From the nineteenth-century British Poor Laws, to an early twentieth-century Aboriginal reserve in Queensland Australia, to AIDS activists on the streets of Toronto in the 1990s, Bodily Subjects explores the historical entanglement between gender and health to expose how ideas of health - a concept whose meanings we too often assume to understand - are embedded in assumptions about femininity and masculinity.

These essays expand the conversation on health and gender by examining their intersection in different geo-political contexts and times. Constantly measured through ideals and judged by those in authority, healthy development has been construed differently for teenage girls, adult men and women, postpartum mothers, and those seeking cosmetic surgery. Over time, meanings of health have expanded from an able body signifying health in the nineteenth century to concepts of "well-being," a psychological and moral interpretation, which has dominated health discourse in Western countries since the late twentieth century.

Through examinations of particular times and places, across two centuries and three continents, Bodily Subjects highlights the ways in which the body is both subjectively experienced and becomes a subject of inquiry.

Contributors include Barbara Brookes (University of Otago), Brigitte Fuchs (University of Vienna), Catherine Gidney (St Thomas University), Mona Gleason (University of British Columbia), Natalie Gravelle (York University), Rebecca Godderis (Wilfrid Laurier University), Antje Kampf (Humboldt University of Berlin), Marjorie Levine-Clark (University of Denver), Wendy Mitchinson (University of Waterloo), Meg Parsons (University of Auckland), Tracy Penny Light (University of Waterloo), Patricia A. Reeve (Suffolk University), Anika Stafford (Simon Fraser University), and Thomas Wendelboe (University of Waterloo).

Tracy Penny Light is the executive director of the Centre for Student Engagement and Learning Innovation at Thompson Rivers University, Canada. Recent publications include, Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000 with Wendy Mitchinson and Barbara Brookes, and “Fifty Shades of Complexity: Exploring Technologically Mediated Leisure and Women’s Sexuality” with Diana C. Parry.

Tracy Penny Light's profile page

Barbara Brookes' profile page

Wendy Mitchinson is a Canada Research Chair in Gender and Medical History and a professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo.

Wendy Mitchinson's profile page