Chris Bobel
Specializations:
Embodiment
Feminist activism
Social movements
Health
Critical development studies
Course idea:
None specified
Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston where she teaches courses on Gender & the Body, Feminist Theory, Feminist Research Methods, Women in US Social Movements and Feminist Activism. Chris is interested, most broadly, in the social construction of embodiment, and the diverse efforts of actors to effect social change especially around issues that are stigmatized and otherwise marginalized and how feminist thinking becomes feminist doing at the most intimate and immediate levels. In short, she finds the body-- a site where social norms, cultural anxieties and political agendas come to life-- an endlessly fascinating subject of inquiry.
Chris is the author, most recently, of The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South just released this month. Her other books include The Paradox of Natural Mothering, New Blood: Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation and Embodied Resistance: Breaking the Rules, Challenging the Norms (co-edited with Samantha Kwan). Her current major projects in progress include a 2nd co-edited collection titled Body Battlegrounds: Transgressions, Tensions and Transformations (forthcoming with Vanderbilt University Press in Winter 2019), and serving as lead editor of The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Menstruation Studies [due out in 2020] and a new ethnographic project exploring contemporary activism inspired by grief and trauma.
Chris is past president of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research and often quoted in the mainstream media about the rapidly growing menstrual activist movement including The New York Times, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, The Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, NPR, USA Today, The Atlantic, El Mundo,Agence France-Presse, and the Associated Press.
For a complete list of her publications and public intellectual engagements, see https://works.bepress.com/chris_bobel/