Date: Thu, 22 Jan 1998 13:25:22 -0500
From: Reg Lilly <rlilly-AT-scott.skidmore.edu>
Subject: PLC: CFP: Body as Source and Site of Argument


THE BODY AS SOURCE AND SITE OF ARGUMENT
The journal Argumentation & Advocacy calls for essays for a special issue
titled "The Body as Source and Site of Argument.

We experience our bodies in incongruous ways.  The privacy of our sensations,
the personal awareness derived from physical acts, the joys and pleasures
aroused through intimate contact with other bodies teach us
profound lessons about our personal identity and self-sufficiency.  We
experience our own body in ways that are unavailable to the inspection of
others.  Our pain or ecstasy is our own and known only second hand to those with
whom we share its secrets.  But our bodies also are in the world.  Like Adam and
Eve after the fall, we encounter strange and unlike things.  Beyond the gates of
our privacy we become aware of our flaws and experience rebukefor our personal
insufficiency; our innocence is lost and we experience shame in our nakedness.
        The incongruity between personal lessons of self-sufficiency and public
ones of insufficiency is transferred to the tension between domination and
civilization in the civic realm.  There we attempt to shape an arena that can
protect us from our own weaknesses and those of others but also can accommodate
our desire to turn toward those others and be open to experiencing them as the
Other.  This public experience of the body, including the most intimate aspects
of its private contact with other bodies, is part of a larger historical and
cultural dialogue on the body. The voices engaged in this conversation speak in
many arenas:  the pulpit and confessional, medical practice, psychotherapy,
schools, the legislative assembly and the courts, penal institutions, political
practices, urban and architectural design, fashion design, literature and the
arts, and of course, the streets.  These discursive arenas transform the
personal and private experiences of the body into an object of public
expression, and sometimes into performances that are themselves public
expressions.  As they acquire official status, whether by virtue of trust (as in
the efficacy of medical practice), faith (as in the redemptive force of
religion), law (as in the authority of the state to regulate and the penal
system to punish), instituional practices (as in the imposition of discipline by
the educational system) or ballot, they speak a discourse of power in which the
individual's self-sufficiency is made the object of protection and regulation. 
In sum, our bodies are contestive sites but also sources of argument.  These and
other topics are possible areas of discussion on the body as a source and form
of argument.

Questions?  Contact Guest Editor Gerard Hauser at hauserg-AT-spot.colorado.edu or
303/492-6756 or Edward Schiappa at schia001-AT-gold.tc.umn.edu or 612/624-2808. 
Three copies of the completed papers must be submitted by
September 15, 1998 to Gerard Hauser, Communication Department, CB270, University
of Colorado at Boulder, Boulder, CO 80309-0270.  Consult the journal for formal
requirements.


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