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Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body’s influence, meaning, and matter in society.
Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book’s chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end.
Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body.
“With particular attention to issues of race, gender, and colonialism, this fascinating collection explores how power relations inscribe themselves upon the body, and definitions of what is ‘healthy’ and ‘sick,' ‘right’ and ‘wrong.' The authors highlight the body as an interpretive site of resistance whereby self and community reclaim positive empowerment. It's simply a must-read.” Drew Leder, Loyola University
“A diverse yet surprisingly focused collection of strong and innovative contributions to the field. A must-read for those interested in the (social) meanings and (contested) interpretations of bodies.” Werner Binder, Masaryk University
"This excellent collection of interpretive, theoretically rich studies of embodiment shows how productive the dissensus amongst perspectives is when it comes to sensing the body’s openness to the vicissitudes of modernity." Arun Saldanha, University of Minnesota
Anne Marie Champagne is a PhD candidate in sociology and Center for Cultural Sociology junior fellow at Yale University.
Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Delaware.
Introduction: Between Meaning and Matter - Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman
1. Toward a Strong Cultural Sociology of the Body and Embodiment - Anne Marie Champagne
2. Thinking the Molecular - Ben Spatz
3. Interpreting Africa’s Seselelãme: Bodily Ways of Knowing in a Globalized World - Kathryn Linn Geurts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie
4. Gender on the Post-Colony: Phenomenology, Race, and the Body in Nervous Conditions - Sweta Rajan-Rankin and Mrinalini Greedharry
5. Reinterpreting Male Bodies and Health in Crisis Times: From “Obesity” to Bigger Matters - Lee F. Monaghan
6. Beauty, Breasts, and Meaning after Mastectomy - Piper Sledge
7. “You Are Not the Body”: (Re)Interpreting the Body in and through Integral Yoga - Erin F. Johnston
8. Black Girls’ Bodies and Belonging in the Classroom - Brittney Miles
9. Embodied Vulnerability and Sensemaking with Solidarity Activists - Chandra Russo
10. Our Bodies, Our Disciplines, Our Selves - Annemarie Jutel