Body Phobia: The Western Roots of Our Fear of Difference

Your body is who you are. We will only build a just society by rejecting fear of our bodies.  

Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies--from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture. Fear has led cisgender, white, and able-bodied people to deprioritize the physical experience and prioritize the mind alone, contributing to our alienation from one another, the marginalization of certain kinds of bodies, and harm to us all.

Body Phobia is an examination of the western societal fear of the body. Starting with an excavation of the religious roots of this fear, Dex Anderson then zooms out to show how fear of bodies permeates all parts of culture, influencing who gets to be perceived as more than their body, and who does not. By becoming self-aware of how our bodies interact with the world and what it means to have a body, we can begin to overcome the harm done in divorcing the western body and the western mind for centuries. Through cutting analysis and candid storytelling, Dex Anderson exposes our fear-based politics and shows us a way to approach bodies that is neither positive nor negative but neutral. Our bodies are. And that's enough.

Dex E. Anderson is a non-binary writer with a master's degree in English from Baylor University and a master of studies in women's studies from the University of Oxford in the UK. They are the author of In Transit: Being Non-Binary in a World of Dichotomies, Problematic: How Toxic Call-Out Culture Is Destroying Feminism, and Damaged Goods: New Perspectives on Christian Purity. Their work focuses on the intersections of gender, history, religion, and theory, and they have been published in Rolling Stone, Cosmo, Bitch Magazine, Dame, and many others. They live in Minneapolis with their two cats, Minerva and Tonks.