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This volume addresses how the rhetoric of feminist empowerment has been combined with mainstream representations of food, thus creating a cultural consciousness around food and eating that is unmistakably pathological. Throughout, Natalie Jovanovski discusses key texts written by women, for women: best-selling diet books, popular cookbooks produced by female food celebrities, and iconic feminist self-help texts. This is the first book to engage in a feminist analysis of body-policing food trends that focus specifically on the use of feminist rhetoric as a harmful aspect of food culture. There is a smorgasbord of seemingly diverse gender roles for women to choose from, but many encourage breaking gender norms and embracing a love of food while perpetuating old narratives of guilt and restraint. Digesting Femininities problematizes the gendering of food and eating and challenges the reader to imagine what a genderless and emancipatory food culture would look like.

What is the essence of black dance in America? To answer that question, Brenda Dixon Gottschild maps an unorthodox'geography', the geography of the black dancing body, to show the central place black dance has in American culture. From the feet to the butt, to hair to skin/face, and beyond to the soul/spirit, Brenda Dixon Gottschild talks to some of the greatest choreographers of our day including Garth Fagan, Francesca Harper, Meredith Monk, Brenda Buffalino, Doug Elkins, Ralph Lemon, Fernando Bujones, Bill T. Jones, Trisha Brown, Jawole Zollar, Bebe Miller, Sean Curran and Shelly Washington to look at the evolution of black dance and it's importance to American culture. This is a groundbreaking piece of work by one of the foremost African-American dance critics of our day.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, American media abound with images and narratives of bodily transformations. At the crossroads of American, cultural, literary, media, gender, queer, disability and governmentality studies, the book presents a timely intervention into critical debates on body transformations and contemporary makeover culture.

Body image can be influenced by a complex interaction of factors ranging between a person's individual thoughts, beliefs, feelings and behaviours regarding their own body, and their perception of what counts as the ideal body within their own social and cultural environment, and in the media. This book explains body dissatisfaction and eating disorder issues, and focuses on developing ways of improving body image, particularly in children and young people. Also includes: worksheets and activities, fast facts, glossary, web links, index. Titles in the Issues in Society series are individual resource books which provide an overview on a specific subject comprised of facts and opinions. The information in this resource book is not from any single author, publication or organisation. The unique value of the Issues in Society series lies in its diversity of content and perspectives. The content comes from a wide variety of sources and includes: newspaper reports and opinion pieces, website fact sheets, magazine and journal articles, statistics and surveys, government reports, and literature from special interest groups.

In this book, the authors present current research in the study of the gender differences, sociocultural influences and health implications of body image. Topics include muscle dysmorphia as an expression of cultural and social standard influence; a cross-national examination of body image and health behaviors in Jordan and the United States; body image and sexuality in breast cancer survivors; body dissatisfaction among African American, Asian American, and Latina women; mens'body image; eating and body-related disorders among men; mass media's effect on body image and eating disturbances; transferring personal body knowledge in adolescents; body image investment and self-regulation of weight control behaviors; explicit and implicit anti-fat attitudes; feminism and body image; dietary habits, exercise and body image; gender difference modulation in a body-selective region in the brain; body image improvement after cosmetic surgery by evaluating postural changes; body image and quality of life of women with polycystic ovary syndrome; and evaluation of ideal and acceptable body shapes in older adults.

In our appearance-obsessed society, eating is about much more than hunger and sustenance. Food inspires pleasure and anxiety, shame and obsession. We are constantly judged on how we look, so we've come to judge ourselves (and others) on what and how we eat.Joyce Maynard writes about learning to make pie with her complex but adored mother. Caroline Leavitt's chilling piece describes the overlap between power and eating. Ophira Edut explains how an outspoken “body outlaw” wound up on Jenny Craig. Diana Abu-Jaber writes about abandoning her Bedouin customs for America's silverware and table manners–and missing the physical, hands-on connection with food. Exploring the bonds between appetite and remorse, hunger and longing, satisfaction and desire, this anthology is for every woman who's ever felt guilty about eating dessert, or gushed over a friend's weight loss, or wished she had a different body. Feed Me! features the following essays:“He Called Me Fat; It Set Me Free” by Sari Botton “The Grief Diety” by Caroline Leavitt “With Hands” by Diana Abu-Jaber “Seconds” by Jenny Allen “My Worst Excess” by Amity Gaige “Sisi, You're Getting Fat” by Courtney E. Martin “My Ten Plagues” by Harriet Brown “Top Model” by Magali Amadei “Reader, I Ate Him” by Brenda Copeland “The Twin Paradox” by Susan O'Doherty “Attack of the XL Girl” by Laurie Notaro “Sugar Plum Fairy” by Dana Kinstler “Sky Girl” by Ann Hood “Plus What?” by Lisa Romeo “Ess, Ess” by Rochelle Jewel Shapiro “In the House of Jean Nidetch” by Whitney Otto “You're Not Fat” by Kate Harding “My Binge Year” by Jane E. Brody “Day One” by Wendy McClure “Quacks” by Kathi Kamen Goldmark “Battle of the Bulge: Notes from a Decade of Body Activism” by Ophira Edut “Take this Cake and Shove it” by Joan Fischer “Pie” by Joyce Maynard

In analyses of tattoo contests, advertising, and modern primitive photographs, the book shows how images of tattooed bodies communicate and disrupt notions of gender, class, and exoticism through their discursive performances. Fenske suggests working within dominant discourse to represent and subvert oppressive gender and class evaluations.

This uniquely integrative handbook provides a comprehensive account of current theory, research, and clinical practice in the area of body image and body image disorders.

The choreographies of Bill T. Jones, Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels, Zab Maboungou, David Dorfman, Marie Chouinard, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, and others, have helped establish dance as a crucial discourse of the 90s. These dancers, Ann Cooper Albright argues, are asking the audience to see the body as a source of cultural identity — a physical presence that moves with and through its gendered, racial, and social meanings.Through her articulate and nuanced analysis of contemporary choreography, Albright shows how the dancing body shifts conventions of representation and provides a critical example of the dialectical relationship between cultures and the bodies that inhabit them. As a dancer, feminist, and philosopher, Albright turns to the material experience of bodies, not just the body as a figure or metaphor, to understand how cultural representation becomes embedded in the body. In arguing for the intelligence of bodies, Choreographing Difference is itself a testimonial, giving voice to some important political, moral, and artistic questions of our time.Ebook Edition Note: All images have been redacted.

Whether they are rich or poor, tall or short, liberal or conservative, most young American women have one thing in common - they want to be thin. And they are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to get that way, even to the point of starving themselves. Why are America's women so preoccupied with weight? What has caused record numbers of young women - even before they reach their teenage years - to suffer from anorexia and bulimia? In Am I Thin Enough Yet?, Sharlene Hesse-Biber answers these questions and more, as she goes beyond traditional psychological explanations of eating disorders to level a powerful indictment against the social, political, and economic pressures women face in a weight-obsessed society. Packed with first-hand, intimate portraits of young women from a wide variety of backgrounds, and drawing on historical accounts and current material culled from both popular and scholarly sources, Am I Thin Enough Yet? offers a provocative new way of understanding why women feel the way they do about their minds and bodies. Specifically, Hesse-Biber highlights the various ways in which American families, schools, popular culture, and the health and fitness industry all undermine young women's self-confidence as they inculcate the notions that thinness is beauty and that a woman's body is more important than her mind. The book concludes with Hesse-Biber's prescriptions on how women can overcome their low self-image through therapy, spiritualism, and grass-roots efforts to empower themselves against a society obsessed with beauty and thinness.

This collection of feminist essays from a variety of disciplines explores the idea of the body as a site for the production of political ideologies.Bodily Discursions offers a multiplicity of feminist perspectives on the body, especially the female body, from a variety of disciplines: literary history, social theory, art history, cultural studies, the history of rhetoric, film, and literary criticism among others. Subjects range from public punishment of outspoken women during the English Renaissance to current responses to the AIDS pandemic in the popular media. Contributors include Alice E. Adams, Susanmarie Harrington, Catherine Hobbs, Cynthia Huff, Cathy Peppers, Roberta Schreyer, Julie Shaffer, Torri L. Thompson, Angela Wall, Deborah S. Wilson, and Christine Moneera Laennec.All of the essays offer variations on the same theme—the idea that the body is a site for the production of political ideologies, particularly in response to social exigencies and cultural crises. However, there is no single, over-arching ideological model here for feminism, much less for reading the body in a specific historical or cultural moment.Bodily Discursions offers instead a number of individual voices on a variety of issues and phenomena as they determine the configuration of the body. This book demonstrates that society needs to pay attention to how the body is manipulated if we are to work for social progress and political justice, for it is through our bodies that we all must articulate our experience and live our lives.'This topic is on the cutting edge of scholarship in both feminist and cultural studies. It is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field.'-- Elizabeth D. Harvey, University of Western OntarioDeborah S. Wilson teaches in the English Department at Illinois Central College. Christine Moneera Laennec is a lecturer in the French Department of Aberdeen University, Scotland.