Sander L. Gilman. Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture

Stand Up Straight! A History of Posture is a book on the history of the body, and in Sander L. Gilman’s expansive oeuvre, the body makes a significant theme. Over the past forty years, he has made interventions, among others, in the history of health, illness, madness, sexuality, race, gender, the Jewish body, beauty, and obesity. All these studies speak to the productivity and stimulating imagination of the author. They also speak to the fragmentary nature of the theme. There is no baseline narrative of the history of the body. Not even Alain Corbin, Jean-Jacques Courtine, and Georges Vigarello’s three-volume Histoire du corps (2005–2006) succeeds in capturing it all. Rather than a topic or field of research, the body seems to be a canvas for a wide and wild variety of historical investigations in dance, sports, gender, sexuality, medicine, race, and so forth. Gilman is fully aware of this. He...

Aesthetics · Art · Beauty · Dance · Expansive · Human sexuality · Literature · Narrative · Psychoanalysis · Sander · Sociology · Theme (computing) · French Historical and Cultural Studies · Gender Studies · Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Psychology