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Description
Bodies carry politics before they carry meaning. A body is read the moment it enters a room - sexed, raced, aged, sorted as whole or lacking, as clean or contaminating - and the reading arrives with consequences attached. Who eats first, who walks home alone after dark, who may refuse a touch, who may grieve openly, who is believed in a courtroom: each question resolves along lines drawn across flesh. Literature has kept a long record of those lines, and the essays gathered here return to that record with attention to how it was made and who was made to bear it.