Bodies Out Of Bounds

"This is an exceptional collection—the subject is of obvious importance, yet terribly undertheorized and unexamined. I know of no other work that offers what this collection provides."—Marcia Millman, author of Such a Pretty Face: Being Fat in America ". . . A valuable contribution to scholarly debates on the place of excessive bodies in contemporary culture. This book promises to enrich all areas of inquiry related to the politics of bodies."—Carole Spitzack, author of Confessing Excess: Women and the Politics of Body Reduction "This anthology includes a wide range of perceptive and original essays, which explore and analyze the underlying ideologies that have made fat "incorrect." Echoing the spirit of the nineteenth-century adage about children who should be neither seen nor heard, some of the authors powerfully remind us that we keep "bodies out of bound" silenced and unseen-unless, of course, we need to peek at the comic or grotesque."—Raquel Salgado Scherr, co-author of Face Value: The Politics of Beauty "Through textual analyses, video/film analyses, television theory, and literary theory, this collection demonstrates the various ways in which dominant representations of fat and corpulence have been both demonized and rendered invisible. . . . This volume will be a crucial corollary to work on the tyranny of slenderness; a collection of different perspectives on the fat body is sorely missing in women's studies, communication, and media studies."—Sarah Banet-Weiser, author of The Most Beautiful Girl in the World: Beauty Pageants and National Identity

This work examines a number of sites of struggle over the cultural meaning of fatness. It is grounded in scholarship on identity politics, the social construction of beauty, and the subversion of hegemonic medical ideas about the dangers of fatness.

A radical approach to film viewing

From #1 New York Times bestseller Lauren Blakely, a steamy new romance about a quarterback on the rise, the off-limits team lawyer, and a spark too hot to resist. The first rule of football--don't screw with a streak. My career is finally looking up, and I'm leading a new pro team down the field every Sunday. No way will I mess with that. But when I meet the most stunning and captivating woman I've ever seen, I tell myself one night will have to be enough. But it's not. And now I can't get her out of my mind. Even when I'm playing. Even when I need to focus. Even when I'm on the hottest streak of my life. And it turns out, she's not just some random woman I met. She works for the team. My team. *** I only have one goal this season--do my part as the team's lawyer to keep them out of trouble. Help rebuild their reputation on and off the field. There's no room for error and certainly no room for a secret tryst with a player . . . even if he's the quarterback. Right?

In Out of Bounds, feminist Helen Lenskyj presents an insightful examination of the links between women's participation in sports and the control of their reproductive capacity and sexuality. She identifies the female frailty myth, the illusion of male athletic superiority and the concept of compulsory heterosexuality as powerful determinants of "masculinity" and "femininity" in the realm of sport. Looking at developments from the 1880's to the 1980's, Lenskyj discusses medical views of women's health and physical potential and examines the social attitudes and practices that keep girls and women from participating in the full range of sports and physical activities. Topics include contact sports, self-defence, fitness, bodybuilding and women-only sport. Photographs, memorabilia and eye-opening information covering 100 years reveals the missing links between women, sport and sexuality.

Masterful essays that illuminate not only how we die but also how we live. Thomas Lynch, poet, funeral director, and author of the highly praised The Undertaking, winner of an American Book Award and finalist for the National Book Award, continues to examine the relations between the "literary and mortuary arts." "Lynch engages the reader with a mixture of poetic and funerary elements....his voice is rich and generous."—Richard Bernstein, New York Times "[W]hat makes him such a fine essayist is that it's just the business of everyday life and death to him."—Los Angeles Times Book Review "Few readers will walk away from this volume less than stunned and grateful."—Jay Parini, author of Benjamin's Crossing "A luminous work of words."—Nicholas Delbanco, author of What Remains

What's Wrong with Fat? examines the social implications of understanding fatness as a medical health risk, disease, and epidemic. Examining the ways in which debates over fatness have developed, Abigail Saguy argues that the obesity crisis literally makes us fat, intensifies negative body image, and justifies weight-based discrimination.

Cultural anxieties about fatness and the attendant stigmatisation of fat bodies, have lent a medical authority and cultural legitimacy to what can be described as ’fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation, pathologisation, and commodification of fatness, coupled with the moral panic over an alleged ’obesity epidemic’, this volume brings together the latest scholarship from various critical disciplines to challenge existing ideas of fat and fat embodiment. Shedding light on the ways in which fat embodiment is lived, experienced, regulated and (re)produced across a range of cultural sites and contexts, Queering Fat Embodiment destabilises established ideas about fat bodies, making explicit the intersectionality of fat identities and thereby countering the assertion that fat studies has in recent years reproduced a white, ableist, heteronormative subjectivity in its analyses. A critical queer examination on fatness, Queering Fat Embodiment will be of interest to scholars of cultural and queer theory, sociology and media studies, working on questions of embodiment, stigmatisation and gender and sexuality.