Western metaphysical dualism drives the erasure of the body in academic teaching

Evidence

Professors rarely speak of the place of eros or the erotic in our classrooms. Trained in the philosophical context of Western metaphysical dualism, many of us have accepted the notion that there is a split between the body and the mind. Believing this, individuals enter the classroom to teach as though only the mind is present, and not the body. To call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professorial elders, who have been usually white and male. But our nonwhite elders were just as eager to deny the body. The predominantly black college has always been a bastion of repression. The public world of institutional learning was a site where the body had to be erased, go unnoticed. — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress, 381

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Feminist pedagogy’s refusal of the mind-body split makes Women’s Studies subversive — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 386; Physical classroom movement dismantles the desk’s implied hierarchy of truth — bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as…, 259; Mind-body dualism naturally prepares minds to accept the immortal soul — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 72 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Mind-body dualism naturally prepares minds to accept the immortal soul #expands (0.75) — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 72
• The body cannot be simultaneously an object and the subject that reveals the world #complicates (0.75) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 826
• The utopian attack on dualism pivoted into postmodern philosophy #expands (0.72) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 685
• Hegel dissolves subject-object dualism by starting before the separation occurs #complicates (0.72) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 102
• The particular marked body replaces the abstract universal subject in postmodernity #qualifies (0.72) — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 549