The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections

This college-level handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of sociological and cultural perspectives on the human body. Organized along the lines of a standard anatomical textbook delineated by body parts and processes, this volume subverts the expected content in favor of providing tools for social and cultural analysis.

Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural, and political contexts, with emphasis on multiple, contested meanings of the body, body parts, and systems. Case studies, examples, and discussion questions are both US-based and international. Advancing critical body studies, the book explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography, and citizenship status. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics, and social problems. The authors use commonly understood anatomical frames to discuss social, cultural, political, and ethical issues concerning embodiment.

Lisa Jean Moore, a medical sociologist, is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her scholarship is located at the intersections of sociology of health and medicine, science and technology studies, feminist studies, animal studies, and critical body studies. She is the author of Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid and the co-author of Gendered Bodies: Feminist Perspectives, Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility, and Buzz: Urban Beekeeping and the Power of the Bee. Additionally she has co-edited The Body Reader and is a founding co-editor of a successful book series at NYU Press entitled Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century.

Monica J. Casper is Professor and Head of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. A sociologist, her scholarly and teaching interests include gender, race, bodies, health, sexuality, disability, and trauma. She has published several books, including the award-winning The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery. Her current research focuses on race and the biopolitics of infant mortality in the U.S. She is a founding co-editor of the NYU Press book series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century, as well as a managing editor of The Feminist Wire.