Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves

Kathy Davis tells the story of this remarkable book’s global circulation. Based on interviews with members of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, the group of women who created Our Bodies, Ourselves, as well as responses to the book from readers, and discussions with translators from Latin America, Egypt, Thailand, China, Eastern Europe, Francophone Africa, and many other countries and regions, Davis shows why Our Bodies, Ourselves could never have been so influential if it had been just a popular manual on women’s health. It was precisely the book’s distinctive epistemology, inviting women to use their own experiences as resources for producing situated, critical knowledge about their bodies and health, that allowed the book to speak to so many women within and outside the United States. Davis provides a grounded analysis of how feminist knowledge and political practice actually travel, and she shows how the process of transforming Our Bodies, Ourselves offers a glimpse of a truly transnational feminism, one that joins the acknowledgment of difference and diversity among women in different locations with critical reflexivity and political empowerment.

Kathy Davis is a Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for History and Culture at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Her books include The Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies (coedited with Mary Evans and Judith Lorber), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences: Cultural Studies on Cosmetic Surgery, and Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body.