Plastic Bodies is nuanced and richly detailed. . . . It delivers everything it promises.
Andrea Ford
Medicine Anthropology Theory
Sanabria has produced a subtle, well-researched and beautifully written book that could be used in graduate and advanced undergraduate courses in Science and Technology Studies, Latin American Studies, the Sociology or Anthropology of Health and ... Read moreMedicine and the Globalization of Sexuality and Gender.
Rafael de la Dehesa
International Feminist Journal of Politics
A highly readable and sophisticated ethnography, Plastic Bodies will appeal to scholars in the fields of Brazilian studies, women and gender studies, global health, science and technology studies, and pharmaceutical anthropology.
Jose Amador
The Latin Americanist
Plastic Bodies is an extraordinary monograph, produced from a decade of careful engagement with techniques of place-making, othering, and ethnographic theory. Anthropology at its very best, this is work that makes evident the plasticity of the binary. Through gripping stories of the self in the other, the here in the there, nature in artifice, and the beauty in mess, readers come to understand that binaries are always socially made.
Emily Yates-Doerr
Somatosphere
Sanabria's work is innovative and inventive, responding to the impacts of neomaterialism, feminist studies of science and the ontological turn in anthropology. Instead of taking the bodies' frontiers for granted, Sanabria prefers to focus on the very process of their making. This is a great contribution to contemporary studies of the body.
Daniela Tonelli Manica
Somatosphere
Rich in ethnographic detail and rigorous in interpretation, Plastic Bodies is a deeply researched, complex, and innovative exploration of an important topic.... [T]his book is a fascinating analysis of gender, the medicalization of the body, and the socialization of biochemistry that has wide applicability across disciplines.
Okezi T. Otovo
Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Plastic Bodies is a timely and exhilarating project that contributes to a constellation of emergent, multidisciplinary, feminist scholarship about bodies, hormones, biopolitics, and materiality.
E. Hella Tsaconas
Feminist Formations
Clearly written and engaging, Plastic Bodies will make an excellent addition to both graduate and undergraduate reading lists, in particular in courses on the anthropology of the body, reproduction, and science and technology studies. It will also be of interest to those who teach courses on Brazil and the Brazilian Northeast region.
K. Eliza Williamson
Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Emilia Sanabria's Plastic Bodies is a captivating book and a much needed study on perceptions on menstruation and associated biomedical practices. . . . Plastic Bodies is a pleasure to read; it is beautifully written and has a style that at times merges with the genre of travel writing enabling readers to accompany Sanabria to Salvador de Bahia where she conducted her fieldwork.
Angela Lavilla Canedo
Centre for Medical Humanities
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