Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction: Why "Against Health"? Jonathan M. MetzlPart I: What Is Health, Anyway? 2 What Is Health and How Do You Get It? Richard Klein 3 Risky Bigness: On Obesity, Eating, and the Ambiguity of "Health" Lauren Berlant 4 Against Global Health? Arbitrating Science, Non-Science, and Nonsense through Health Vincanne Adams Part II: Seeing Health through Morality 5 The Social Immorality of Health in the Gene Age: Race, Disability, and Inequality Dorothy Roberts 6 Fat Panic and the New Morality Kathleen LeBesco 7 Against Breastfeeding (Sometimes) Joan B. WolfPart III: Making Health and Disease 8 Pharmaceutical Propaganda Carl Elliott 9 The Strangely Passive-Aggressive History of Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder Christopher Lane 10 Obsession: Against Mental Health Lennard J. Davis 11 Atomic Health, or How The Bomb Altered American Notions of Death Joseph MascoPart IV: Pleasure and Pain after Health 12 How Much Sex Is Healthy? The Pleasures of Asexuality Eunjung Kim 13 Be Prepared S. Lochlann Jain 14 In the Name of Pain Tobin Siebers 15 Conclusion: What Next? Anna Kirkland About the Contributors Index

Promotional Information

Argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good

About the Author

Jonathan M. Metzl (Editor)
Jonathan M. Metzl is the Frederick B. Rentschler II Professor of Sociology and Psychiatry, and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society, at Vanderbilt University. His books include The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease, Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs, Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality, and Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland, which won the 2020 Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Book Award.
Anna Kirkland (Editor)
Anna Kirkland is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and Political Science at the University of Michigan.

Reviews

"A powerful group of essays, and the topics addressed in the respective chapters are interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking" David Serlin, author of Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America " Lots of food for thought...will be of interest to those wanting to stretch their views on health care" - Library Journal