This book looks at the physical and metaphorical attributes of the human body as a site of contention, politics, and cultural protest. It discusses a range of issues, from torture and moral panics to the "AIDS plague" and the homosocial subtexts of George Bush's political speeches.

Avery Gordon's first book, Ghostly Matters, was widely acclaimed as a work of striking sociological imagination and social theory. Keeping Good Time, her much anticipated second book, brings together essays by Gordon that were 'written to be read aloud'. Her eloquent voice in this book further establishes her place among literary sociological writers of a new generation. Keeping Good Time explores the meaning of being a politically engaged scholar during deeply troubled times. The book's essays consider the role of education during war time, the costs of imprisonment and repression, the power of utopianism in an age of globalization, the complexities of gendered racism, the politics of culture, and the practice of theory as it emerges from everyday life.

Avery Gordon's first book, Ghostly Matters, was widely acclaimed as a work of striking sociological imagination and social theory. Keeping Good Time, her much anticipated second book, brings together essays by Gordon that were 'written to be read aloud'. Her eloquent voice in this book further establishes her place among literary sociological writers of a new generation. Keeping Good Time explores the meaning of being a politically engaged scholar during deeply troubled times. The book's essays consider the role of education during war time, the costs of imprisonment and repression, the power of utopianism in an age of globalization, the complexities of gendered racism, the politics of culture, and the practice of theory as it emerges from everyday life.

This remarkable book looks at the physical and metaphorical attributes of the human body as a site of contention, politics, and cultural protest. Essayists from the social sciences and the humanities discuss a range of issues, from torture and moral panics to the "AIDS plague" and the homosocial subtexts of George Bush's political speeches. Sometimes written in shocking and graphic language, these essays embrace the notion that there is a viable place in scholarly writing for anger, sadness, joy, despair, grief, and celebration-an infusion of passion. The tradition of emotional involvement in the issues was lost in late twentieth-century academia but is revisited here through the theories of postmodernism. Trading upon the theory that good cultural studies can affect politics, the contributors to this book take on current political and social issues of consequence. Pierre Bourdieu, Nancy Armstrong, Stephen Pfohl, Donna Haraway, Toni Negri, George Marcus, and others tackle such subjects as the politics of pharmacology; women, war, and AIDS; ethnicity, national identity, and the Japanese Emperor system; the meaning of property; and the "death and sinister afterlife" of the American family. These dynamic essays go beyond examination and point to ways in which the societies they identify can be improved, rebuilt, or redirected toward ends other than power, social discipline, inequality, and violence. The intent of the volume is transformative-assuming that politics is culture, the essayists attempt through cultural analysis to offer a means of remaking politics. A compendium of innovative scholarship, Body Politics bristles with interesting information and creative energy.