Jennifer Graves

Samantha Kwan

Competing Constructions in Contemporary Culture

Framing Fat

Chris Bobel

Combines ethnographic research with personal stories to provide a portrait of the daily lives of people who defy or violate the rules and conventions of the social norms regarding body modification, piercings and tattoos.

Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules

Embodied Resistance

According to public health officials, obesity poses significant health risks and has become a modern-day epidemic. A closer look at this so-called epidemic, however, suggests that there are multiple perspectives on the fat body, not all of which view obesity as a health hazard. Alongside public health officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are advertisers of the fashion-beauty complex, food industry advocates at the Center for Consumer Freedom, and activists at the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Framing Fat takes a bird’s-eye view of how these multiple actors construct the fat body by identifying the messages these groups put forth, particularly where issues of beauty, health, choice and responsibility, and social justice are concerned. Samantha Kwan and Jennifer Graves examine how laypersons respond to these conflicting messages and illustrate the gendered, raced, and classed implications within them. In doing so, they shed light on how dominant ideas about body fat have led to the moral indictment of body nonconformists, essentially “framing” them for their fat bodies.

"This book uses interviews with women undergoing elective cosmetic surgery to explore the way they make sense of their body project in light of dominant cultural discourses, including women's agency over their bodies and the undesirability of unnatural aesthetics"--

Cosmetic Surgery, Boundary Work, and the Pursuit of the Natural Fake

Under the Knife

Embodied Resistance engages the rich and complex range of society's contemporary "body outlaws"--people from many social locations who violate norms about the private, the repellent, or the forbidden. This collection ventures beyond the conventional focus on the "disciplined body" and instead, examines conformity from the perspective of resisters. By balancing accessibly written original ethnographic research with personal narratives, Embodied Resistance provides a window into the everyday lives of those who defy or violate socially constructed body rules and conventions.

Samantha Kwan

About

Books

Join the club