Bodies Out of Bounds


Book Description

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity




Bodies Out of Bounds


Book Description

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity




Revolting Bodies?


Book Description

This work examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. It is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness.




The Cinematic Body


Book Description

A radical approach to film viewing




Fat Rights


Book Description

Author Interview on The Brian Lehrer Show America is a weight-obsessed nation. Over the last decade, there's been an explosion of concern in the U.S. about people getting fatter. Plaintiffs are now filing lawsuits arguing that discrimination against fat people should be illegal. Fat Rights asks the first provocative questions that need to be raised about adding weight to lists of currently protected traits like race, gender, and disability. Is body fat an indicator of a character flaw or of incompetence on the job? Does it pose risks or costs to employers they should be allowed to evade? Or is it simply a stigmatized difference that does not bear on the ability to perform most jobs? Could we imagine fatness as part of workplace diversity? Considering fat discrimination prompts us to rethink these basic questions that lawyers, judges, and ordinary citizens ask before a new trait begins to look suitable for antidiscrimination coverage. Fat Rights draws on little-known legal cases brought by fat citizens as well as significant lawsuits over other forms of bodily difference (such as transgenderism), asking why the boundaries of our antidiscrimination laws rest where they do. Fatness, argues Kirkland, is both similar to and provocatively different from other protected traits, raising long–standing dilemmas in antidiscrimination law into stark relief. Though options for defending difference may be scarce, Kirkland evaluates the available strategies and proposes new ways of navigating this new legal question. Fat Rights enters the fray of the obesity debate from a new perspective: our inherited civil rights tradition. The scope is broad, covering much more than just weight discrimination and drawing the reader into the larger context of antidiscrimination protections and how they can be justified for a new group.




What's Wrong with Fat?


Book Description

What's Wrong with Fat? examines the social implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic. Examining the ways in which debates over fatness have developed, Abigail Saguy argues that the obesity crisis literally makes us fat, intensifies negative body image, and justifies weight-based discrimination.




Bodies that Matter


Book Description

The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.




Trust


Book Description

Trust is inherent in travel. We ask a stranger for directions, or for a ride. We live among people whose language, culture, and motivations we don't understand. Trust binds us to another with an intoxicating energy; it is brave, giddy, joyous, and lustful. A sudden attraction careens into sexual surrender, and trust becomes unconditional. Trust laughs at danger and leaps into the unknown. The author of Abuses and Foreign Bodies, Alphonso Lingis has traveled the globe for many years, and in Trust he reflects on journeys from Latin America to Asia to Antarctica. Whether feeding chocolate sauce and tuna to the baboons who visit his campsite in Ethiopia, celebrating the millennial New Year in Mongolia, or indulging in a passionate love affair in Vietnam, Lingis evaluates what happens around him and how it affects him and others. From these experiences he gains new understandings about spirituality, masculinity, love, death, ecstasy, and change. In the tradition of such international travelers as Paul Theroux, Pico Iyer, and Ryszard Kapuscinski, and with insight reminiscent of John Berger and Joan Didion, Lingis shares both the private revelations and the universal connections he acquires on his exotic journeys. "Travel far enough," he concludes, "and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world"-where trust is ultimate. Alphonso Lingis is author of The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common, Dangerous Emotions, Abuses, and Foreign Bodies. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University.




Defy Gravity


Book Description

New York Times best-selling author Caroline Myss draws from her years as a medical intuitive to show that healing is not only physical; it is also a mystical phenomenon that transcends reason. Inspired by ordinary people who overcame a wide array of physical and psychological ailments—from rheumatoid arthritis to cancer—Caroline dove into the works of the great mystics to gain a deeper understanding of healing’s spiritual underpinnings. Based on these studies, she demonstrates how conventional and holistic medicine often fall short in times of need. Both systems rely upon a logical approach to curing illness when there is nothing reasonable about the emotional, psychological, or spiritual influences behind any ailment. Integral to this mystical healing approach is the engagement of the soul, which we experience through exploring our seven shadow passions, building an empowered inner self around our seven inherent graces, and learning how to work with the mystical laws that govern it. This knowledge holds the key to understanding what it means to defy gravity and break through the boundaries of ordinary thought. You can heal any illness. You can channel grace. And you can learn to live fearlessly.




Experimental Fashion


Book Description

Shortlisted for the Millia Davenport Publication Award Experimental Fashion traces the proliferation of the grotesque and carnivalesque within contemporary fashion and the close relation between fashion and performance art, from Lady Gaga's raw meat dress to Leigh Bowery's performance style. The book examines the designers and performance artists at the turn of the twenty-first century whose work challenges established codes of what represents the fashionable body. These innovative people, the book argues, make their challenges through dynamic strategies of parody, humour and inversion. It explores the experimental work of modern designers such as Georgina Godley, Bernhard Willhelm, Rei Kawakubo and fashion designer, performance artist, and club figure Leigh Bowery. It also discusses the increased centrality of experimental fashion through the pop phenomenon, Lady Gaga.