Body Horror

Anne Elizabeth Moore

Description

Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative—probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law—to uncomfortably intimate. Moore, who suffers from several autoimmune disorders, examines what it takes to seek care and community in the increasingly complicated, problematic, and disinterested US healthcare system.

A Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award shortlist title, Body Horror is “sharp, shocking, and darkly funny. . . . Brainy and historically informed, this collection is less a rallying cry or a bitter diatribe than a series of irreverent and ruthlessly accurate jabs at a culture that is slowly devouring us” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Featuring an updated introduction and new essays, as well as illustrations by Xander Marro, this new edition of Body Horror is a fascinating, insightful portrait of the gore that encapsulates contemporary American politics.

Foreword

Body horror, a revised introduction

Massacre on Veng Sreng Street 

The shameful legacy (and secret promise) of the sanitary napkin disposal bag

Women

A few things I have learned about illness in America

Model employee

Vagina dentata

Consumpcyon

Cultural imperative

On leaving the birthplace of standard time

Fake snake oil

The presence of no presence

Fucking cancer

The metaphysics of compost

Three months after emerging from your deathbed

Acknowledgments

Notes 

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Santé du quotidien
• Health Issues
• Social Science
• Essays
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Alice Wong
• Meghan O'Rourke
• Disease

Informations

• Publié par: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Date de parution: 18 avril 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781558612976
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE NEW EDITION OF BODY HORROR
“An exploration of misogyny unlike any I’ve ever encountered, this reissued and updated volume brings us again into the excellence of Anne Elizabeth Moore’s research and ability as a historian. She writes with wit, wry humor, and the instincts of a detective-novelist-cum-muckraking-journalist. In Body Horror, Moore brings us stories that will never leave us alone again.”
—RIVA LEHRER, artist and author of Golem Girl: A Memoir
“With lacerating wit and furious precision, Anne Elizabeth Moore connects the dots between labor, medicine, misogyny, and cultural production to reveal the scars and sores wrought by Western capitalism. In the six years since Body Horror was originally published, Moore’s already-prescient writing now reflects the urgency, both personal and political, of upending the tidy narratives of a body politic that hurt more than they help. It’s a necessary evisceration of institutions and imperatives that asks us to do something almost unthinkable: imagine better for ourselves and our communities.”
—ANDI ZEISLER, author of We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement
“I laughed, I cried, I puked, I cheered. This visceral collection is one of the best things I’ve ever read—an essential, humane book.”
—DANIEL KRAUS, coauthor of The Living Dead
“ Body Horror is a strangely comforting book to read for its decidedly feminist, anti-capitalist, and anti-consumerist content. It is indeed a tiny bit horrific but written with a good dose of humor, and shows that, no, you are not alone in this cruel world.”
—JULIE DOUCET, cartoonist and author of Time Zone J
PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION OF BODY HORROR
“Sharp, shocking, and darkly funny, the essays in [ Body Horror ] … expose the twisted logic at the core of Western capitalism and our stunted understanding of both its violence and the illnesses it breeds.… Brainy and historically informed, this collection is less a rallying cry or a bitter diatribe than a series of irreverent and ruthlessly accurate jabs at a culture that is slowly devouring us.”
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY , starred review
“[D]evastating in its unwillingness to flinch … Body Horror is an incredible, touching, intelligent collection that looks beyond what’s comfortable to examine what is true.”
— FOREWORD REVIEWS
“By audaciously linking her disparate Body Horrors to a larger construct—more complex even than her own immune system, more menacing than mere patriarchy—Moore allows her essays, each plenty feisty in its own right, to punch significantly above their individual weight. Whether one is ready in real life to attribute everything from Crohn’s disease to Pacific Time to the machinations of the market, Moore’s arguments land with force enough to make even the marginally politicized reader think.”
— LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
“Probing her own experiences with disease and healthcare, Anne Elizabeth Moore offers scalpel-sharp insight into the ways women’s bodies are subject to unspeakable horrors under capitalism.”
— CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“Moore herself is hyper-aware, and her unflinching worldview had the effect on me of a knife cutting through the wool pulled over my eyes.”
—AUTOSTRADDLE

Published in 2023 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
feministpress .org
First Feminist Press edition 2023
Copyright © 2023 by Anne Elizabeth Moore
Body Horror was originally published in 2017 by Curbside Splendor. The book has since been revised and expanded.
All rights reserved.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing April 2023
Cover design and interior illustrations by Xander Marro
Text design by Drew Stevens
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Moore, Anne Elizabeth, author.
Title: Body horror : capitalism, fear, misogyny, jokes / Anne Elizabeth Moore.
Description: First Feminist Press edition. | New York, NY : Feminist Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022056027 (print) | LCCN 2022056028 (ebook) | ISBN 9781558612860 (paperback) | ISBN 9781558612976 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—Social conditions—21st century. | Women—Health and hygiene. | Misogyny. | Capitalism—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HQ1155 .M66 2023 (print) | LCC HQ1155 (ebook) | DDC 305.409/05—dc23/eng/20221222
LC record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022056027
LC ebook record available at https:// lccn .loc .gov /2022056028
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS Cover Advance praise for the New Edition Praise for the First Edition Title Page Copyright Contents Introduction to the New Edition Massacre on Veng Sreng Street The Shameful Legacy (and Secret Promise) of the Sanitary Napkin Disposal Bag Tips, Gags, and Jokes for Girls in Captivity Women Model Employee Horror Autotoxicus Consumpcyon A Few Things I Have Learned about Illness in America Fake Snake Oil On Leaving the Birthplace of Standard Time Cultural Imperative The Presence of No Present Normative Bodies, Unusual Tastes The Metaphysics of Compost Fucking Cancer A Partial Recounting of My Current Anxieties Three Months after Emerging from Your Deathbed Publication Credits Notes About the Author Also Available from Feminist Press About the Feminist Press
INTRODUCTION TO THE NEW EDITION
IN THE HALCYON DAYS surrounding the appearance of the first edition of Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, Christine Blasey Ford had not yet given testimony against Supreme Court justice then nominee Brett Kavanaugh regarding his sexual assault of her some decades prior, and he had not yet been appointed to the highest court in the land anyway. The subsequent wave of rape, assault, gaslighting, manipulating, undermining, silencing, controlling, and other revelations (ahem, “allegations”) that we refer to as #MeToo had not yet occurred. There was nary a pandemic in sight. Banning books for acknowledging a panoply of gender identities was, if not unthinkable, at least uncommon. The gender pay gap was still closing, even if only by pennies every year. Roe v. Wade was still in effect. The sitting president, elected on a grab-’em-by-the-pussy platform, had not declared victory in an election he had clearly lost nor had he yet instigated an armed revolt on the Capitol.
It is difficult to believe that the first edition of Body Horror came out only five years ago. Half of that time has been lost to COVID-19, a constantly mutating virus holding sway over American health and culture that is taking a very long time for us to emerge from—will we ever? I have doubts—and that seems to be changing the nature of time itself. Deadlines have grown increasingly flexible in recent years, appointments now loosely held, memories foggy. Could this book first have come out only five years ago? Or is five years an incredibly long time?
That Body Horror predicted and even responded to the above-named momentous cultural events was not lost on readers, and this appears to be one reason I still get regular emails about it, despite how difficult it has become to find copies of that first edition. Yet the book’s prescience did not explain reader devotion, the intensity of which surprised me at first. This is a weird book: constructed loosely on seemingly unrelated themes, the text jumps wildly from location to location as well as from topic to topic, and I used a lot of what I think we can all agree is inappropriate humor. I genuinely did not expect readers to be able to connect with it. I had suspected for some time that when I became ill, I lost the ability to adhere to American Literary Logic. Most illness narratives in particular never made sense to me.
In constructing my own I did not, for example, want to share medical diagnoses, since mine are constantly shifting, which meant the volume couldn’t be branded a Lupus Book or a Fibromyalgia Tale or whatever, and such branding, I am told, is essential to finding an audience. I was not interested in presenting a triumphal story of survival, since technically speaking I was sicker after the book came out than I was when I started writing it. My approach in this text additionally defies the dictum that readers want to think about illness only when they can feel uplifted by it, which strikes me as ludicrous. Plenty of people are entirely defeated by illness and also read. Are we not to acknowledge this reality? Even in nonfiction? Then again, I hold little interest in talking about my precise experience of illness very much at all, nor my favorite scenes from my favorite horror films, nor my experiments in femininity, sexuality, or, in any direct way, misogyny. I’m certainly no memoirist, as anyone who has read the memoir I published in 2021 can probably tell. More interesting to me is the collective anatomy, the public body, that corpus afflicted by our failures to protect public health. It seems to me impossible to address the frustrations of inhabiting my physical form without also acknowledging the difficulties facing other feminine bodies, other corpuses in general. That being said, I absolutely did not want to dump on capitalism for three hundred plus pages, even if our political economy sorely deserves it, because honestly that starts to get old quick.
What I ori