Body Stories

Body stories capture a nuanced, interconnected, interactive, and complex telling of our understanding, perception, and experience of and through our bodies. Plenty has been published on body image but image suggests a static fixed body, unmitigated through our social interactions and varying times and spaces. This book is not a "how-to" guide for fat confidence. It's not a compendium of fat suffering. It's simply a collection of narratives about what it's like to survive in a weight-hating world. It resists the ways that marginalized bodies are being written and researched and put into other people's ideas about our existence. The stories in this book are celebratory and are painful. They look at intersections of race and queerness; they destabilize womanhood by presenting a range of possible female embodiments. They explore issues of disability and madness. The full range of possibilities that are collected here give a picture of what it means to live in a society with strong and powerful messages about size, about normalcy, about what a moral and healthy life and body look like. This book is a snapshot of its place and time, but these stories remind us that we're here to stay. The body stories will change but we will keep owning our own narratives. While story, especially written by women, is often seen as outside the academic canon, these stories, these creative offerings, are theory, are research, and are activism. They are nothing less than the blueprint for liberation. Writing about fat and about bodies outside of medicalized narratives, without ignoring the impact of race, sexuality, class, ability, gender, fashion, appearance, and beyond, is radical and rigorous. It is impossible to think about the future without wishing for liberation. Liberation can come in many forms. It can mean an awareness, the ability to confront. The stories in this book display the ways that liberation isn't a finish line or a thing we can complete—rather it is a million small actio

An innovative guide to anatomy that uses techniques from yoga and dance to increase awareness of the body.

Imagine a graph with two lines. One indicates happiness, the other tracks how you feel about your body. If you’re like millions of people, the lines do not intersect. But what if they did? This practical, inspirational, and visually lively book shows you how to create a healthier and happier life by treating yourself with compassion rather than shame. It shows the way to a sense of well-being attained by understanding how to love, connect, and care for yourself—and that includes your mind as well as your body. Body Kindness is based on four principles. WHAT YOU DO: the choices you make about food, exercise, sleep, and more HOW YOU FEEL: befriending your emotions and standing up to the unhelpful voice in your head WHO YOU ARE: goal-setting based on your personal values WHERE YOU BELONG: body-loving support from people and communities that help you create a meaningful life With mind and body exercises to keep your energy spiraling up and prompts to help you identify what YOU really want and care about, Body Kindness helps you let go of things you can't control and embrace the things you can by finding the workable, daily steps that fit you best. Think of it as the anti-diet book that leads to a more joyful and meaningful life!

With a Foreword by Professor Katharine Phillips and an Introduction by Professor David Veale and Doctor Rob Willson. Body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) is characterised by a preoccupation with a perceived defect, or defects, in one's appearance. These 'flaws' are either unnoticeable to the outside eye or seen as nothing more than a normal physical variation. To the person with BDD however, the abhorred aspects of their appearance cause significant shame and distress. Some hide away and become housebound, sometimes for many years. BDD affects males and females almost equally and has one of the highest suicide rates of any mental illness. Despite the extreme suffering experienced by people with BDD, it is possible to learn to cope with and even completely move beyond it. The stories in this volume powerfully attest to this. Gathered here are thirty-six lived experiences of people with BDD and their loved ones. They are stories of tremendous bravery, immeasurable determination and incredible hope.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Wild Body. A Soldier of Humour and Other Stories" by Wyndham Lewis. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

This is a captivating collection of short stories by Wyndham Lewis with character studies drawn from his trips to Brittany and Spain. It is one of the earliest works by Lewis that beautifully presents his views on humor and his philosophy of the mind-body dichotomy.

Joyce Carol Oates assembles an outstanding cast of authors—including Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, and Megan Abbott—to explore, subvert, and reinvent one of the most vital subgenres of horror "In this haunting new collection, edited by Oates, fifteen women writers explore the manifold horrors of living (and dying) in a patriarchal society . . . this collection may initially appeal to readers eager for tales filled with vampires and werewolves, influences from beyond the grave, and gore, guts, and ooze. They will not be disappointed. However, the stories not only bleed across the categorical boundaries they have been assigned, but also expand the scope of what is terrifying about the body—living or dead, human or nonhuman—in the first place . . . A bold collection of horror stories that flies in the face of both gender and genre conventions." —Kirkus Reviews While the common belief is that "body horror" as a subgenre of horror fiction dates back to the 1970s, Joyce Carol Oates suggests that Medusa, the snake-haired gorgon in Greek mythology, is the "quintessential emblem of female body horror." In A Darker Shade of Noir: New Stories of Body Horror by Women Writers, Oates has assembled a spectacular cast to explore this subgenre focusing on distortions to the human body in the most fascinating of ways. "Should we know nothing of the female monsters of antiquity," Oates writes in her introduction to the volume, "still we would know that body horror in its myriad manifestations speaks most powerfully to women and girls. To be female is to inhabit a body that is by nature vulnerable to forcible invasion, susceptible to impregnation and repeated pregnancies, condemned to suffer childbirth, often in the past early deaths in childbirth and in the aftermath of childbirth." Featuring brand-new stories by: Margaret Atwood, Tananarive Due, Joyce Carol Oates, Megan Abbott, Raven Leilani, Aimee Bender, Lisa Lim, Cassandra Khaw, Elizabeth Hand, Valerie Martin, Sheila Kohler, Joanna Margaret, Lisa Tuttle, Aimee LaBrie, and Yumi Dineen Shiroma.