Body Battlegrounds explores the rich and complex lives of society's body outlaws—individuals from myriad social locations who oppose hegemonic norms, customs, and conventions about the body. Original research chapters (based on textual analysis, qualitative interviews, and participant observation) along with personal narratives provide a window into the everyday lives of people rewriting the norms of embodiment in sites like schools, sporting events, and doctors' offices. Table of Contents Introduction | Chris Bobel and Samantha Kwan Part I: Going "Natural" • Body Hair Battlegrounds: The Consequences, Reverberations, and Promises of Women Growing Their Leg, Pubic, and Underarm Hair | Breanne Fahs • Radical Doulas, Childbirth Activism, and the Politics of Embodiment | Monica Basile • Caring for the Corpse: Embodied Transgression and Transformation in Home Funeral Advocacy | Anne Esacove Living Resistance: • Deconstructing Reconstructing: Challenging Medical Advice Following Mastectomy | Joanna Rankin • My Ten-Year Dreadlock Journey: Why I Love the "Kink" in My Hair . . . Today | Cheryl Thompson • Living My Full Life: My Rejecting Weight Loss as an Imperative for Recovery from Binge Eating Disorder | Christina Fisanick • Pretty Brown: Encounters with My Skin Color | Praveena Lakshmanan Part II: Representing Resistance • Blood as Resistance: Photography as Contemporary Menstrual Activism | Shayda Kafai • Am I Pretty Enough for You Yet?: Resistance through Parody in the Pretty or Ugly YouTube Trend | Katherine Phelps • The Infidel in the Mirror: Mormon Women's Oppositional Embodiment | Kelly Grove and Doug Schrock Living Resistance: • A Cystor's Story: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and the Disruption of Normative Femininity | Ledah McKellar • Old Bags Take a Stand: A Face Off with Ageism in America | Faith Baum and Lori Petchers • Making Up with My Body: Applying Cosmetics to Resist Disembodiment | Haley Gentile • I Am a Person Now: Autism, Indistinguishability, and (Non)optimal Outcome | Alyssa Hillary Part III: Creating Community, Disrupting Assumptions • Yelling and Pushing on the Bus: The Complexity of Black Girls' Resistance | Stephanie D. Sears and Maxine Leeds Craig • Big Gay Men's Performative Protest Against Body Shaming: The Case of Girth and Mirth | Jason Whitesel • "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Embodied Activism of Domestic Violence Survivors on Welfare | Sheila M. Katz Living Resistance: • "Your Signing Is So Beautiful!": The Radical Invisibility of ASL Interpreters in Public | Rachel Kolb • Two Shakes | Rev. Adam Lawrence Dyer • "Showing Our Muslim": Embracing the Hijab in the Era of Paradox | Sara Rehman • "Doing Out": A Black Dandy Defies Gender Norms in the Bronx | Mark Broomfield • Everybody: Making Fat Radio for All of Us | Cat Pausé Part IV: Transforming Institutions and Ideologies • Embodying Nonexistence: Encountering Mono- and Cisnormativities in Everyday Life | J. E. Sumerau • Freeing the Nipple: Encoding the Heterosexual Male Gaze into Law | J. Shoshanna Ehrlich • Give Us a Twirl: Male Baton Twirlers' Embodied Resistance in a Feminized Terrain | Trenton M. Haltom • "That Gentle Somebody": Rethinking Black Female Same-Sex Practices and Heteronormativity in Contemporary South Africa | Taylor Riley Living Resistance:

The complex lives of society's body outlaws and their acts of resistance

The Managed Body productively complicates ‘menstrual hygiene management’ (MHM)—a growing social movement to support menstruating girls in the Global South. Bobel offers an invested critique of the complicated discourses of MHM including its conceptual and practical links with the Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) development sector, human rights and ‘the girling of development.’ Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews, participant observations and the digital materials of NGOs and social businesses, Bobel shows how MHM frames problems and solutions to capture attention and direct resources to this highly-tabooed topic. She asserts that MHM organizations often inadvertently rely upon weak evidence and spectacularized representations to make the claim of a ‘hygienic crisis’ that authorizes rescue. And, she argues, the largely product-based solutions that follow fail to challenge the social construction of the menstrual body as dirty and in need of concealment. While cast as fundamental to preserving girls’ dignity, MHM prioritizes ‘technological fixes’ that teach girls to discipline their developing bodies vis a vis consumer culture, a move that actually accommodates more than it resists the core problem of menstrual stigma.

In popular debates over the influences of nature versus culture on human lives, bodies are often assigned to the category of "nature": biological, essential, and pre-social. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment challenges that view, arguing that bodies both shape and get shaped by human societies. As such, the body is an appropriate and necessary area of study for sociologists. The Handbook works to clarify the scope of this topic and display the innovations of research within the field. The volume is divided into three main parts: Bodies and Methodology; Marginalized Bodies; and Embodied Sociology. Sociologists contributing to the first two parts focus on the body and the ways it is given meaning, regulated, and subjected to legal and medical oversight in a variety of social contexts (particularly when the body in question violates norms for how a culture believes bodies "ought" to behave or appear). Sociologists contributing to the last part use the bodily as a lens through which to study social institutions and experiences. These social settings range from personal decisions about medical treatment to programs for teaching police recruits how to use physical force, from social movement tactics to countries' understandings of race and national identity. The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of the Body also prioritizes empirical evidence and methodological rigor, attending to the ways particular lives are lived in particular physical bodies located within particular cultural and institutional contexts. Many chapters offer extended methodological reflections, providing guidance on how to conduct sociological research on the body and, at times, acknowledging the role the authors' own bodies play in developing their knowledge of the research subject.

The growth of the service economy, widespread acceptance of cosmetic technologies, expansion of global media, and the intensification of scrutiny of appearance brought about by the internet have heightened the power of beauty ideals in everyday life. A range of interdisciplinary contributions by an international roster of established and emerging scholars will introduce students to the emergence of debates about beauty, including work in history, sociology, communications, anthropology, gender studies, disability studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, philosophy, and psychology. The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is an essential reference work for students and researchers interested in the politics of appearance. Comprising over 30 chapters by a team of international contributors the Handbook is divided into six parts: Theorizing Beauty Politics Competing Definitions of Beauty Beauty, Activism, and Social Change Body Work Beauty and Labor Beauty and the Lifecourse The Routledge Companion to Beauty Politics is essential reading for students in Women and Gender Studies, Sociology, Media Studies, Communications, Philosophy, and Psychology.

While the 21st century insulin crisis provokes protest and political dialogue, public conception of diabetes remain firmly unchanged. Popular media representations portray diabetes as a condition couched in lifestyle choices. In the groundbreaking volume (Un)doing Diabetes, authors destabilize depictions so powerful, so subtle, and so unquestioned, that readers may find assertions counterintuitive. (Un)doing Diabetes is the first collection of essays to use disability studies to explore representations of diabetes across a wide range of mediums- from Twitter to TV and film, to theater, fiction, fanfiction, fashion and more. This disability studies approach to diabetes locates individual experiences of diabetes within historical and contemporary social conditions. In undoing diabetes, authors deconstruct assumptions the public commonly holds about diabetes, while writers doing diabetes present counter-narratives community members create to represent themselves. This collection will be of interest to scholars, activists, caregivers, and those living with diabetes.