The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity

Evidence

In Rung III, ‘‘The Rung of Teaching,’’ which employs yoga practices, Malina and Beck write ‘‘every motion must find its source in the center of the actor’s body’’ (56). Here again, it is within a prime representation and enactment of this play’s utopian modernity that it moves toward postmodernity. Embodiment becomes a key focus and problematic in postmodernity, where the body is seen, especially in Foucauldian, queer, and feminist analyses, as the prime site of both the inscription of hegemonic power and also of potentialities of resistance. The ‘‘marked’’ body is also a location of particularity, the specificity of subjectivity embedded in particular histories of race, gender, class, nation, over against the abstract, universal, but always implicitly white-male-bourgeois-European, transparent subject of modernity. In literally making p-a-r-a-d-i-s-e out of particular bodies, so that the shape of each letter, and therefore of the word overall, depends on the shape and size of the bodies comprising it, Paradise Now announces this postmodern regime of the particularity of the marked body. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 549

Categorization

• DEFINE: Crisp definition of the ‘marked body’ concept and why it anchors postmodern thought.
• XREF: Ties directly to chapter 20’s claim that postmodernity extends modernity’s egalitarianism to subaltern others. — connects to: Postmodern theory holds that no one escapes culture’s ideological constructions — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 228; Postmodernity extends modernity’s egalitarianism to subaltern others — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 506; Postmodern subjectivity replaced the heroic vanguard self with shifting affinity coalitions — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 648 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Postmodernism replaces the autonomous work with the decentered text #corroborates (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 224
• Postmodern allegory is horizontal and relational rather than vertical and fixed #corroborates (0.75) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 392