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Reviewed by:
  • Refiguring the Ordinary
  • Ann V. Murphy
Gail Weiss Refiguring the Ordinary Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008, 264 pp. ISBN 978-0-253-21989-3

In Refiguring the Ordinary, Gail Weiss advances a trajectory of thought begun in Body Images (Routledge 1999), where she stressed the social, ethical, and political dimensions of embodiment. In this earlier work, Weiss brought resources from feminist theory to bear on Merleau-Ponty and Schilder's account of the body image, or corporeal schema, a figure that illuminates the way in which the contours of the body are prereflectively drawn in relation to the world and to others. In this sense, the body image is neither conscious nor individualistic, but "an agency that has its own memory, habits, and horizons of experience" and that is permeated by one's being with others (BI, 3). The focus in Refiguring the Ordinary moves to consider the ways in which our embodied self-understanding is radically bound to a horizon of ordinary everyday concern, and so looks to the ordinary itself for some insight into how we conceive of social, ethical, and political experience. Weiss is known for her work on the ways in which sex, gender, and disability inform bodily habit and comportment. This interest in habit is sustained in Refiguring the Ordinary through an exploration of "the less visible but no less pervasive roles race, gender, class, ethnicity, and ability collectively play in structuring the meaning of everyday experience" (2).

The title of the text is particularly fitting not only because it designates the subject matter, but also because it reflexively describes its own position in [End Page 257] Weiss's body of work, for here she returns to some themes with which she has been preoccupied since the first book, but does so with a new agenda in mind, and with different resources. Weiss is here refiguring certain themes that have always grounded her theoretical orientation. Although engaging a theme with which she has been preoccupied throughout her writings, Refiguring the Ordinary is remarkable for the sheer variety of resources that are brought to bear in the course of the book, resources drawn from various disciplines, including philosophy, literature and literary theory, cultural studies, and disability studies. The interdisciplinary tenor of the text is engaging and provocative. Indeed, one of the nicest things about Weiss's writing is her ability to move between classical phenomenological analysis and contemporary political and cultural debates with great ease, compromising neither, but letting each speak to the other in ways both meaningful and suggestive.

While Refiguring the Ordinary can in many ways be read as furthering the analyses of intersubjective and bodily habit that were begun in Body Images, the more recent text is noteworthy for bringing a remarkable collection of authors into dialogue, a group that extends well beyond the "usual suspects" and includes not only Merleau-Ponty, but Bourdieu, Deleuze, James, Proust, and Diprose. The innovative ways in which Weiss brings these thinkers into conversation is one of the more provocative dimensions of this text. In one chapter, Husserl's mediations on experiential horizons are brought into dialogue with Robert Gooding Williams's discussion of the Rodney King incident and the subsequent riots in Los Angeles. In another, Bourdieu's conception of the habitus is brought to bear on the events of September 11. It is this kind of movement between the theoretical and the concrete that has come to be one of the hallmarks of Weiss's writing, with always engaging results.

The text as a whole is intended as an investigation of the ways in which sex, gender, race, disability, age, etc., structure the meaning of everyday experience. In phenomenological terms, Weiss investigates the ways in which these various facets of identity constitute the horizons of one's experience, or the framing assumptions that motivate perception and understanding. Weiss's engagement with the ordinary is marked by this phenomenological-political approach, which is deeply invested in examining the ways in which race and gender, for instance, are more often than not unthematized or background influences in the formation of one's lifeworld. Unsurprisingly, the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty informs Weiss's analysis to...

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