Body Battlegrounds

"What does it mean to use bodily resistance as a lens to expose and critique highly policed social rules around body size, grooming, skin color, birthing, mental health, aging, partner violence, and much more without falling into the trap of individualizing identity politics? This is what Body Battlegrounds is all about. It is at once an accessible continuation of the radical tradition in scholarship on bodies and a great gift to interdisciplinary scholars and their students."
—Meika Loe, Professor of Sociology and Women's Studies, Colgate University, and author of Aging Our Way: Lessons for Living from 85 and Beyond

"A pathbreaking, exciting, and often surprising collection that provides unpredictable insights into aspects of embodiment not frequently considered. These wide-ranging essays reveal a fundamental human commonality: We all have to deal with the bodies we have while challenging the context in which they exist."
—Loretta Ross, author and co-creator of Reproductive Justice

"Bobel and Kwan have done it again! By 'it,' I mean they have curated yet another theoretically and empirically diverse, engaging, insightful, and highly readable collection of scholarly and activist writing on bodily norms and the myriad ways people resist (and sometimes accommodate) them."
—Laura M. Carpenter, Associate Professor of Sociology, Vanderbilt University, and author of Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences

About Embodied Resistance, Chris Bobel & Samantha Kwan's previous edited collection (also published by Vanderbilt):
"Finally, here is a book about the body that is as juicy, colorful, and unpredictable as the body itself. Embodied Resistance is not only about resistance but as a collection vibrates with its own resistance, both to academic abstractions about 'the body' and to uncritical storytelling. A wonderful blend of ethnographic research and personal reflections, it toes no one theoretical line and embraces a fascinating range of practices, issues, and experiences. This is a book students will identify with, argue with, shed tears over, laugh along with, and rarest of all for a scholarly reader, enjoy curling up with."
—Susan Bordo, author of Unbearable Weight and The Male Body