Body Battlegrounds

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, also published by Vanderbilt.

"What does it mean to use bodily resistance as a lens to expose and critique highly policed social rules around body size, grooming, skin color, birthing, mental health, aging, partner violence, and much more without falling into the trap of individualizing identity politics? This is what Body Battlegrounds is all about. It is at once an accessible continuation of the radical tradition in scholarship on bodies and a great gift to interdisciplinary scholars and their students."—Meika Loe, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Colgate University, and author of Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond

• Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha KwanPart I: Going “Natural”Chapter 1: Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair | Breanne FahsChapter 2: Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment | Monica BasileChapter 3: Caring for the Corpse: Embodied Transgression and Transformation in Home Funeral Advocacy | Anne EsacoveLiving Resistance:• Deconstructing Reconstructing: Challenging Medical Advice Following Mastectomy | Joanna Rankin• My Ten-Year Dreadlock Journey: Why I Love the “Kink” in My Hair . . . Today | Cheryl Thompson• Living My Full Life: Rejecting Weight Loss as an Imperative for Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder | Christina Fisanick• Pretty Brown: Encounters with My Skin Color | Praveena LakshmananPart II: Representing ResistanceChapter 4: Blood as Resistance: Photography as Contemporary Menstrual Activism | Shayda KafaiChapter 5: Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet?: Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend | Katherine PhelpsChapter 6: The Infidel in the Mirror: Mormon Women’s Oppositional Embodiment | Kelly Grove and Doug SchrockLiving Resistance:• A Cystor’s Story: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Disruption of Normative Femininity | Ledah McKellar• Old Bags Take a Stand: A Face Off with Ageism in America | Faith Baum and Lori Petchers• Making Up with My Body: Applying Cosmetics to Resist Disembodiment | Haley Gentile• I Am a Person Now: Autism, Indistinguishability, and (Non)optimal Outcome | Alyssa HillaryPart III: Creating Community, Disrupting AssumptionsChapter 7: Yelling and Pushing on the Bus: The Complexity of Black Girls’ Resistance | Stephanie D. Sears and Maxine Leeds CraigChapter 8: Big Gay Men’s Performative Protest against Body Shaming: The Case of Girth and Mirth | Jason WhiteselChapter 9: “What’s Love Got to Do with It?”: The Embodied Activism of Domestic Violence Survivors on Welfare | Sheila M. KatzLiving Resistance:• “Your Signing Is So Beautiful!”: The Radical Invisibility of ASL Interpreters in Public | Rachel Kolb• Two Shakes | Rev. Adam Lawrence Dyer• “Showing Our Muslim”: Embracing the Hijab in the Era of Paradox | Sara Rehman• “Doing Out”: A Black Dandy Defies Gender Norms in the Bronx | Mark Broomfield• Everybody: Making Fat Radio for All of Us | Cat PauséPart IV: Transforming Institutions and IdeologiesChapter 10: Embodying Nonexistence: Encountering Mono- and Cisnormativities in Everyday Life | J. E. SumerauChapter 11: Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law | J. Shoshanna EhrlichChapter 12: Give Us a Twirl: Male Baton Twirlers’ Embodied Resistance in a Feminized Terrain | Trenton M. HaltomChapter 13: “That Gentle Somebody”: Rethinking Black Female Same-Sex Practices and Heteronormativity in Contemporary South Africa | Taylor RileyLiving Resistance:• Showing Up as Myself: Embodiment and Authenticity in the Classroom | Ryan Ambuter• Sitting and Resisting: How Using a Wheelchair Confronts Ideas of Normal | Margaret Stran• Against Diabetic Numerology in a Black Body, or, Why I Cannot Live by the Numbers | Anthony Ryan Hatch• My Women’s Studies Professor Uses Botox? | Dana BerkowitzAfterword: Bodies of Resistance | Sonya Renee TaylorContributorsIndex