About the Book
Embodied Resistance engages the rich and complex range of society's contemporary "body outlaws"—people from many social locations who violate norms about the private, the repellent, or the forbidden. This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.
Table of Contents:
Foreword | Rose Weitz
Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan
Part I: Rewriting Gender Scripts
Chapter 1: The Specter of Excess: Race, Class, and Gender in Women’s Body Hair Narratives | Breanne Fahs and Denise A. Delgado
Chapter 2: “Is That Any Way to Treat a Lady?”: The Dominatrix’s Dungeon | Danielle J. Lindemann
Chapter 3: “Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’”: Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby | Natalie M. Peluso
Chapter 4: Becoming a Female-to-Male Transgender (FTM) in South Korea | Tari Youngjung Na and Hae Yeon Choo
Living Resistance:
• From Rapunzel to G.I. Jane | Samantha Binford
• Funnel as Phallus | Sara L. Crawley
Part II: Challenging Marginalization
Chapter 5: “Give Me a Boa and Some Bling!”: Red Hat Society Members Commanding Visibility in the Public Sphere | M. Elise Radina, Lydia K. Manning, Marybeth C. Stalp, and Annette Lynch
Chapter 6: Fat. Hairy. Sexy: Contesting Standards of Beauty and Sexuality in the Gay Community | Nathaniel C. Pyle and Noa Logan Klein
Chapter 7: Belly Dancing Mommas: Challenging Cultural Discourses of Maternity | Angela M. Moe
Chapter 8: “It’s Important to Show Your Colors”: Counter-Heteronormativity in a Metropolitan Community Church | J. Edward Sumerau and Douglas P. Schrock
Living Resistance:
• An Accidental Education | Hanne Blank
• The Pickup | Catherine Bergart
Part III: Defying Authoritative Knowledges and Conventional Wisdom
Chapter 9: Anorexia as a Choice: Constructing a New Community of Health and Beauty through Pro-Ana Websites | Abigail Richardson and Elizabeth Cherry
Chapter 10: Public Mothers and Private Practices: Breastfeeding as Transgression | Jennifer A. Reich
Chapter 11: “It’s Hard to Say”: Moving Beyond the Mystery of Female Genital Pain | Christine Labuski
Chapter 12: “What I Had to Do to Survive”: Self-Injurers’ Bodily Emotion Work | Margaret Leaf and Douglas P. Schrock
Living Resistance:
• Intersex? Not My Problem | Esther Morris Leidolf
• Doula-Assisted Childbirth: Helping Her Birth Her Way | Angela Horn
Part IV: Negotiating Boundaries and Meanings
Chapter 13: The Politics of the Stall: Transgender and Genderqueer Workers Negotiating “the Bathroom Question” | Catherine Connell
Chapter 14: The Everyday Resistance of Vegetarianism | Samantha Kwan and Louise Marie Roth
Chapter 15: Menopausal and Misbehaving: When Women “Flash” in Front of Others | Heather E. Dillaway
Chapter 16: The Transformation of Bodily Practices among Religious Defectors | Lynn Davidman
Living Resistance:
• Crossing the Menstrual Line | David Linton
• Myself, Covered | Beverly Yuen Thompson
Afterword | Barbara Katz Rothman
Classroom Resources
Contributors
Index
About the Author :
Chris Bobel, Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, and Samantha Kwan, Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Houston, are co-editors of Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules and Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations, both published by Vanderbilt.
Review :
"The book is a good start to a more nuanced understanding of the interconnections between complicity and transgression."
--Contemporary Sociology
"The book is a good start to a more nuanced understanding of the interconnections between complicity and transgression."
--Contemporary Sociology
"This anthology captures the urgency of the body's involvement with power relations. It reminds us of the significant and sometimes high stakes of negotiating embodiment and identity, embodiment and sexuality, race, gender. Bobel and Kwan situate the wide range of articles in the most current literatures in critical scholarship, and remind us why the body has become such an important place of scholarship, why it carries so much meaning and instigates so much struggle."
--Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture and In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification
"This anthology captures the urgency of the body's involvement with power relations. It reminds us of the significant and sometimes high stakes of negotiating embodiment and identity, embodiment and sexuality, race, gender. Bobel and Kwan situate the wide range of articles in the most current literatures in critical scholarship, and remind us why the body has become such an important place of scholarship, why it carries so much meaning and instigates so much struggle."
--Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Director of the Center for the Study of Women and Society, Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture and In the Flesh: The Cultural Politics of Body Modification
"Finally, here is a book about the body that is as juicy, colorful, and unpredictable as the body itself. Embodied Resistance is not only about resistance but as a collection vibrates with its own resistance, both to academic abstractions about 'the body' and to uncritical storytelling. A wonderful blend of ethnographic research and personal reflections, it toes no one theoretical line and embraces a fascinating range of practices, issues, and experiences. This is a book students will identify with, argue with, shed tears over, laugh along with, and rarest of all for a scholarly reader, enjoy curling up with."
--Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight and The Male Body
"Finally, here is a book about the body that is as juicy, colorful, and unpredictable as the body itself. Embodied Resistance is not only about resistance but as a collection vibrates with its own resistance, both to academic abstractions about 'the body' and to uncritical storytelling. A wonderful blend of ethnographic research and personal reflections, it toes no one theoretical line and embraces a fascinating range of practices, issues, and experiences. This is a book students will identify with, argue with, shed tears over, laugh along with, and rarest of all for a scholarly reader, enjoy curling up with."
--Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight and The Male Body
