The Politics of Women's Bodies, Fourth Edition, is an anthology covering the issues surrounding women's bodies. Threads running throughout the book include the distribution of power between men and women, how that affects cultural standards, and how those standards subsequently serve aspowerful and political tools for controlling women's appearance, sexuality, and behavior. This book fills an important niche not covered by other books: focus on women's bodies, social control, and agency.The new edition includes updated readings which engage diversity and highlight cross-cultural relevance where appropriate.

Is it possible to simultaneously belong to and be exiled from a community? In Politics of the Female Body, Ketu H. Katrak argues that it is not only possible, but common, especially for women who have been subjects of colonial empires. Through her careful analysis of postcolonial literary texts, Katrak uncovers the ways that the female body becomes a site of both oppression and resistance. She examines writers working in the English language, including Anita Desai from India, Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, and Merle Hodge from Trinidad, among others. The writers share colonial histories, a sense of solidarity, and resistance strategies in the on-going struggles of decolonization that center on the body. Bringing together a rich selection of primary texts, Katrak examines published novels, poems, stories, and essays, as well as activist materials, oral histories, and pamphlets—forms that push against the boundaries of what is considered strictly literary. In these varied materials, she reveals common political and feminist alliances across geographic boundaries. A unique comparative look at women’s literary work and its relationship to the body in third world societies, this text will be of interest to literary scholars and to those working in the fields of postcolonial studies and women’s studies.

Winner of the 2015 FWSA Book Prize The body is a site of impassioned, fraught and complex debate in the West today. In one political moment, left-wingers, academics and feminists have defended powerful men accused of sex crimes, positioned topless pictures in the tabloids as empowering, and opposed them for sexualizing breasts and undermining their natural function. At the same time they have been criticized by extreme-right groups for ignoring honour killings and other culture-based forms of violence against women. How can we make sense of this varied terrain? In this important and challenging new book, Alison Phipps constructs a political sociology of womens bodies around key debates: sexual violence, gender and Islam, sex work and motherhood. Her analysis uncovers dubious rhetorics and paradoxical allegiances, and contextualizes these within the powerful coalition of neoliberal and neoconservative frameworks. She explores how feminism can be caricatured and vilified at both ends of the political spectrum, arguing that Western feminisms are now faced with complex problems of positioning in a world where gender often comes second to other political priorities. This book provides a welcome investigation into Western politics around womens bodies, and will be particularly useful to scholars and upper-level students of sociology, political science, gender studies and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in how bodies become politicized.

What does it mean for Black women to organize in a political context that has generally ignored them or been unresponsive although Black women have shown themselves an important voting bloc? How for example, does #sayhername translate into a political agenda that manifests itself in specific policies? Shadow Bodies focuses on the positionality of the Black woman’s body, which serves as a springboard for helping us think through political and cultural representations. It does so by asking: How do discursive practices, both speech and silences, support and maintain hegemonic understandings of Black womanhood thereby rendering some Black women as shadow bodies, unseen and unremarked upon? Grounded in Black feminist thought, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery looks at the functioning of scripts ascribed to Black women’s bodies in the framing of HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse, and mental illness and how such functioning renders some bodies invisible in Black politics in general and Black women’s politics specifically.

In this work the author explores the social and political assumptions of biology, and genetics in particular. She examines the ways biologists use scientific language, use genetics, and apply it to human situations, especially to women's situations.

The politics of the body is often highly contested, culturally specific, and controlled, and this book calls our attention to how bodies are included or excluded in the polity. With governments regulating bodies in ways that mark the political boundaries of who is a citizen, worthy of protection and rights, as well as those who transgress socially proscribed norms, the contributors to this volume offer a systematic investigation of both theoretical and empirical account of bodily differences broadly defined. These chapters, diverse in both the populations and the political behaviours examined, as well as the methodological approaches employed, showcase the significance of body politics in a way few edited works in political science currently do. Arguing that the body is an important site to understand power relations, this book will be of interest to those studying the unequal application of rights to women, racial and ethnic minorities, the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Politics, Groups, and Identities.

As a field of scholarship, gender and politics has exploded over the last fifty years and is now global, institutionalized, and ever expanding. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics brings to political science an accessible and comprehensive overview of the key contributions of gender scholars to the study of politics and shows how these contributions produce a richer understanding of polities and societies. Like the field it represents, the handbook has a broad understanding of what counts as political and is based on a notion of gender that highlights masculinities as well as femininities, thereby moving feminist debates in politics beyond the focus on women. It engages with some of the key aspects of political science as well as important themes in gender and feminist research (such as sexuality and body politics), thereby forging a dialogue between gender studies in politics and mainstream political science. The handbook is organized in sections that look at sexuality and body politics; political economy; civil society; participation, representation and policymaking; institutions, states and governance as well as nation, citizenship and identity. The Oxford Handbook of Gender and Politics contains and reflects the best scholarship in its field.

Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engaging book reveals how once-tabooed issues, such as rape, gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive rights, have emerged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities and covers a broad range of gender and development issues, including fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies, from diverse viewpoints. The book's originality comes through the author's rich experience and engagement in feminist activism and global body politics and was winner of the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.

Under the leadership of the Justice and Development Party in Turkey came new regulations about reproductive rights, family and gender policies. Women's central role in reproductive and domestic work was swiftly reaffirmed as a state value and policies surrounding issues such as abortion and IVF were newly debated. Taking Turkey as the case study, this is the first book to examine the various ways in which neoliberal modes of governing women's bodies come together with conservative and authoritarian measures. The book is divided into three parts - the 'reproductive' body, the 'maternal' body and the 'sexualized' body - to explore the three main governmental representations of, and interventions into, the female body. Topics for discussion include: the increasing control of poor or ethnic minority women's fertility, the expansion of IVF and egg markets, the commodification of pregnancy and motherhood through surrogacy, and the privatization of gynaecological and obstetrical care. The contributors argue that conservative and authoritarian forms of government lead to a direct assault on women's bodies, health and sexuality by legitimizing corporeal control, sexual violence and patriarchal conceptions of religious morality. While focusing on the Turkish case, the editors also propose analytical tools for a broader understanding of the recent changes in the politics of the female body in various contexts such as Eastern Europe, Latin America and the United States.

This work comprises a collection of influential readings in feminist theory. It is divided into four sections: "Reading the Body"; "Bodies in Production"; "The Body Speaks"; and "Body on Stage".