First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This thought-provoking volume compares the responses of women in a variety of countries and cultural settings to modern medical technologies. The contributors describe how women in East Africa deal with infertility, how American women respond to pre-natal diagnostic screening, how women in China and Japan choose to make use of reproductive technologies. The essays also explore wider themes, such as the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and how women confront environmental hazards which threaten them and their families. It is often assumed that women are passive in the face of biomedical technology, but this book shows that they make pragmatic choices, with responses ranging from acceptance to rejection or indifference. The reception of biomedical technology is situated in its local cultural contexts, and vital issues of women's health are related to political and ethnic concerns.

In the increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic American landscape of the present, understanding and bridging dynamic cross-cultural conversations about social and political concerns becomes a complicated humanistic project. How do everyday embodied experiences transform from being anecdotal to having social and political significance? What can the experience of corporeality offer social and political discourse? And, how does that discourse change when those bodies belong to Arab Americans and African Americans? Therí A. Pickens discusses a range of literary, cultural, and archival material where narratives emphasize embodied experience to examine how these experiences constitute Arab Americans and African Americans as social and political subjects. Pickens argues that Arab American and African American narratives rely on the body’s fragility, rather than its exceptional strength or emotion, to create urgent social and political critiques. The creators of these narratives find potential in mundane experiences such as breathing, touch, illness, pain, and death. Each chapter in this book focuses on one of these everyday embodied experiences and examines how authors mobilize that fragility to create social and political commentary. Pickens discusses how the authors' focus on quotidian experiences complicates their critiques of the nation state, domestic and international politics, exile, cultural mores, and the medical establishment. New Body Politics participates in a vibrant interdisciplinary conversation about cross-ethnic studies, American literature, and Arab American literature. Using intercultural analysis, Pickens explores issues of the body and representation that will be relevant to fields as varied as Political Science, African American Studies, Arab American Studies, and Disability Studies.

AIDS galvanized the politics of the gay community. The groups Michael Lynch helped organize and his prescient articles in The Body Politic sent messages of resistance and hope across North America. In telling his story and illuminating the issues, Ann Silversides draws on Lynch's diaries, letters, and poems; interviews with family, friends, and colleagues; film and newspaper records; and the papers of other leading AIDS activists. Book jacket.

This book looks at the physical and metaphorical attributes of the human body as a site of contention, politics, and cultural protest. It discusses a range of issues, from torture and moral panics to the "AIDS plague" and the homosocial subtexts of George Bush's political speeches.

Body Politics in Development sets out to define body politics as a key political and mobilizing force for human rights in the last two decades. This passionate and engaging book reveals how once-tabooed issues, such as rape, gender-based violence, and sexual and reproductive rights, have emerged into the public arena as critical grounds of contention and struggle. Engaging in the latest feminist thinking and action, the book describes the struggles around body politics for people living in economic and socially vulnerable communities and covers a broad range of gender and development issues, including fundamentalism, sexualities and new technologies, from diverse viewpoints. The book's originality comes through the author's rich experience and engagement in feminist activism and global body politics and was winner of the 2010 FWSA Book Prize.

Political Physics analyses the work of two of the most influential thinkers of our time - Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. The book takes the reader on a transversal journey, crossing the boundaries of philosophy and science.Political Physics explores the limits and strengths of Derridean and Deleuzean philosophical approaches. Focussing on their differing approaches to the question of the 'body politic' - in all its registers, from the physical-chemical body, to the economic, the social and the political body - the book reveals a profound difference in ontological commitment. The book argues that the straightforward materialism of Deleuzean philosophy can operate across the range of analysis whereas Derridean deconstruction effectively operates at the level of reason, consciousness and culture.Cross-cutting a Derridean analysis of the history of philosophy with a Deleuzian approach to creative dialogue and complexity theory, Political Physics illuminates the value of both approaches to the analysis of contemporary culture, politics and science and to the rereading of the history of ideas.

Luxurious Sexualities contains some of the most path- breaking adventurous critical writing currently to be found in Britain. Focusing on eighteenth century sexuality it is intriguing, controversial and provoking. Textual Practice contains articles relating to women, popular culture, visual media, and ethnic and sexual minorities.

Although postcolonialism has emerged as one of the most significant theoretical movements in literary and cultural studies, it has paid scant attention to the importance of trade and trade relations to debates about culture. Focusing on the past two centuries, this volume investigates the links among trade, colonialism, and forms of representation, posing the question, 'What is the historical or modern relationship between economic inequality and imperial patterns of representation and reading?' Rather than dealing exclusively with a particular industry or type of industry, the contributors take up the issue of how various economies have been represented in Aboriginal art; in literature by North American, Caribbean, Portuguese, South African, First Nations, Australian, British, and Aboriginal authors; and in a diverse range of writings that includes travel diaries, missionary texts, the findings of the Leprosy Investigation Commission, early medical accounts and media representations of HIV/AIDS. Examining trade in commodities as various as illicit drugs, liquor, bananas, tourism, adventure fiction, and modern Aboriginal art, as well as cultural exchanges in politics, medicine, and literature, the essays reflect the widespread origins of the contributors themselves, who are based throughout the English-speaking world. Taken as a whole, this book contests the commonplace view promoted by some modern economists-that trade in and of itself has a leveling effect, equalising cultures, places, and peoples-demonstrating instead the ways in which commerce has created and exacerbated differences in power.