Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health

"Culture, Bodies and the Sociology of Health" explores the boundaries between bodies and society with special reference to uncovering the cultural components of health and the ways in which bodies are catagorised according to a form of culturally embedded 'health orthodoxy'. Illustrating the importance of contextualising the body as a cultural entity, this book demonstrates that the spaces and boundaries between healthy bodies are becoming more diverse than ever before. It reveals the cultural components of a 'morality of health', which shapes and regulates bodies as they are constructed as either healthy and normal, or pathological, risky and abnormal. In this volume, an international team of scholars engages with a range of issues surrounding the cultural construction of the body as a site of health and illness. The boundaries between bodies and society are examined through the cultural meanings of kidney transplantation; pathologizing of elite athletes; non-elite road running; use of fitness magazines; the cultural gaze of the internet; gerontological theory vis a vis gender; and, the 'genetics' of obesity and pregnant drug using bodies as 'polluted'. As such, it will be of interest not only to sociologists, especially sociologists of health, but also to scholars of media and communication studies as well as cultural theorists.