"Anyone with a body will know how troublesome they can be, but Body Phobia explains it's not just you--it's all of us. Dianna Anderson's keen insights into the ways we fear our own embodiment, and how ambient cultural anxiety around our bodies is vented particularly on fat, queer, and racialized bodies, is an essential tool to understanding and connecting with our embodied selves."
Body Phobia
The Western Roots of Our Fear of Difference
$24.99
- In stock
-
Quantity discount
- For bulk discounting, please call Sales and Service at 877-373-0706 and ask about our Corporate Sales Program.
Buy on
Your body is who you are. We will only build a just society by rejecting fear of our bodies.
Western culture hates the fact that we have bodies--from evangelical culture, which insists "you are a soul and have a body," to wellness culture that turns your control over your body into a moral test, to transphobic activism that insists any step taken to change one's body is an immoral act, to the treatment of disabled bodies in a profoundly ableist culture. Fear has led cisgender, white, and able-bodied people to deprioritize the physical experience and prioritize the mind alone, contributing to our alienation from one another, the marginalization of certain kinds of bodies, and harm to us all.
Body Phobia is an examination of the western societal fear of the body. Starting with an excavation of the religious roots of this fear, Dianna Anderson then zooms out to show how fear of bodies permeates all parts of culture, influencing who gets to be perceived as more than their body, and who does not. By becoming self-aware of how our bodies interact with the world and what it means to have a body, we can begin to overcome the harm done in divorcing the western body and the western mind for centuries. Through cutting analysis and candid storytelling, Dianna E. Anderson exposes our fear-based politics and shows us a way to approach bodies that is neither positive nor negative but neutral. Our bodies are. And that's enough.