both private and public contexts, Discourse, the Body and Identity brings different forms of linguistic and multi-modal analysis to bear on these questions. It draws on and develops concepts and methods from sociolinguistics, sociology, social psychology and cultural theory. Together, these approaches explore body representations and embodied action for the purposes of, for example, instruction, display, and personal story telling. The volume brings together research on representations of bodily ageing, gendered bodies, bodies at risk, ill and disabled bodies, but also bodies at play and narcissistic body.