Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes

Whether for entertainment, under the guise of medicine, or to propel consumerism, heinous acts are perpetrated daily on women’s bodies. In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, award-winning journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore catalogs the global toll of capitalism on our physical autonomy. Weaving together unflinching research and surprising humor, these essays range from investigative—probing the Cambodian garment industry, the history of menstrual products, or the gender biases of patent law—to uncomfortably intimate. Informed by her own navigation of several autoimmune diagnoses, Moore examines what it takes to seek care and community in the increasingly complicated, problematic, and disinterested US healthcare system.

A Lambda Literary Award finalist and a Chicago Review of Books Nonfiction Award shortlist title, Body Horror is “sharp, shocking, and darkly funny. . . . Brainy and historically informed, this collection is less a rallying cry or a bitter diatribe than a series of irreverent and ruthlessly accurate jabs at a culture that is slowly devouring us” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Featuring an updated introduction and new essays, as well as illustrations by Xander Marro, this new edition of Body Horror is a fascinating, insightful portrait of the gore that encapsulates contemporary American politics.

ISBN-13: 9781558612860

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Feminist Press at CUNY, The

Publication Date: 04-18-2023

Pages: 344

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, SD. She is the author of Unmarketable (2007), the Eisner Award–winning Sweet Little Cunt (2018), Gentrifier: A Memoir (2021), which was an NPR Best Book of the Year, and others. She is the founding editor of Houghton Mifflin’s Best American Comics and the former editor of Punk Planet, The Comics Journal, and the Chicago Reader. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Ragdale Foundation. She is a Fulbright Senior Scholar, has taught in the Visual Critical Studies department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was the 2019 Mackey Chair of Creative Writing at Beloit College. She lives in the Catskills with her ineffective feline personal assistants, Taku and Captain America.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Massacre on Veng Sreng Street
2. The Shameful Legacy (and Secret Promise) of the Sanitary Napkin Disposal Bag
3. Tips, Gags, and Jokes for Girls in Captivity
4. Women
5. Model Employee
6. Horror autotoxicus
7. Consumpcyon
8. A Few Things I Have Learned about Illness in America
9. Fake Snake Oil
10. On Leaving the Birthplace of Standard Time
11. Cultural Imperative
12. The Presence of No Present
13. Normative Bodies, Unusual Tastes
14. The Metaphysics of Compost
15. Fucking Cancer
16. A Partial Recounting of My Current Anxieties
17. Three Months after Emerging from Your Deathbed