The Emperor Has a Body: Body-Politics in the Between

By S. Elise Peeples

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0965441822
• ISBN13: 9780965441827
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: Javelina Books
• Length: 290 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

This books urges one to see the world in a more creative way

This place where all the riches lie, the place of the twilight. She speakes of the between, where creative dialog can and does take place.Elise guides you gently into a world that needs to be, a world where all matters, the earth,women,men and breath.A family tree which includes a Redwood.

This book changed my life

I stumbled upon this book while looking for some nursery rhymes to read to my son. After digesting the many novel concepts of universal cooperation, I began to utilize the easily understood principles in my work as a community organizer.

How to access the organic powers within all of us.

Elise Peeples' first non-fiction book offers a fresh approach about accessing the organic powers within all of us, despite societal dogma from every corner. She suggests a way out of collective, spiritual bankruptcy within the confines of institutional thought. She also shows us how individual powerlessness is reinforced by the English language. Peeples writes, "When we speak of difference, we are almost always assuming a standard from which something else deviates or is "other." Some scholars who are bothered by this terminology have begun using alternative words .The word "alternative" more nearly gives equal status to all alternatives. It is that root from which comes the word "alterity," a word I will use in place of "difference" or "other."" Peeples is not the first writer to discuss how language reinforces the culture. She does provide remedies rather than simple criticism of the dominant culture's standards in the United States. For example, Peeples writes, "For most women there is something about their bodies that they wish to hide, are ashamed of - whether that be heritage, disability, age, class, weight " So we "tyrannize it. Make it behave. Refuse it its appetites and desires. Starve it. Carve it. Stuff it. Exercise it to death. Slice it up. Pump it up. Shut it up. Punish it. Sell it.Fat women who refuse further dieting or never go on diets to begin with are heroines because, through the worst of peer, societal and institutional pressure, they are saying, "this is how I am and I refuse to hide to protect you from your own body shame." Peeples' non-fiction is not a book solely for women whose dress size is more than four. She is inclusive as she addresses today's most pressing issues. The weight issue, too often, is a nightly focus of the fluffy, five and six o'clock news. Peeples non-fiction is divided into two parts. The first part shows us how we landed in the abyss in which we find ourselves. The second part shows us an alternative. Among other things, Peeples suggests an approach to understanding our uniqueness and similarities, eliminating the need for another abyss that accompanies total separation from one another. "If we seek to win, to come out on top, we are still playing by the rules of the power-over society. What we must search for is immanent power, that power which lies directly in the Between- By fearing it and going away from it, we lose its power and our power- by understanding immanent power, by refusing to remain in the power-over mode, we can begin to change the way the world thinks about itself." Read Peeples' book, that begins with the fairy-tale myth about the Emperor's new clothes, to gain understanding about words like "the Between," "power-over," and "alterity." The beauty of Peeples' non-fiction is that it is not academic, nor does it reinforce the stale ideas that have brought U.S. society to the dangerous precipice of unmitigated hatred,