Embodying the Monster

My long term research interests have focused on the body and particularly on the notion of the anomalous body, whether that relates to sex and gender, to disability, to ageing, or to cyborgs. At present I am working on an international project exploring the phenomenology of heart transplant recipients. My approach has always been broadly postmodernist - or at least poststructuralist - and strongly influenced by the ongoing development of feminist theory and of postconventional bioethics. For many years I have done collaborative work on disability, and the area of Critical Disability Studies has more recently become a sharper focus of research. I have recently finished a new book (Dangerous Discourses) which brings together many of my existing interests as well as extending them into legal theory, queer theory and even psychoanalysis. I hope that any students (or intending students) pursuing dissertations or theses in any of those fields will get in contact.

`Shildrick′s study stands out among postmodern analyses of the body by refusing to abandon the fleshiness of cultural life. The scope of this book is impressive and its analysis of "monstrous corporeality" and "vulnerability" as an inalienable counterpart of what it is to be human culminates in a posthumanis ethics of and for the body that will be the subject of debate among body theorists, feminists and cultural analysts′ - Chris Shilling, University of Portsmouth

• Introduction Monsters, Marvels and Meanings Monstering the (M)OtherThe Self′s Clean and Proper BodyContagious Encounters and the Ethics of RiskLevinas and Vulnerable BecomingThe Relational Economy of TouchWelcoming the Monstrous Arrivant