Interpreting the Body

Written by leading social scientists working in and across a variety of analytic traditions, this ambitious, insightful volume explores interpretation as a focal metaphor for understanding the body's influence, meaning, and matter in society.

Interpreting body and embodiment in social movements, health and medicine, race, sex and gender, globalization, colonialism, education, and other contexts, the book's chapters call into question taken-for-granted ideas of where the self, the social world, and the body begin and end.

Encouraging reflection and opening new perspectives on theories of the body that cut through the classic mind/body divide, this is an important contribution to the literature on the body.

“A diverse yet surprisingly focused collection of strong and innovative contributions to the field. A must-read for those interested in the (social) meanings and (contested) interpretations of bodies.” Werner Binder, Masaryk University

"This excellent collection of interpretive, theoretically rich studies of embodiment shows how productive the dissensus amongst perspectives is when it comes to sensing the body’s openness to the vicissitudes of modernity." Arun Saldanha, University of Minnesota

Anne Marie Champagne is a PhD candidate in Sociology and Center for Cultural Sociology Junior Fellow at Yale University.

Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware.

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