| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier, editors. Body Parts: Critical Explorations in Corporeality. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books. 2005. Pp. ix, 273. $90.00.
The threshold of historical studies has advanced far beyond the political, economic, and social domains favored in the first six decades of the previous century, even beyond the private and personal realms explored by historians of the family, gender, and women in the past fifty years. Christopher E. Forth and Ivan Crozier, a historian and a sociologist, have assembled thirteen essays by historians of culture, gender, and sexuality, as well as by specialists in religion, literature, and psychology from Australia, Britain, Europe, and North America. The essays examine body parts ranging from appendages like legs, visible features like braids and skin, and external/internal parts like biceps, bellies, breasts and bums, they but also penetrate the skin to probe internal parts like the anus and pelvis, corporeal fluids like blood, organic systems like the digestive tract, and physiological processes. Most of the essays are empirically based but theoretically informed, notably by French and feminist theorists on the body. In the aptly titled "Introduction: Parts, Wholes, and Peoples," the editors make the credible claim that the collection demonstrates that studying body parts reveals modern illusions about wholeness and how the body and its parts are implicated in individual and collective identity formation.	1
The essays are organized into two sections. The first and longer section, called "Classifying," includes four historical essays inspired by Michel Foucault's theories about biomedical discipline. The editors also reference Mikhail Bakhtin on the premodern body as grotesque, overflowing its boundaries, and Françoise Loux and Barbara Duden, whose work on premodern medicine and folklore posit a porous body, open to the world. These four essays track how biomedical specialists in evolutionary theory, forensics, gynecology, obstetrics, physiology, and sexology, often in combination with criminologists, lawyers and judges, used the presence or absence of blushing, characteristics of unnamable parts like bums (euphemistically called the fundament), the diseased rectum, and medical folklore about a "primitive pelvis" and racially based pain tolerance to detect criminal "types," draw parallels between cholera and homosexuality, describe a "homosexual anus" in a vain effort to identify sodomites/homosexuals, or withhold pain relief and otherwise mistreat African and especially African American women in labor.	2
The other three essays in "Classifying" move beyond the canonical Foucauldian mix of medicine, sexuality, and law. Although Fredrik Albritton Johsson's essay on manual dexterity is aligned with biodiscipline, he focuses on how ideas about manual dexterity were applied in the economy, as ideas about manual dexterity and the division of labor traveled from Adam Smith, to Erasmus Darwin, to the entrepreneur Josiah Wedgewood. Jay Geller's essay situates the poet Heinrich Heine's representations of the braid or zopf of German Jews as gendered and ethnic indexes of German-Jewish relations in the context of the European penchant for stereotyping and thereby distancing "others" by fixating on certain body parts, in this case the braid or zopf. Fiona Giles's essay on contemporary efforts to express "the integrated breast," meaning the maternal as well as the erotic breast, in the little-known but apparently thriving movement for adult nursing and equally unfamiliar but also flourishing phenomenon of lactation pornography is more closely aligned with the later Foucault as appropriated by feminist theorists. Giles cites Julia Kristeva's concept of the maternal body as a prelinguistic state. For readers who have not read Kristeva, the brief citation is insufficiently informative.	. . .

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