Gendered Bodies

In this unique approach to the field of body studies, author, scholar, and educator Victoria Kannen explores what it means to exist in a body that is constantly on display and subjected to public scrutiny. Kannen examines the interplay of many ways our bodies express identity, such as gender, race, body size, sexuality, disability, body modification, and age, and how public scrutiny of those expressions can impact our public and private selves. Intertwining personal narratives of self-identified “odd and awed” women with theoretical chapters that help to elucidate the role of social power, this volume tackles the stares, comments, and questions that are directed towards bodies in public space through original research, personal narratives, and artistic expression. As readers encounter the narratives and images throughout the book, they will be supported by scholarly chapters on embodiment, identity, resistance, and power to help analyze, reflect on, and critically engage with the content. Through stories, theory, and art, this timely new resource will engage students and scholars of women’s and gender studies, sociology, critical disability studies, and body studies. FEATURES: - Offers a unique understanding of interpretation and what it means to have a body that causes curiosity, discrimination, and lifelong interactions - Accessible and engaging for students and scholars, as well as those outside of academia - Provides creative and non-traditional opportunities for critical engagement with various embodiments

Despite all the efforts to promote change, power and authority still seem to be permanently associated with the white, the straight and the masculine, both symbolically and in the everyday world of organizations. As the intricate relationship between the symbolic and the everyday remains under-researched, this anthology proposes a transdisciplinary feminist perspective drawing on the humanities in order to explore the complex nature of the gendered politics of organizations. Indeed, analyzing how images, narratives, symbols and bodies are all part of how power and gender are constructed in organizations through a broad and international range of empirical studies, Bodies, Symbols and Organizational Practice explores issues at the interstices of the humanities and social sciences, combining theoretical and analytical perspectives from both areas. Providing a radical analysis of the gendered dynamics of power as well as petitioning for radical intervention into those dynamics, this timely volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as: Organization and Management Studies, Gender studies, Feminist theory and Sociology of Work & Industry.

Gendering Bodies explains how the social world shapes our physical bodies and how our bodies shape the social world. In this remarkable investigation into contemporary ideas of gender, sociologists Crawley, Foley, and Shehan argue that bodies are constantly being gendered, that is, encouraged to participate in (heterosexual) gender conformity. This engendering influences nutrition practices, work and employment choices, diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, sexual practices, and training - or lack thereof - in sports and fitness. This is an accessible, yet comprehensive, sociological inquiry into a theory of the gendered body.

This book focuses on key themes that reveal how gendered relations, ideologies, and practices shape human bodies. At the same time, it shows how human bodies are linked to other significant axes of inequality based on racial ethnic group, disability, sexuality, class, culture, religion, age, and nation. This second edition incorporates sixteen new selections on such topics as evolution and motherhood; breastfeeding; breast cancer; the effects of height on men; job discrimination and transgendered people; world champion runner Caster Semenya and sex verification; disability, gender, and embodiment; and Palestinian female suicide bombers.

This book looks at the representation of the body in culture from a feminist perspective. Subjects covered include bodybuilding, cosmetic surgery, and cyberculture.

Gendered Bodies introduces readers to women's visual art in contemporary China by examining how the visual process of gendering reshapes understandings of historiography, sexuality, pain, and space. When artists take the body as the subject of female experience and the medium of aesthetic experiment, they reveal a wealth of noncanonical approaches to art. The insertion of women's narratives into Chinese art history rewrites a historiography that has denied legitimacy to the woman artist. The gendering of sexuality reveals that the female body incites pleasure in women themselves, reversing the dynamic from woman as desired object to woman as desiring subject. The gendering of pain demonstrates that for those haunted by the sociopolitical past, the body can articulate traumatic memories and psychological torment. The gendering of space transforms the female body into an emblem of landscape devastation, remaps ruin aesthetics, and extends the politics of gender identity into cyberspace and virtual reality. The work presents a critical review of women's art in contemporary China in relation to art traditions, classical and contemporary. Inscribing the female body into art generates not only visual experimentation, but also interaction between local art/cultural production and global perception. While artists may seek inspiration and exhibition space abroad, they often reject the (Western) label "feminist artist." An extensive analysis of artworks and artists—both well- and little-known—provides readers with discursively persuasive and visually provocative evidence. Gendered Bodies follows an interdisciplinary approach that general readers as well as scholars will find inspired and inspiring.

Interest in sociological study of the body, theoretically and empirically, has increased dramatically in the 1990s. This book builds on this work by bringing together exciting and stimulating research which examines the social and cultural processes involved in the construction of gendered bodies and sexual practices. Contributors explore these issues in a variety of settings ranging from the workplace and leisure industry to social arenas of moral and medical regulation.

With its roots in Middle Eastern and North African dance, belly dance is a popular leisure activity in the West with women (and some men) of all ages and body types pursing the activity for diverse reasons. Drawing on empirical research, fieldwork, and interviews with participants, this book investigates the social world and small group cultures of American belly dance, examining the various ways in which people use leisure to construct the self and social relationships. With attention to gender expectations, body image, sexuality, community, spiritual experiences, and the process of identifying with a leisure activity, this book shows how people engage in the same pursuit in a variety of ways. It sheds light on the manner in which dancers strive to deal with the challenges presented by internal power struggles and legitimacy bids, public beliefs, narrow cultural ideals of beauty and often sexualized assumptions about their art. A fascinating study of identity work and the reproduction and challenging of gender norms through a gendered leisure activity, Gendered Bodies and Leisure: The Practice and Performance of American Belly Dance will be of interest to students and scholars researching gender and sexuality, the sociology of leisure, the sociology of the body and interactionist thought.