More Encumbrance than Enjoyment

Abstract

This volume joins together eight heterogeneous essays by women under the theme “enjoyment and encumbrance of the body.” All of the contributions belong within the spectrum of psychological reflection; the themes range from sports, cooking and eating, and beauty, to the process of psychoanalysis, experimental psychology, and free-association based on clinical practice. The thread throughout the contributions remains indiscernible and thus the multiplicity seems arbitrary. And while the contributions vary, so too their quality. Unfortunately, some of the articles do not go beyond the uncritical compilation of other works and the majority of the essays barely make reference to the broad and long institutionalized field of research on the body in both social and cultural studies. However, some of the essays do offer interesting empirical insights that inspire the reader to reflect further and a select few are so wide-ranging that the reader can utilize the material for continued contemplation and research. Overall, academic scholars of (female) bodies, be they “beginners” or more “advanced,” will not enjoy reading the essays in this book, but rather—with few exceptions, which, it fairs mentioning, have already been published elsewhere—find reading an encumbrance. What makes the book even more infuriating and everything but argumentatively convincing is that some of the texts engage in more or less explicitly articulated bashing of feminism and women’s studies.