Plastic Bodies

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. Plastic Bodies will be of interest to all those working in medical anthropology, gender studies, and sexual and reproductive health.

"Emilia Sanabria’s Plastic Bodies is a captivating book and a much needed study on perceptions on menstruation and associated biomedical practices. . . . Plastic Bodies is a pleasure to read; it is beautifully written and has a style that at times merges with the genre of travel writing enabling readers to accompany Sanabria to Salvador de Bahia where she conducted her fieldwork."  , "Clearly written and engaging, Plastic Bodies will make an excellent addition to both graduate and undergraduate reading lists, in particular in courses on the anthropology of the body, reproduction, and science and technology studies. It will also be of interest to those who teach courses on Brazil and the Brazilian Northeast region.", "Plastic Bodies is a timely and exhilarating project that contributes to a constellation of emergent, multidisciplinary, feminist scholarship about bodies, hormones, biopolitics, and materiality.", "Rich in ethnographic detail and rigorous in interpretation, Plastic Bodies is a deeply researched, complex, and innovative exploration of an important topic.... [T]his book is a fascinating analysis of gender, the medicalization of the body, and the socialization of biochemistry that has wide applicability across disciplines.", "Sanabria’s work is innovative and inventive, responding to the impacts of neomaterialism, feminist studies of science and the “ontological turn” in anthropology. Instead of taking the bodies’ frontiers for granted, Sanabria prefers to focus on the very process of their making. This is a great contribution to contemporary studies of the body."

Emilia Sanabria is Maîtresse de conferences in Social Anthropology at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon.