Customer Reviews

Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Race, Gender, and Science)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I read this book several years ago as a grad student and now regularly recommend it to my doc students. The articles offer eye-opening studies on how bodies were and are read as sites of deviancy and used as the objects and justification for intervention through both acts against individuals and local and global politics. It offers really practical studies in how can power-knowledge function in "scientific" studies, particularly in colonialism, although there are more recent studies as well. As I am particularly interested in gender studies, I especially like Fausto-Sterlings article on the so-called "Hottentot Venus", Horn's piece on reading the female body, and Terry's piece on the search for the homosexual body. I also frequently cite Phelan's piece on differences in the imagined audiences of AIDS education material. Having cited these as my favorites, there isn't a piece in the book that I didn't like.

I'm usually not a big fan of postmodern scholarship, and this book is no exception. It was a decent book for my class, in that it introduced students to the implications of various kinds of bodily deviance (deafness, race, sex, body type, etc.) as well as various (arguably) non-anatomical categories that were reified as anatomical difference (Jewishness, various mental illnesses, etc.). Most of the articles are not all that great, however.

Proctor's essay on the Holocaust is excellent, and is probably the high-point of the book. But you can get that elsewhere. The more postmodern essays are interesting but their conclusions shouldn't be taken very seriously, since they are just asserted; sometimes, their conclusions are directly contradicted by the evidence cited in the text! A lot of this book is ideological rather than investigatory, and when Fausto-Sterling asserts a link between anatomy and capitalism or tells me (despite evidence to the contrary) that specific anatomists did their work to support a global colonialist project, I shook my head in disgust and ripped into the essay the next day in class.

There's better stuff out there.