The Body

<p>This college-level handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of sociological and cultural perspectives on the human body. Organized along the lines of a standard anatomical textbook delineated by body parts and processes, this volume subverts the expected content in favor of providing tools for social and cultural analysis. </p> <p>Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural, and political contexts, with emphasis on multiple, contested meanings of the body, body parts, and systems. Case studies, examples, and discussion questions are both US-based and international. Advancing critical body studies, the book explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography, and citizenship status. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics, and social problems. The authors use commonly understood anatomical frames to discuss social, cultural, political, and ethical issues concerning embodiment.</p>

The Body: Social and Cultural Dissections

Politics & Social Sciences

Moore, Lisa Jean

Casper, Monica

Philosophy

Routledge

The Making of the Unborn Patient: Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, Monica J. Casper, It is now possible for physicians to recognize that a pregnant woman's foetus is facing life-threatening problems, perform surgery on the foetus, and if it survives, return it to the woman's uterus to finish gestation. Although foetal surgery has existed in various forms for three decades, it is only just beginning to capture the public's imagination. These still largely experimental procedures raise all types of medical, political and ethical questions. Who is the patient? What are the technical difficulties involved in foetal surgery? How do reproductive politics seep into the operating room, and how do medical definitions and meanings flow out of medicine and into other social spheres? How are ethical issues defined in this practice and who defines them? Is foetal surgery the kind of medicine we want? What is involved in reframing foetal surgery as a women's health issue, rather than simply a paediatric concern? In this ethnographic study of the social, cultural and historical aspects of foetal surgery, Monica Casper addresses these questions. "The Making of the Unborn Patient" examines two important and connected events of the second half of the 20th century: the emergence of foetal surgery as a new medical specialty and the debut of the unborn patient.

The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery

Women's Studies

Rutgers University Press

Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (Biopolitics, 2)

We know more about the physical body—how it begins, how it responds to illness, even how it decomposes—than ever before. Yet not all bodies are created equal, some bodies clearly count more than others, and some bodies are not recognized at all. In Missing Bodies, Monica J. Casper and Lisa Jean Moore explore the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century. The authors examine bodies, both actual and symbolic, in a variety of arenas: pornography, fashion, sports, medicine, photography, cinema, sex work, labor, migration, medical tourism, and war. This new politicsof visibility can lead to the overexposure of some bodies—Lance Armstrong, Jessica Lynch—and to the near invisibility of others—dead Iraqi civilians, illegal immigrants, the victims of HIV/AIDS and "natural" disasters.Missing Bodies presents a call for a new, engaged way of seeing and recovering bodies in a world that routinely, often strategically,obscures or erases them. It poses difficult, even startling questions: Why did it take so long for the United States media to begin telling stories about the "falling bodies" of 9/11? Why has the United States government refused to allow photographs or filming of flag-draped coffins carrying the bodies of soldiers who are dying in Iraq? Why are the bodies of girls and women so relentlessly sexualized? By examining the cultural politics at work in such disappearances and inclusions of the physical body the authors show how the social, medical and economic consequences of visibility can reward or undermine privilege in society.

Anthropology

NYU Press

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Books by Casper, Monica