Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse [Hardcover]

Focusing on the body as a visual and discursive platform across public space, we study marginalization as a sociocultural practice and hegemonic schema. Whereas mass incarceration and law enforcement readily feature in discussions of institutionalized racism, we differently highlight understudied sites of normalization and exclusion. Our combined effort centers upon physical contexts (skeletons, pageant stages, gentrifying neighborhoods), discursive spaces (medical textbooks, legal battles, dance pedagogy, vampire narratives) and philosophical arenas (morality, genocide, physician-assisted suicide, cryonic preservation, transfeminism) to deconstruct seemingly intrinsic connections between body and behavior, Whiteness and normativity.

Jamie A. Thomas is assistant professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College.

Christina Jackson is assistant professor of sociology at Stockton University.

Jamie A. Thomas and Christina Jackson's edited volume, Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse, represents an important contribution to this field. . . . Students and scholars interested in corporeal feminism will find the analyses of underresearched modes and contexts of embodiment collected in Embodied Difference to be of great value. . . The volume. . . fulfills its editor's aim to provide an outstanding example of how cross-disciplinary, intersectional feminist research can yield new insights into how policies, practices, and pop culture influence our interpretation of bodies in ways that tend to reinforce the unequal distribution of power and privilege along axes of gender, race, sexuality, class, and ability. Its call for further investigations into the covert operations of the Thing in everyday life sets a fresh agenda for feminist scholarship. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy

Embodied Difference: Divergent Bodies in Public Discourse is a refreshingly interdisciplinary consideration of embodiment as a site of agency, olsV