Body Battlegrounds explores the rich and complex lives of society's body outlaws—individuals from myriad social locations who oppose hegemonic norms, customs, and conventions about the body. Original research chapters (based on textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation) along with personal narratives provide a window into the everyday lives of people rewriting the norms of embodiment in sites like schools, sporting events, and doctors' offices. Table of Contents Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan Part I: Going "Natural" • Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair | Breanne Fahs • Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment | Monica Basile • Caring for the Corpse: Embodied Transgression and Transformation in Home Funeral Advocacy | Anne Esacove Living 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: My Rejecting Weight Loss as an Imperative for Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder | Christina Fisanick • Pretty Brown: Encounters with My Skin Color | Praveena Lakshmanan Part II: Representing Resistance • Blood as Resistance: Photography as Contemporary Menstrual Activism | Shayda Kafai • Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet?: Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend | Katherine Phelps • The Infidel in the Mirror: Mormon Women's Oppositional Embodiment | Kelly Grove and Doug Schrock Living 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 Hillary Part III: Creating Community, Disrupting Assumptions • Yelling and Pushing on the Bus: The Complexity of Black Girls' Resistance | Stephanie D. Sears and Maxine Leeds Craig • Big Gay Men's Performative Protest Against Body Shaming: The Case of Girth and Mirth | Jason Whitesel • "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Embodied Activism of Domestic Violence Survivors on Welfare | Sheila M. Katz Living 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 Pausé Part IV: Transforming Institutions and Ideologies • Embodying Nonexistence: Encountering Mono- and Cisnormativities in Everyday Life | J. E. Sumerau • Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law | J. Shoshanna Ehrlich • Give Us a Twirl: Male Baton Twirlers' Embodied Resistance in a Feminized Terrain | Trenton M. Haltom • "That Gentle Somebody": Rethinking Black Female Same-Sex Practices and Heteronormativity in Contemporary South Africa | Taylor Riley Living Resistance:

The Managed Body productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.

In popular debates over the influences of nature versus culture on human lives, bodies are often assigned to the category of "nature": biological, essential, and pre-social. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment challenges that view, arguing that bodies both shape and get shaped by human societies. As such, the body is an appropriate and necessary area of study for sociologists. The Handbook works to clarify the scope of this topic and display the innovations of research within the field. The volume is divided into three main parts: Bodies and Methodology; Marginalized Bodies; and Embodied Sociology. Sociologists contributing to the first two parts focus on the body and the ways it is given meaning, regulated, and subjected to legal and medical oversight in a variety of social contexts (particularly when the body in question violates norms for how a culture believes bodies "ought" to behave or appear). Sociologists contributing to the last part use the bodily as a lens through which to study social institutions and experiences. These social settings range from personal decisions about medical treatment to programs for teaching police recruits how to use physical force, from social movement tactics to countries' understandings of race and national identity. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Body also prioritizes empirical evidence and methodological rigor, attending to the ways particular lives are lived in particular physical bodies located within particular cultural and institutional contexts. Many chapters offer extended methodological reflections, providing guidance on how to conduct sociological research on the body and, at times, acknowledging the role the authors' own bodies play in developing their knowledge of the research subject.

Packed with science-based insight into what it really means to 'age' and reminding us that we have far more control over how young we feel and look than most of us realize, this comprehensive guide, by natural health expert Jayney Goddard, offers the ultimate blueprint for anti-ageing the natural way. Our attitudes towards ageing have undergone radical changes in recent years and many women now recognize that beauty and health come not from invasive procedures, fillers or expensive skincare brands but from the inside out. This book is an expert holistic guide on the science of how to age well - not only physically and mentally but also emotionally and even spiritually - covering everything from nutrition, herbal medicine, good breathing, the best exercise, mental attitude, natural skincare, haircare and facelift techniques, hormonal balance, good relationships, the power of nature and the power of sleep. Each chapter includes easily implementable techniques which, while natural, are supported by solid scientific research, with a focus on the neurobiology of happiness and how to develop a 'rewind' mindset. All this is underpinned with biological age tests for readers to try for themselves and, at the end, a specifically designed practical programme called the 'Personal 21-Day Rewind Plan'. The result? Better skin, a leaner body, stronger bones, improved cognitive function, enhanced libido, more energy, improved immune function, increased resistance to degenerative diseases, more resilience against stress and much more. So, while we can't change our chronological age, we can dramatically reduce and even reverse our biological age so that we have plenty more healthy, happy years to look forward to.

When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Prince Edward County, Virginia, home to one of the five cases combined by the Court under Brown, abolished its public school system rather than integrate. Jill Titus situates the crisis in Prince Edward County within the seismic changes brought by Brown and Virginia's decision to resist desegregation. While school districts across the South temporarily closed a building here or there to block a specific desegregation order, only in Prince Edward did local authorities abandon public education entirely--and with every intention of permanence. When the public schools finally reopened after five years of struggle--under direct order of the Supreme Court--county authorities employed every weapon in their arsenal to ensure that the newly reopened system remained segregated, impoverished, and academically substandard. Intertwining educational and children's history with the history of the black freedom struggle, Titus draws on little-known archival sources and new interviews to reveal the ways that ordinary people, black and white, battled, and continue to battle, over the role of public education in the United States.

Body hair, especially on women, provokes, disrupts, and, at times, offends. It is tangled up with culture itself—in art, families, workplaces, relationships, sex, the beauty industry, governments, and capitalism. From Chinese activists challenging the Communist Party, to students in Arizona rejecting their family and workplace ideas about grooming, to high-art feminist photographers boldly featuring hairy women, Fahs deftly explores the volatile and ever-changing landscape of women's body hair politics. She showcases an underground movement of artists, zine-makers, rebels, and activists who have used women's visible body hair as a declaration of freedom from patriarchal norms. Fahs presents body hair not just as a personal grooming choice but as a connection to broader cultural stories about women's reproductive rights, feminist battlegrounds about autonomy, neoliberal intrusions into beauty regimens, and even global tensions around women's place in society. Ultimately, Unshaved shows the collision between the mundane and the extraordinary, the everyday and the revolutionary.