Soraya Tremayne

Maya Unnithan-Kumar

Obesity is a rising global health problem. On the one hand a clearly defined medical condition, it is at the same time a corporeal state embedded in the social and cultural perception of fatness, body shape and size. Focusing specifically on the maternal body, contributors to the volume examine how the language and notions of obesity connect with, or stand apart from, wider societal values and moralities to do with the body, fatness, reproduction and what is considered 'natural'. A focus on fatness in the context of human reproduction and motherhood offers instructive insights into the global circulation and authority of biomedical facts on fatness (as 'risky' anti-fit, for example). As with other social and cultural studies critical of health policy discourse, this volume challenges the spontaneous connection being made in scientific and popular understanding between fatness and ill health.

Women's Experiences of Corporeality and the Shaping of Social Policy

Fatness and the Maternal Body

Marcia C. Inhorn

How and to what extent have Islamic legal scholars and Middle Eastern lawmakers, as well as Middle Eastern Muslim physicians and patients, grappled with the complex bioethical, legal, and social issues that are raised in the process of attempting to conceive life in the face of infertility? This path-breaking volume explores the influence of Islamic attitudes on Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) and reveals the variations in both the Islamic jurisprudence and the cultural responses to ARTs.

Sunni and Shia Perspectives

Islam and Assisted Reproductive Technologies

Alaine M. Low

Associate Lecturer Alaine Low

These 13 workshop-based papers critique ecofeminist assumptions about traditional societies viewing women as closer to nature and more spiritual than men. Following an overview by Low (history, Open U.) and Tremayne (social and cultural anthropology, U. of Oxford), the first contribution frames the debate over gender politics and environmentalism. Next, case studies illustrate sacred landscape (not intrinsically ecologically-oriented) in such societies past and present. Part III treats nature and gender in several major world religions. The final paper discusses contemporary paganism's quest for wholeness. The cover title reads Women as sacred custodians of the earth? Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Soraya Tremayne

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