Gendering Bodies explains how the social world shapes our physical bodies and how our bodies shape the social world. In this remarkable investigation into contemporary ideas of gender, sociologists Crawley, Foley, and Shehan argue that bodies are constantly being gendered, that is, encouraged to participate in (heterosexual) gender conformity. This engendering influences nutrition practices, work and employment choices, diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, sexual practices, and training - or lack thereof - in sports and fitness. This is an accessible, yet comprehensive, sociological inquiry into a theory of the gendered body.
Now updated with groundbreaking research, this award-winning classic examines the construction of sexual identity in biology, society, and history. Why do some people prefer heterosexual love while others fancy the same sex? Is sexual identity biologically determined or a product of convention? In this brilliant and provocative book, the acclaimed author of Myths of Gender argues that even the most fundamental knowledge about sex is shaped by the culture in which scientific knowledge is produced. Drawing on astonishing real-life cases and a probing analysis of centuries of scientific research, Fausto-Sterling demonstrates how scientists have historically politicized the body. In lively and impassioned prose, she breaks down three key dualisms -- sex/gender, nature/nurture, and real/constructed -- and asserts that individuals born as mixtures of male and female exist as one of five natural human variants and, as such, should not be forced to compromise their differences to fit a flawed societal definition of normality.
The human body is thought of conventionally as a biological entity, with its longevity, morbidity, size and even appearance determined by genetic factors immune to the influence of society or culture. Since the mid-1980s, however, there has been a rising awareness of how our bodies, and our perception of them, are influenced by the social, cultural and material contexts in which humans live. Drawing on studies of sex and gender, education, governance, the economy, and religion, Chris Shilling demonstrates how our physical being allows us to affect the material and virtual world around us, yet also enables governments to shape and direct our thoughts and actions. Revealing how social relationships, cultural images, and technological and medical advances shape our perceptions and awareness, he exposes the limitations of traditional Western traditions of thought that elevate the mind over the body as that which defines us as human. Dealing with issues ranging from cosmetic and transplant surgery, the performance of gendered identities, the commodification of bodies and body parts, and the violent consequences of competing conceptions of the body as sacred, Shilling provides a compelling account of why body matters present contemporary societies with a series of urgent and inescapable challenges. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Despite all efforts to promote change, power and authority still seem to be permanently associated with the white, the straight and the masculine, both symbolically and in the everyday world of organizations. This collection proposes a transdisciplinary feminist perspective to explore the complex nature of the gendered politics of organizations.
As part of the emerging new research on civic innovation, this book explores how sexual politics and gender relations play out in feminist struggles around body politics in Brazil, Colombia, India, Iran, Mexico, Nepal, Turkey, Nicaragua, as well as in East Africa, Latin America and global institutions and networks. From diverse disciplinary perspectives, the book looks at how feminists are engaged in a complex struggle for democratic power in a neoliberal age and at how resistance is integral to possibilities for change. In making visible resistances to dominant economic and social policies, the book highlights how such struggles are both gendered and gendering bodies. The chapters explore struggles for healthy environments, sexual health and reproductive rights, access to abortion, an end to gender-based violence, the human rights of LGBTIQA persons, the recognition of indigenous territories and all peoples’ rights to care, love and work freely. The book sets out the violence, hopes, contradictions and ways forward in these civic innovations, resistances and connections across the globe.
This book focuses on key themes that reveal how gendered relations, ideologies, and practices shape human bodies. At the same time, it shows how human bodies are linked to other significant axes of inequality based on racial ethnic group, disability, sexuality, class, culture, religion, age, and nation. This second edition incorporates sixteen new selections on such topics as evolution and motherhood; breastfeeding; breast cancer; the effects of height on men; job discrimination and transgendered people; world champion runner Caster Semenya and sex verification; disability, gender, and embodiment; and Palestinian female suicide bombers.
Original and theoretically astute, Abstract Bodies is the first book to apply the interdisciplinary field of transgender studies to the discipline of art history. It recasts debates around abstraction and figuration in 1960s art through a discussion of gender’s mutability and multiplicity. In that decade, sculpture purged representation and figuration but continued to explore the human as an implicit reference. Even as the statue and the figure were left behind, artists and critics asked how the human, and particularly gender and sexuality, related to abstract sculptural objects that refused the human form. This book examines abstract sculpture in the 1960s that came to propose unconventional and open accounts of bodies, persons, and genders. Drawing on transgender and queer theory, David J. Getsy offers innovative and archivally rich new interpretations of artworks by and critical writing about four major artists—Dan Flavin (1933–1996), Nancy Grossman (b. 1940), John Chamberlain (1927–2011), and David Smith (1906–1965). Abstract Bodies makes a case for abstraction as a resource in reconsidering gender’s multiple capacities and offers an ambitious contribution to this burgeoning interdisciplinary field.
This title explores the relationship between subalternity, the discourse and technology of the body, and the rise and proliferation of racial, colonial, sexual, domestic, and state violence, examining the materiality of violence on the 'otherized' body.
Eighteenth-century natural historians created a peculiar, and peculiarly durable, vision of nature--one that embodied the sexual and racial tensions of that era. When plants were found to reproduce sexually, eighteenth-century botanists ascribed to them passionate relations, polyandrous marriages, and suicidal incest, and accounts of steamy plant sex began to infiltrate the botanical literature of the day. Naturalists also turned their attention to the great apes just becoming known to eighteenth-century Europeans, clothing the females in silk vestments and training them to sip tea with the modest demeanor of English matrons, while imagining the males of the species fully capable of ravishing women.
