Review: "Body Phobia" by Dianna E. Anderson

Body Phobia by Dianna E. Anderson
Published October 2024 via Broadleaf Books
★★★

American culture hates the fact that we have bodies (loc. 4*), writes Anderson, and so the book goes: Body Phobia is an exploration of some of the ways in which American culture seeks to control bodies and to regulate them, often in the context of white evangelical Christianity.

Short but wide-ranging, Body Phobia covers topics such as race, disability, gender, and sexuality. Some of the material feels pretty academic, but in an accessible way; there's also a lot of memoir and of Anderson piecing together the topics that are most relevant to their own life and figuring out how they intersect and where they come from.

There's so much material here—any of the chapters could become a book of its own, I think. I found it to be a bit slow going at times because of this; there's so much going on that I couldn't quite get my footing. But some fascinating tidbits:

And it took a long time before doctors actually understood things that we now know to be true, like the fact that babies can feel pain (up until the 1980s, it was common to operate on infants without anesthesia because of a mistaken belief that babies didn't actually process pain). (loc. 718) Maybe worth noting here that many doctors still—implicitly or explicitly—believe that minorities, particularly Black people, feel less pain than White people and undermedicate accordingly.

He [Anderson's brother, who has Down syndrome] was their kid, and they were going to raise him. It took my extended family a little bit to get used to the idea—my dad told me once that my grandpa had asked him when he was going to grow out of his condition. (loc. 789)

In a discussion of religion and homosexuality, Anderson notes that some Jewish scholars take a different view of the story of Sodom than (conservative) Christians do; I won't quote because I'd be quoting a quote and that gets messy, but the short of it is that in the at least one interpretation the sin is about forcing people to conform. I may have to seek out the text Anderson quotes and read more, because it's not something I'd heard before, and I'm very intrigued.

Readers should go in knowing that there's a fair amount about White evangelical Christianity in here; fortunately that's one of my pet reading topics (from a very secular view, but what can you do—we all have our weird things), but it's not something I expected from the description. An interesting read for a somewhat academically inclined crowd.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.