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This chapter offer glimpses of how women appear in forensic medical descriptions as sexually deviant bodies—often disembodied, always empirically verifiable. It analyzes medico-legal accounts of abortion, descriptions that overlapped with the forensic assessment of rape, virginity testing, and infanticide. Different authorities, including coroners, medical doctors, policemen, state administrators, and social commentators, utilized a circular form of reasoning where anatomical description was united with a speculative sociology of Indian women's sexuality, and then read back onto the body to discern the meaning of the anatomical violence on the body. These case studies of the body utilized typological categories that link women's social status to their sexual behavior. Over the course of individual case studies, social typologies were read back onto parts of women's bodies to comprehend the meaning of physical evidence. This circularity appears in legal medicine as a natural form of reasoning: a logic that seamlessly united anatomical descriptions of sexualized bodies with the ethno-scientific assessment of social identity.

This chapter focuses on the issue of rape, where the application of a property discourse is almost entirely metaphorical, with no direct implication as regards commodification. It deals almost exclusively with heterosexual rape, and with the rape of women's bodies, not those of girls or boys, for it is as regards the rape of adult women that the pull of property models has been most evident. It argues that bodily experience is central to understanding the nature and harm of rape, and that property discourse makes this harder to grasp. It rejects a property model of rape and warns that when rape is represented in ways that minimize the significance that both men and women have bodies and experience pain and fear, reduces something that potentially alerts us to a shared vulnerability into a minority concern.

The literature regarding the female body consists of a vast collection of political, anthropological, medical, sociological, and religious studies about how the social constructions of women's bodies are used and even abused so that the lives of women may be controlled. Women's bodies have played no small part in the establishment of the relationship between men and women. In several cultures today, various cultural practices and beliefs that are associated with the honor and shame complex that started in the Mediterranean region continue to persist. This complex has profound effects particularly among Muslim women. This chapter looks into some of the ideas that are crucial to the honor-shame complex which includes the social construction attributed to women's bodies, how women are perceived as property, the importance of virginity, and honor killings.

This chapter examines how southern physicians constructed the meanings of male and female bodies. Believing that reproductive processes were inherently dangerous to women's health, doctors throughout the nation sought to extend their authority by proclaiming that menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and menopause often required medical attention. In the South, these vulnerabilities had to be ascribed to white women's bodies at the same time that doctors rejected them for black women. However, doctors eager to expand their practice and willing to acknowledge black women's suffering could not reject them too vehemently. This chapter considers how physicians defined white women's bodies as well as the ways in which they addressed the contradictions in their explanations of racial and sexual differences. It shows that physicians utilized the familiar trope of the dangers of modern civilized life and sympathy theory to explain women's health, and especially white women's vulnerable bodies and reproductive suffering in contrast to the relative absence of such weakness in black women.

This chapter examines the discursive forces that competed to define Korean women's bodies and reproductive capacities within the framework of medical science. Reproducing the nation was a top priority for all modernizing countries but was even more pressing under colonial occupation. To emerge victorious and independent, Koreans needed not only numbers but strong, healthy bodies and minds to rebuild the homeland. Critical debates about the modernization of childbirth, birth control, age of marriage, and hygiene opened up a new arena of discourse on sex. While the colonial government sought to improve the quality and quantity of its workforce in the empire, Koreans aimed to create a healthier population to assume control over an independent nation. They also resisted Japanese attempts to colonize the Korean “national body” by maintaining as much control as possible over the public discourse.

The chapter discusses why study of religious traditions and rituals is critical for understanding social processes in historical studies. It traces some prominent historical studies on how women have been represented in various sources, why these sources focus on her body and reproductivity and ignore other aspects of her existence. Mehargarh and Harappan female figurines, women in the Brāhmaṇa and other texts, the obsession with the body in Buddhist and Jaina monastic traditions are all discussed in order to trace the historical context in which the Puranic references to women emerge. The chapter focuses on the need to trace gender ideologies in which women’s bodies are treated as sites for expressing religiosity, either through over-emphasis on their reproductivity or through projecting them as polluting and repugnant.

This book explores how developers of modern intrauterine devices (IUDs) have adapted to different social interests. It details how they understood the political stakes of women’s bodies. It argues that scientific work organizes itself in response to the socially and geographically diverse demands around fertility control and acts on women’s bodies through its discourse. It shows an example of the global political economy of women’s bodies in the history of this contraceptive device. It believes that women’s social empowerment is a prerequisite to reproductive self-determination and well-being. This book describes how different modes of governance over women’s bodies are linked to one another. An overview of the chapters included in this book is finally given.

This chapter develops Chapter Two's discussion of the social nature of time to consider whether women's bodies and/or social roles give rise to a specifically female ‘time culture’ and, if so, the place of such ‘women's time’ in patriarchal capitalist societies. It rejects any claim that ‘women's time’ and ‘men's time’ can be seen as closed and exclusive categories. However, the chapter agrees with those writers who argue that women's traditional roles and responsibilities give rise to temporal rhythms and needs that are often in conflict with the logic of commodified clock time to which they are often forced to conform. It also finds that the inappropriate imposition of clock time on caring work and relationships can be damaging and counter-productive.

This chapter examines physicians' efforts to understand various types of anomalous bodies. Southern physicians who recognized race, sex, and place as essential aspects of bodies had to acknowledge that these categories were not always precisely defined. People could move from the North or from Europe to the South or from one place to another within it. Although custom and law defined all slaves as black, medicine was aware that interracial sex led to many bodies that combined the blood and thus the characteristics of the two races. Far less common, but certainly compelling to doctors, were bodies that exhibited aspects of both male and female. Physicians determined to define what was normal believed that studying bodies that fell between categories could help them understand health and illness. This chapter explores how southern physicians addressed the intellectual dilemmas posed by bodies of mixed race and by the ambiguous nature of women's bodies. It also considers how physicians thought about the maternal influence on the health of the fetus during the course of pregnancy.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Alexander’s The Venus Hottentot and Deborah Richards Last One Out—both of which reference black popular cultural figures such as Saartjie Baartman to remap the difficult genealogy of black corporeality. These collections consider and critique models of diasporic subject formation that lean on example, exception, and recovery, creating instead a network of compromised affiliations and cosmopolitan desires that acknowledge both the pleasures and dangers of representation. Tracing a range of alternative ways to engage the vexed black body through its very visible global circulation, Alexander and Richards reorder the legacies of iconic raced and gendered representations; hence, establishing new genealogy of black women's bodies in innovative form.

This introductory chapter chronicles the evolving discourse of women's health, from its commonly cited inception at the Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. It explores the strides made in the advancement of women's health and, of course, the development of civil rights and other modes of political enfranchisement that occurred along with these advances. The chapter likewise considers the issues women's health activists still face to this day, such as the struggle against the medical sexism prevalent even in institutions meant to help these women. Moreover, the bodies of women are often perceived differently by those in the medical profession, as they are often classified—often to the detriment of the woman's well-being—according to race and class, thus opening up issues of diversity as well as other dimensions critical to women's access to “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being.”

This chapter examines Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and African American dramatist Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. The two dramatize the sociopolitical movements in the 1960s by the staging of black women's bodies. Aidoo's play centers on an African American woman experiencing cultural and sexual dislocation in postcolonial Ghana with her African husband, while Kennedy's play works around the psychological disintegration of a young black student in New York City. Working at the crossroads of major countercultural investments, these plays grapple with the lingering presence of colonial histories by creating scenes that question the mimetically realist boundaries of the body.

This chapter examines how maternal and child health experts defined risks to healthy pregnancies around the turn of the twenty-first century, especially amid scientific uncertainty regarding the etiology of birth outcomes. Drawing on interviews with maternal and child health experts and physicians who were involved in drafting and/or disseminating the pre-pregnancy care model, this chapter details how individuals drew on long-held assumptions about strong ties between women’s bodies and reproductive outcomes in order to craft a new “common sense” about future reproductive risk. Pre-pregnancy care as an anticipatory care strategy highlights how medicine and public health today focus on preemptive clinical intervention and on future risk. Moreover, pre-pregnancy care serves as a bellwether for where this trend is headed: toward preventive interventions in the name of the health of future generations.

This chapter describes how side effects of a hormone-releasing intrauterine device (IUD) created a unique product, Mirena. It specifically analyzes the making of Mirena, while revealing the behind-the-scenes aspects of this now increasingly popular contraceptive method and reconstructs the historical paths that produced this device. This chapter provides further insight into how governance over women’s bodies is delicately differentiated at intersections of race and class. It also reveals how various body/technology pairings were configured, creating a network of connections that reflect the racialized global context within which technoscientific interventions in women’s bodies are imagined.

This chapter presents a reading of Vera Brosgol's graphic novel Anya's Ghost, whose titular adolescent heroine struggles with the issues of body image, unrequited love, and the tensions between her Russian cultural heritage and her desire to assimilate into US culture. Visual expression foregrounds the disconnect between the way Anya's body appears to the reader and the way Anya imagines that her body appears. By juxtaposing Anya's “real” and “imagined” bodies, Brosgol calls the reader's attention to the social and internal pressures about body image faced by young women. Moreover, the simultaneous visual presentation of multiple selves calls young readers to actively engage with the comic narrative and to call into question the various ideologies about women's bodies with which the text engages.

This chapter presents a scene featuring Heather and Elaine at a table loaded with books, food, drinks, and cell phones. One shares her written notes with the audience while the other one continues to write. They then share their thoughts on writing about their bodies.

Chapter 1 introduces the relationship between dance and gender, inquiring into the ways dance is gendered in Western society today and the significance of these findings. An extensive review of literature covers feminist perspectives, social construction of gender, gender equity, men in dance, queer theory and GLBT studies, plus gender roles in modern dance, ballet, social, religious, popular and recreational dance. Two of the most-discussed issues within the literature since the mid-1990s are the presentation of women’s bodies onstage, and how male dancers disrupt traditional ideas of masculinity. Dance outside the gender binary is also considered. Gender roles onstage, in class, in rehearsal, in company leadership, in postsecondary dance departments, and in choreographer funding are sites of inquiry within this book of empirical research studies and essays.

This chapter focuses on the commercial tampon, first available in the United States in 1936. The introduction of the mass-produced tampon marked a significant turning point in women's lives. It spoke to desires for physical freedom, changes in dress, and evolving viewpoints with regard to hygiene and the corporeal. Advertisers' use of the sportswoman in campaigns of the 1930s and 1940s was an important strategy for the product's viability. Inside the pages of popular magazines, the tampon-advocating athlete at once represented modernity, encouraged physical activity, and contributed to a “culture of concealment” that perpetuated menstrual shame and stressed the need for secrecy and discretion.

This chapter analyses a performance lecture, Terminal, given during the conference 1916: Home: 2016 by Speaking of IMELDA. A multi-generational group of London-based Irish feminists, Speaking of IMELDA (2014-2018) used performance, film, and media interventions at public events to campaign for repeal of the 8th Amendment while building on solidarities between abortion seekers travelling to the UK and the Irish diaspora. Terminal explored the histories of coercive control over women’s bodies in Ireland, centring on tensions between the ideals in the 1916 Proclamation and women’s lived experiences during the century after 1916. Members discuss how Terminal grew out of Speaking of IMELDA’s public interventions in Irish abortion discourses. In Terminal, many members recognised the performance as an act of research, probing deep connections between the 8th Amendment and how women’s rights have been policed in Ireland through contraception, incarceration, and religious social control. Re-enacting these astonishing female experiences welded the immediacy of IMELDA’s direct actions to a new method of reperforming trauma and its effects, to understand more nuanced connections between past and present. This account from IMELDAs involved in devising and staging Terminal reflects on wider roles they enacted while building upon multiple backgrounds, perspectives, and understanding of those herstories.