A cutting-edge anthology on power and women's bodies edited by a leading scholar in the field.
For the past three decades, feminist scholars have examined how the female body and ideas about the female body affect women's lives. Revised and updated in its third edition, The Politics of
Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior brings together recent critical writings in this important field.
*New to this edition
Preface
Part I. The Social Construction of Women's Bodies
1. Rose Weitz: A History of Women's Bodies
This article delineates how ideas about the female body have changed - or not - over time, as well as the very real impact those ideas have had on
women's lives.
2. Judith Lorber: Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology
Lorber argues that binary sex differences are a social construction: they appear to be natural and real only because our cultural practices make them real.
3. Karin A. Martin: Becoming a Gendered Body: Practices
of Preschools
Martin explores how preschools teach young children to "perform gender" and to develop embodied selves that are "properly" gendered.
4. Catherine Kohler Riessman: Women and Medicalization: A New Perspective
This article examines why women sometimes have supported the
medicalization of their bodies, and how medicalization has both benefited and harmed women.
*5. Cheryl Chase: Affronting Reason
Chase describes the medicalization of intersex--and the price she, personally, paid for it. Medicalization, she argues, has served more to reinforce cultural
ideas about sex and gender than to help intersex children.
6. Sandra Lee Bartky: Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power
Bartky describes how women internalize social expectations regarding female appearance and behavior and then adopt "disciplinary practices" to
meet those expectations that reinforce their subordination to men.
Part II. The Politics of Sexuality
7. Janet Lee: Menarche and the (Hetero)sexualization of the Female Body
This article explores how girls' experiences with menstruation affect their sense of self and body, and
how those experiences can serve as sites of resistance.
8. Deborah L. Tolman: Daring to Desire: Culture and the Bodies of Adolescent Girls
Tolman describes how teenage girls think about sexual desire and explores how their ideas are shaped by both the promise of sexual pleasure and the
threat of sexual danger.
*9. Patricia Hill Collins: Get Your Freak On: Sex, Babies, and Images of Black Femininity
This article explores contemporary images of African American women, discusses how these images reinforce racism, and shows how African American women use these images to
assert control over their bodies and lives.
*10. Isabel Molina Guzmán and Angharad N. Valdivia: Brain, Brow, and Booty: Latina Iconicity in U.S. Popular Culture
The authors analyze the gendered and racialized media portrayals of Jennifer Lopez, Salma Hayek, and Frida Kahlo.
*11. Amy
C. Wilkins: "So Full of Myself as a Chick": Goth Women, Sexual Independence, and Gender Egalitarianism
Wilkins shows how Goth women are exempted from dominant cultural norms for sexuality and appearance; their post-feminist assumptions, however, camouflage gender and sexual inequality within
Goth culture.
Part III. The Politics of Appearance
12. Iris Marion Young: Breasted Experience: The Look and the Feeling
This article explores women's relationships with their breasts; women sometimes view their breasts as objects to be used and other times act as subjects whose
breasts are part of their essential selves.
*13. Patricia Gagné and Deanna McGaughey: Designing Women: Cultural Hegemony and the Exercise of Power among Women Who Have Undergone Elective Mammoplasty
The authors show how women actively choose cosmetic surgery (exercising free will), but do
so in the context of hegemonic cultural norms that make it difficult for them to consider other choices.
14. Rose Weitz: Women and Their Hair: Seeking Power Through Resistance and Accommodation
Weitz uses women's experiences with their hair to illustrate how resistance and accommodation
are interwoven in women's everyday bodily experiences.
*15. Vivyan C. Adair: Branded with Infamy: Inscriptions of Poverty and Class in the United States
This article describes how poverty and its stigma are physically marked on the bodies of poor women; that stigma both supports public
policies that discipline poor women's bodies and encourages poor women to do so themselves.
*16. Cecilia Hartley: Letting Ourselves Go: Making Room for the Fat Body in Feminist Scholarship
Hartley dissects cultural norms that stigmatize fat women, explores how those norms affect all women,
and suggests that fatness can be a form of feminist resistance.
*17. Andrea Avery: Rip Tide: Swimming Through Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis
Avery describes her embodied experiences living as a young woman with rheumatoid arthritis; she explores how she has developed a positive embodied
self that acknowledges her illness but does not let it define her.
*18. Victoria Pitts: Reclaiming the Female Body: Women Body Modifiers and Feminist Debates
This article analyzes both how women use body modification to take control of their bodies and the benefits and limitations of this
embodied resistance.
Part IV. The Politics of Behavior
19. Susan K. Cahn: From the "Muscle Moll" to the "Butch" Ballplayer: Mannishness, Lesbianism, and Homophobia in U.S. Women's Sports
Cahn traces the modern history of women in sports and shows how gendered and racial
stereotypes led women athletes to become stigmatized, first as heterosexually "loose" and later as presumed lesbians.
20. Shari L. Dworkin: "Holding Back": Negotiating a Glass Ceiling on Women's Muscular Strength
Dworkin describes how women who work out in gyms are discouraged from
building muscle, thus reinforcing sex differences and the idea that women cannot build muscle.
*21. C.J. Pascoe: Compulsive Heterosexuality: Masculinity and Dominance
This article describes how male high school students demonstrate their heterosexuality and their dominance over girls'
bodies--sometimes violently--in order to claim masculine power and identity for themselves.
22. Margo Wilson and Martin Daly: . Till Death Us Do Part
The idea of women's bodies as men's property, the authors argue, underpins wife battering and murder around the world.
*23. Rachel
Roth: Backlash and Continuity: The Political Trajectory of Fetal Rights
Roth describes how the battle over reproductive rights has led to the recent push for "fetal rights"--an idea she believes has served more to punish women for nontraditional behavior than to protect their children.
There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.
Rose Weitz is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University.
Making Sense in the Social Sciences - Margot Northey, Lorne Tepperman and Patrizia Albanese
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