Gender, Culture, and Physicality Paradoxes and Taboos

Although a plethora of scholarship analyzes gender dynamics, this book explores the paradoxes and taboos associated with the gendered meanings given to human bodies in action, also known as physicality. Physicality provides a particularly clear playing space for developing concepts of gender identity, structures, and cultural meanings. Grappling with gender-based paradoxes and questioning gendered taboos, two goals animate this book: to reveal how gender continues to be enacted in ways that dehumanize women and men, and to stimulate thinking and action toward a fuller realization of human potential and partnership. Operating from an ethic of care, in which all people are understood as being created equal, Helen M. Sterk and Annelies Knoppers argue that as long as women and all that is associated with them are devalued, cultural practices will remain implicitly gendered and humanity itself, reduced.

Helen M. Sterk is professor and chair of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College. Annelies Knoppers is professor in the Department of Governance and Organization Studies and in the Department of Pedagogy and Educational Sciences at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands.