Blogging on Bodies: A Welcome Note

Welcome! This site is designed specifically for students in "Bodies in American Culture" at Allegheny College during the spring 2014 semester.  Our aim is to create conversation around how we construct gendered, racialized, and sexualized bodies in U.S. culture. Discussing bodies publicly transgresses our national sense of propriety, privacy, and sometimes decency, yet we are saturated by media images and discourses about bodies.  With ease, each of us can articulate (if not at some level unconsciously police) the "appropriate" size, shape, abilities, strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities of women and men; yet, people are far more diverse than what the categories of women and men currently construct. This is a space for opening up that conversation, wrestling with ideas, wondering about hegemonic representations, and getting real about the cultural politics of bodies.