Refiguring the Ordinary

If social, political, and material transformation is to have a lasting impact on individuals and society, it must be integrated within ordinary experience. Refiguring the Ordinary examines the ways in which individuals' bodies, habits, environments, and abilities function as horizons that underpin their understandings of the ordinary. These features of experience, according to Gail Weiss, are never neutral, but are always affected by gender, race, social class, ethnicity, nationality, and perceptions of bodily normality. While no two people will experience the ordinary in exactly the same way, the multiplicities, possibilities, overlaps, and limitations of day-to-day horizons are always intersubjectively constituted. Weiss turns her attention to changing the conditions and experiences of oppression from ordinary to extraordinary. This book is an impressive phenomenological, feminist reading of the complexities of human experience.

--M. V. Marder

Author: Gail Weiss
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 07/02/2008
Pages: 264
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.93lbs
Size: 9.11h x 6.26w x 0.76d
ISBN: 9780253219893

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2009

About the Author

Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Human Sciences graduate program at The George Washington University. She is author of Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Merleau-Ponty.