Interpreting the Body

About the Editors

Anne Marie Champagne is a junior fellow with the Center for Cultural Sociology, at Yale University, where she is a doctoral candidate in sociology. In addition to serving on the advisory council of Not Putting on a Shirt (NPOAS), a nonprofit advocating for satisfactory aesthetic outcomes for mastectomy patients, she is a member of The Civil Sphere Working Group, an international forum of theorists and empirical social scientists engaging with and developing Civil Sphere Theory. Her research interests include aesthetic power in social life, materiality and culture, body and embodiment, social theory, gender, and the cultural codes of the civil sphere. Her dissertation looks at how aesthetics and materiality inform legal, medical, and individual approaches to mastectomy and constructions of identity in transmen and female-identified breast cancer survivors.

Asia Friedman is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Delaware. Her research has primarily focused on developing a body of research in cognitive sociology unified around her interest in the cognitive and sensory mechanisms of the social construction process. This has included efforts to expand the vocabulary of the field by theorizing such concepts as perceptual construction, filter analysis, and cultural blind spots, as well as to apply analytic frameworks rooted in the sociology of attention and perception to other substantive areas, specifically, gender, race, the body, medicine, and sociological theory. Her book, Blind to Sameness: Sexpectations and the Social Construction of Male and Female Bodies (University of Chicago Press, 2013), won the Distinguished Book Award from the Sex and Gender section of the American Sociological Association in 2016. A second monograph, Mammography Wars: Analyzing Attention in Cultural and Medical Disputes, is forthcoming in 2023 from Rutgers University Press.