Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions, and Transformations

Original research chapters are balanced with personal narratives.



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:

• Showing Up as Myself: Embodiment and Authenticity in the Classroom | Ryan Ambuter

• Sitting and Resisting: How Using a Wheelchair Confronts Ideas of Normal | Margaret Stran

• Against Diabetic Numerology in a Black Body, or, Why I Cannot Live by the Numbers | Anthony Ryan Hatch

• My Women's Studies Professor Uses Botox? | Dana Berkowitz


Afterword: Bodies of Resistance | Sonya Renee Taylor