Book Discovery Day!

I just discovered this book today. It's by Samantha Murray who is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Somatechnics Research Centre/Department of Critical Studies at Macquarie University, Australia. It's called The 'Fat' Female Body (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and it's about the production of the discourse on obesity and fatness in the West: "Exploring the rapidly increasing interest in obesity and fatness, this book engages with dominant ideas about "fatness" and analyses the assumptions that inform anti-fat attitudes in the West, looking at the intersection of medicine and morality in pathologizing "fat bodies."

The table of contents show the following:
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Introduction: The "Fat" Female Body: Pathological, Political and Phenomenological Imaginings

PART 1
Positioning "Fatness" in Our Cultural Imaginary
The "Normal" and the 'Pathological': "Obesity" and the Dis-eased "Fat" Body
"Fat" Bodies as Virtual Confessors and Medical Morality

PART 2
Fed up with Fat-Phobia: Coming Our as "Fat"
Fat Pride and the Insistence on the Voluntarist Subject
Fattening Up Foucault: A "Fat" Counter-Aesthetic?

PART 3
Throwing Off Discourse? Questions of Ambivalence and the Mind/Body Split
("Fat") "Being-In-The-World": Merleau-Ponty's account of the "body-subject"
Embodiment as Ambiguity: "Fatness" as it is Lived

Afterword: "Fat" Bodily Being
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This is just MY kind of books! On a different note, I had gotten myself a hard-cover copy (hem... ahem!) of Denis de Rougemont's Love In the Western World (Princeton University Press, 1983) some time back. I finally picked it up and started plouging through it this morning! A real delight so far! I should probably go back to it right now!