Description
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Biographical Note: -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Weaving her personal history with those of women from the more distant past, Maglaque doesn't strive for universality, but a deep connectivity that makes the book at points illuminating and infuriating." -- Literary Hub, "Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in June" "Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time." -- Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame "In Presence, Erin Magalaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it." -- Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love "An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we've rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other." -- Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl Review Quotes: "[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women's experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800 . . . [Maglaque's] riveting survey reveals just how much of what the modern Western world accepts as given, even natural, was created in this period: from female beauty ideals (which swung from a shape of "abundance, fertility" to "one of refinement and self-control" by the late 18th century) to our notions of personhood, orgasm, gender. In writing as visceral as Cixous demands, Maglaque also uses these revelations to help make sense of her own life, whisking the reader nimbly between this distant past and her present, personal encounters with desire, abortion, birth, ambition." --Mattie Kahn, The New York Times Book Review "I've been savoring Erin Maglaque's book Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body, which came out this week. She's a really good historian, and a terrific stylist who writes with vivid, pointillistic detail about breast-feeding, infant care, sleeping, sex and pregnancy, birth--all that stuff that doesn't usually make it into the historical record." --Namara Smith, The New Yorker "Historian Erin Maglaque has plumbed the archives of early modern Europe to find the traces and shadow traces of female bodies . . . [But] hers is not a conventionally scholarly book: it is thick with sensate details, and her first-person approach is embodied and apetitive." --Michele Pridmore-Brown, The Literary Review (UK) "An impressive book debut . . . As Maglaque examines pregnancy and miscarriage, abortion, labor and birth, caregiving, housework, and care of the dying, the voices of myriad women (herself included) amply fulfill her aim of making the past 'present and immediate.' A richly textured, revelatory history." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review "Weaving her personal history with those of women from the more distant past, Maglaque doesn't strive for universality, but a deep connectivity that makes the book at points illuminating and infuriating." -- Literary Hub, "Ten Great Nonfiction Titles to Read in June" "Engrossing and vital, Presence rediscovers the female body as a vessel of history. Interweaving past and present, the personal with incisive scholarship, these stories reveal the rich, unexpected, and sometimes brutal ways in which the complexities of female embodiment connect all women across all time." -- Michelle Orange, author of Pure Flame "In Presence, Erin Magalaque expands and explodes the genre of personal history. In a voice at once deeply learned and often disarmingly intimate, these explorations unravel much of what women have been told about our bodies, desires, and capacities. They embody a mode of thought that does not only describe freedom but enacts it." -- Moira Weigel, author of Labor of Love "An immersive, revelatory, and astonishing book about women, told through the distinct bodily experiences that punctuate our lives, and the history we've rarely been taught. Beautifully written and acutely insightful, Presence connects us to ourselves, our foremothers, and each other." -- Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl Publisher Marketing: "[A] soulful, moving, sometimes cacophonous account of European women's experiences and interior lives from about 1500 to 1800."--Mattie Kahn, The New York Times Book Review A vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer--stylish, revelatory, and liberating. Today, we understand the mind and the body to be distinct; that the mind exercises control over the flesh. But as Erin Maglaque experienced the transformations of pregnancy, abortion, birth, and care-giving, she began to doubt the truth of that dichotomy. In an effort to better understand her experiences, she found herself reaching to the premodern past, a period when the strange rubbed up against the strikingly recognizable: when people accepted both levitation and the smallpox vaccine, witchcraft and universal gravitation; a time when understandings of the body and its capacity for thought were more expansive, and more unruly. Structured as a biography of the author's own body, from girlhood and adolescence, to sex and abortion, to feeding and caring for an infant, to her experience caring for someone as they were dying, Erin places her personal history into a deep dialogue with the premodern past. She explores the relation between imagination and gender, between maternal and historical subjectivity; she positions female desire as a practice with a past, and offers gentler and more forgiving understandings of housekeeping, pregnancy, early miscarriage, abortion, birth, sleeplessness, and breastfeeding. For readers of Amia Srinivasan's The Right to Sex, Cat Bohannon's Eve, and Olivia Laing's Everybody, Presence is a unique experiment in historical thinking and embodied knowledge; a thoroughly researched, vibrant history of women's bodies, expertise, and work from a major new writer. Review Citations:
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Presence: A Hidden History of the Female Body
$36.00