This article describes findings from a qualitative study that investigated the lived experiences of four mothers recovering from crack cocaine addictions who lost custody of their children. The project was guided by feminist interpretive inquiry, van Manen’s approach to hermeneutic phenomenology, and involved thematic analysis of in depth interview data. By telling the stories of these women and using their own words as well as interpretive poetry written by one of the authors to describe their suffering, our research offers important insights to professionals involved in the field of addictions.

Beginning with the idea that our bellybuttons specifically and our guts more generally are a good thing to think with, this paper proposes the idea of “gut sociality”—that is, a material-semiotic, posthumanist mode of responsivity between bodies that hovers in, around, and through the gut. In order to deepen our understanding of this notion, I provide a phenomenological sketch of morning sickness as one instance of gut sociality. To conclude, I propose that in order to accommodate new modes of being embodied in our twenty-first century world, a method of posthumanist feminist phenomenology should be further developed. This practice should draw upon science discourses, but consider both the risks and the promise of a biological turn.

This essay takes the risk of a formal adventure – both on and off the page – in order to do justice to the specificity of the event, the particular Saying, named ‘song.’ Written by ear to be (read aloud as) heard it has been explicitly composed for oral presentation to perform the ‘truth’ it tells. Taking Joni Mitchell’s rendering of ‘Answer Me’ as its inspiration and point of departure, reference, and return, and drawing on the work of and intellectual tradition associated with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Irigaray, Nancy, and Derrida, for example, the essay explores the power of popular song in the spirit of song itself. Neither music nor philosophy, neither poetry nor prose, but something in between: mousikē-philosophy/philosophy-mousikē.

Proprioception has been considered, within neuroscience, in the context of the control of movement. Here we discuss a possible second role for this 'sixth sense', pleasure in and of movement,homologous with the recently described affective touch. We speculate on its evolution and place in human society and suggest that pleasure in movement may depend not on feedback but also on harmony between intention and action. Examples come from expert movers, dancers and sportsmen, and from those without proprioception due to neurological impairment. Finally we suggest that affective proprioception may help bind our sense of agency with our embodied selves at an emotional level.

The article introduces the phenomenological idea of 'natural attitude' in the field of dance. Three phenomena, which very clearly show the embodiment of the natural attitude and its resistance to the requirements of dance, are analyzed. The 'controlling gaze' is the natural tendency to look at the limbs andfollow their movements instead of proprioceptive control The 'chess play' is a natural tendency of moving on the flat surface and ignoring the volume of movement. The 'seduction' is a natural tendency to lose the body-self because of an interference with the others body. The dancing body has constantly to deal with these natural inclinations. And a dance teacher has to understand this split between 'ought' and 'is'.

The aim of this article is to focus on the body as instrument or means in performance-art. Since the body is no monolithic given, the body is approached in terms of its constitutive layers, and this may enable us to conceive of the mechanisms that make performances possible and operational, i.e. those bodily mechanisms that are implicitly or explicitly controlled or manipulated in performance. Of course, the exploitation of these bodily layers is not solely responsible for the generation of meaning in performance. Yet, it is that what fundamentally /enables/ the generation of sense and signification in performance-art. To approach the body in terms of its layers, from body image and body schema to in-depth body, may partly answer the complexity at work in art performances, since these concepts enable us to consider, on a theoretical level, the body as represented object, as subject, as motor means for being-in-the-world, as origin of subjectivity and emotions, as hidden but most intimate place of impersonal life processes, as possibly distant image, as sensitive, fragile and plastic entity, as something we own and are owned by, as our most personal and yet extremely strange body.

It is argued that the theory of situated cognition together with dynamic systems theory can explain the core of artistic practice and aesthetic experience, and furthermore paves the way for an account of how artist and audience can meet via the artist's work. The production and consumption of art is an embodied practice, firmly based in perception and action, and supported by features of the local, agent-centered and global socio-cultural contexts. Artistic creativity and aesthetic experience equally result from the dynamic interplay between agent and context, allowing for artist and viewer to relate to the artist's work in similar ways.