Get it out: On the Politics of Hysterectomy by Andréa Becker (New York University Press: 2025) Hysterectomy is the most common gynecological procedure worldwide, yet until recently only one book, written by Jean Elson in 2003, has previously taken it as its central focus, reflecting a dominant narrative that obscures the diversity of its interpretations. […]
Hormonal Theory: A Rebellious Glossary by Andrea Ford, Roslyn Malcolm, Sonja Erikainen, Lisa Raeder, and Celia Roberts (eds.) (Bloomsbury: 2024) Far beyond fitness tips about “boosting testosterone” for muscle growth or the tired cliché of attributing women’s moods to menstruation, a wide range of lesser-known hormones has entered public discourse and social media. From productivity […]
Crowded Out: The True Costs of Crowdfunding Healthcare by Nora Kenworthy (MIT Press: 2024) One chilly winter day, I (the author of this review) was standing in line at my university’s coffee shop for a hot drink when I saw a poster printed out amongst the ads for ongoing campus activities of a student asking […]
Mad by the Millions: Mental Disorders and the Early Years of the World Health Organization by Harry Yi-Jui Wu (MIT Press: 2021) Harry Yi-Jui Wu’s Mad by the Millions traces the early efforts of the World Health Organization (WHO) to bring psychiatry into the domain of global public health. Drawing on extensive archival materials, Wu […]
A Life of Worry: Politics, Mental Health, and Vietnam’s Age of Anxiety by Allen Tran (University of California Press: 2023) In A Life of Worry, Allen L. Tran examines how anxiety in post-reform Vietnam is produced at the intersection of historical rupture, economic transformation, and relational obligations. Tran challenges psychiatric models that isolate anxiety as […]
Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering by Anna Stenning (Routledge: 2024) Over the past few decades, narrative has become an increasingly popular medium for autistic people to share their experiences, but there remains an underdeveloped framework for interpreting such accounts. Dr Anna Stenning’s groundbreaking monograph addresses this theoretical gap, surveying a range of life […]
Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs by Marcia C. Inhorn (NYU Press, 2023) Since 2012, when egg freezing by vitrification (flash-freezing) emerged from experimental trials and entered clinical practice in the United States, opinions on its use for non-medical reasons have been deeply divided. The dominant media portrayal of women […]
Burnout. The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat, by Hannah Proctor (Verso, 2024) Hannah Proctor’s Burnout is not about how tiredness arises from the daily grind. Instead, “burnout” is conceptualised as an emotional fatigue which emerges from political struggle. Proctor is a historian at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the […]
Ways of Being. Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence , by James Bridle (Penguin Books, 2023) If you read the cover of James Bridle’s book, you might think it is just another essay on the ontological turn or multispecies ethnography. But James Bridle is not a philosopher or an anthropologist analyzing alternative […]
The Virus Touch: Theorizing Epidemic Media, by Bishnupriya Ghosh (Duke University Press, 2023) In the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic and with various forecasts predicting likelihoods of a similar event in the near future, one cannot help but ask: in the Anthropocene, are we doomed to relentlessly prepare for and react to emerging viral threats? […]
Infertile Environments: Epigenetic Toxicology and the Reproductive Health of Chinese Men, by Janelle Lamoreaux (Duke University Press, 2023). The World Health Organization recently called to center women, pregnant people, and children in addressing climate change (WHO 2023). The report emphasizes potential long-term and intergenerational effects of climate related exposures, such as extreme temperatures, displacement, and […]
