Plastic bodies : sex hormones and menstrual suppression in Brazil / Emilia Sanabria.

Durham : Duke University Press, [2016]

©2016

xi, 252 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

In Plastic Bodies Emilia Sanabria examines how sex hormones are enrolled to create, mold, and discipline social relations and subjectivities. She shows how hormones have become central to contemporary understandings of the body, class, gender, sex, personhood, modernity, and Brazilian national identity. Through interviews with women and doctors; observations in clinics, research centers and pharmacies; and analyses of contraceptive marketing, Sanabria traces the genealogy of menstrual suppression, from its use in population control strategies in the global South to its remarketing as a practice of pharmaceutical self-enhancement couched in neoliberal notions of choice. She links the widespread practice of menstrual suppression and other related elective medical interventions to Bahian views of the body as a malleable object that requires constant work. Given this bodily plasticity, and its potentially limitless character, the book considers ways to assess the values attributed to bodily interventions. --Publisher description.

Online version: Sanabria, Emilia, 1979- Plastic bodies

Books / Online

English

August 24, 2018

Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-240) and index.