"What is the cultural politics of science, health, and disease in the U.S.? Bodies Out of Control explores this question through a series of case studies. From its in-depth examination of the discussions of sickle-cell anemia, schistosomiasis, and cancer in middle school and high school textbooks to its analysis of the news coverage of the anthrax attacks of 2001, the book reveals the entanglements of science, colonialism, nationalism, and identity. The book also explores how the meaning of science itself is worked through in public discourses, offering alternatively medical salvation, confusion, and a vision of a world without pleasure. Finally, to explore what agency and a critical practice of engaging science in classrooms and elsewhere might look like, the book turns to the writings of politicized human research subjects, which demonstrate a spectrum of possibilities for more democratic engagements with science. As a whole, the book emphasizes the importance of engaging texts critically in science education and the ways that the cultural politics of science works through images of human and institutional bodies in and out of control."--Publisher's description.

Create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did? This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. Body Kindness is based on four principles. WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. It's the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life.

Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

"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

Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world and are increasingly recognized as important resources for theology. In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn seeks to discover how embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination. Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience can order normalcy, social status, and communal belonging. She argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning. This is a critical volume for feminist theorists and theologians, critical race theorists, scholars of disability and embodiment, and liberation thinkers who take experiences seriously as sources for theologizing and religious analysis.

Bodies out of Place asserts that anti-Black racism is not better than it used to be; it is just performed in more-nuanced ways. Barbara Harris Combs argues that racism is dynamic, so new theories are needed to help expose it. The Bodies-out-of-Place (BOP) theory she advances in the book offers such a corrective lens. Interrogating several recent racialized events—the Central Park birding incident, the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, sleeping while Black occurrences, and others—Combs demonstrates how the underlying belief that undergirds each encounter is a false presumption that Black bodies in certain contexts are out of place. Within these examples she illustrates how, even amid professions to color-blindness, fixed attitudes about where Black bodies belong, in what positions, at what time, and with whom still predominate. Combs describes a long historical pattern of White pushback against Black advancement and illuminates how each of the various forms of pushback is aimed at social control and regulation of Black bodies. She describes overt and covert attempts to push Black bodies back into their presumed place in U.S. society. While the pushback takes many forms, each works to paint a narrative to justify, rationalize, and excuse continuing violence against Black bodies. Equally important, Combs celebrates the resilient Black agency that has resisted this subjugation.

2010 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title How do concepts and constructions of the body shape people's experiences of agency and objectification within medical culture? As an object of scrutiny, the medicalized body occupies center stage in the work of doctors, nurses, medical examiners, and other medical professionals who mediate broader cultural understandings of pathology, illness, and the various physical transformations associated with life and death. The Body in Medical Culture explores how the body functions within medical culture and examines the metaphors and models of the body used to understand medical phenomena, including disease, diagnostic practices, wellness, anatomy, surgery, and medical research. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines engage representations of bodies, including polio and masculinity, sex reassignment surgery, drug marketing, endography, "designer vaginas," and hospital humor in order to challenge the normalcy of the passively objectified medicalized body.