Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This new, updated edition of the bestselling text retains all the strengths of the first edition whilst: providing a critical survey of the field that is unrivalled in its accuracy and clarity; demonstrating how developments in diet, sexuality, reproductive technology, genetic engineering and sports science have made the body a site for social alternatives and individual choices; and elucidating the practical uses of theory in striking and accessible ways.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Introduction
• The Body in Sociology
• The Naturalistic Body
• The Socially Constructed Body
• The Body and Social Inequalities
• The Body and Physical Capital
• The Civilized Body
• The Body, Self-Identity and Death
• Concluding Comments

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Schilling's book provides a comprehensive review of theories of the body and society, with particular attention to naturalistic, social constructionist, and feminist approaches. Among the many goals of this book, one of the most central is to examine the ways in which sociologists and cultural theorists, despite claims to the contrary, have overlooked the body and focused instead on the mind. In effect, many of these writers have ignored the corporeality of human existence. The absence of an adequate theory of the body, then, exists alongside the body's reconceptualization in high modernity, during which time the body has come to be seen as both potentially limitless in its capacity for change and utterly vulnerable because of the current AIDS epidemic. Schilling also examines the means through which the body both contributes to and is constructed by social inequalities; explores the ways in which the body is an ongoing project, formed from both biology and society; and points to the importance of building a theory of death in the modern age. Essential to any collection of work on the body, health and illness, or social theory. Advanced undergraduates and above.