Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes Reviews

• 
  l

  She is an extremely sloppy thinker and it’s extremely frustrating to read tbh. The introduction was the most interesting part: the rest was garbage
  
  Also the jab about “queer” being used by girls who kiss girls at clubs to get male attention, and then saying that she’s queer bc she’s anti capitalist is so hilarious to me. A battle between straight people for the completely meaningless queer label.
  
  Oh, she also believes that misogyny is about hatred of femininity jsyk before wasting your time.
• 
  Jason Gordon

  A series of essays that pays an homage to a genre of horror films and novels (body horror) by using them as a springboard to discuss the horrors women face under a patriarchal capitalism (particularly in work, entertainment, and medicine). The author outlines some of these horrors as a close observer (Massacre on Veng Street) or as a quasi survivor (Fucking Cancer). Her writing style does take some getting used to, but the patient reader is rewarded with trenchant observations. Metaphysics of Compost is one of the most delightful essays in this collection. Moore leverages her experience with farming (an experience that she uses to highlight the complementary relationship between life and decay) to shatter some of the most harmful myths (purity in relation to consumption) perpetuated by the mainstream food movement. She also demonstrates that the movement's current focus (on sustainability and consumption) are distractions -- arguing that 'the relationships forged by what we eat and how it is acquired are as equally important to the nutritional properties of what is ingested.'
  
  I'd recommend this book to everyone (so much so that I've bought 9 additional copies and gifted them to my friends).
• 
  Lucy Dacus

  The essays only get better as you read on, getting to know her voice, which is intelligent, insightful, sarcastic, and funny in the face of doom-laden subject matter. I had a slow start for whatever reason, but I ended up liking it a lot.
• 
  Ellie

  I was really excited about this book, but it fell far short of my expectations. Moore draws on many primary texts, events, experiences, little known facts, and phenomena that are interesting - or seem to be, from her relatively limited treatment of them - but her writing is so frenetic, jumping from topic to topic within a given essay it is sometimes difficult to see the connection from one part of the essay to the next, or how parts of the discussion serve her overall point; or if she is even tracing the same point from beginning to end.
  
  I also take serious issue with Moore's co-opting of terminologies that belong to other movements and groups, as well as her comparison of Cambodian garment workers and American women in the field of modeling. On both of these issues Moore speaks from a place of privilege that I don't think she fully understands or accepts.
  
  If nothing else, Moore's insights about much of her own experience coming to terms with and living as a person with disabilities that are under studied because they primarily affect women are important
• 
  Raquel

  Read my review of this here!
  https://www.autostraddle.com/body-hor...
• 
  Tessa

  i have mixed feelings about this that i want to acknowledge because i saw a handful of you have it on your lists! i really liked it when i liked it and really didn’t when i didn’t. i think she writes best about american healthcare, illness, and her own experiences—if i was cherry picking, i’d recommend the last three essays. if you read it front to back you will have to grit your teeth through her bizarro explanation of why she identifies as queer (????). i put this collection down for weeks at times when i found her voice tedious and her points not that good. but then again the vagina dentata essay made me laugh out loud on the train. she touches the same ideas frequently—i would have preferred to read one strong essay and gone “interesting!” than repeatedly going “that’s an okay version of the point you’ve already made.” but also i want my uk friends to read it and wonder at how bad american healthcare is LOL
• 
  Riley Wilson

  I really really wanted to like this book. I relate (or thought I related) to a lot of the things Moore writes about, but I’m ultimately left feeling a bit.... I don’t know, frustrated I guess.
  
  There was one essay that I found particularly grating. For all of Moore’s claiming to be “neither stupid or ignorant of political struggles,” I found much of her writing tone deaf, such as when she notes (on the page opposite of the one with the previous quote) that she uses the word “queer” as the general public would fail to recognize, saying that it’s not “the hip synonym for bisexual that indicates I kiss girls at bars to impress boys. I mean queer in the anti-capitalist sense.” Ugh. Moore wishes to speak out against misogyny while describing fellow queer women disparagingly, then notes that she’s never purchase anything “based on a supposed but well-ballyhooed affinity for the LGBTQ community.” This condescension and tone is Moore’s biggest issue. Her topics are interesting but it’s hard to take her seriously when she takes herself so overwhelmingly seriously! (Although I didn’t know at first whether or not she was joking when she said in the same essay that she felt uncomfortable with “crip” because it was “too broad,” despite using “queer” to criticize the LGBTQ community. She wasn’t joking.) Perhaps I’m being too hard on her because I feel that her way of writing is indicative of a larger issue within activist groups (mainly, that those who “know” that they are “right” treat those of us who have yet to be educated as purposefully ignorant), but that doesn’t change my response when reading this. In that same vein: there are plenty of examples of women, those with disabilities, and queer folk experiencing prejudice and injustice. But Moore seems to reach to grab onto new ones people haven’t talked about yet: apparently Amazons Alexa is ableist for responding “I don’t have an opinion on that” to Moore’s question: “Do you acknowledge that people with disabilities exist in the world?” Come ON. Yes, the programmer could have coded more about disabilities, but this is such a blatant trap! It’s bad rhetoric. Frankly, I don’t think it helps people with chronic illnesses.
  
  Some of Moore’s essays on film horror are pretty cool, but nothing phenomenal.
  
  The standout essay of this collection is a tie between the introduction and the last one. Here, Moore abandons most of her rhetoric and just writes. And she’s a good writer! It feels more authentic and less like I’m trying to be fed my own oppression.
• 
  Liza Rodimtseva

  Passionate writing not is necessarily good writing and passionate thoughts are not always being clever ones. Like many essay collections, it jumps about wildly, both in subject and in quality. In some moments, Moore writes poetically about her existential experiences as a chronically ill person, at others she dips into the livid prose of a first-year discourse student. It was no surprise to find that most of these works were originally published online, or not published at all. When Moore is at her best, her rage is palpable; when she unpacks the many, many ways the American medical industry has systematically failed the millions of patients like herself - mostly female for unknown reasons - who suffer from autoimmune disease; or how the garment industry exploits the labor of female workers from sweatshop seamstresses to runway models. On the other hand, some of her ideas are nonsensical, like the intellectual contortion with which she attempts to sew a connection between our culture's infuriating expectation that it is a woman's social debt to bear children and - drum roll, wait for it - the history of U.S. patent law. Just because two things are both rooted in patriarchal beliefs, as most things are, doesn't mean they're in any way correlated. Even more, sometimes Moore falls, with unintended hilarity, into the trope of the outrage-hungry feminist screaming "Sexist!" at inanimate objects, like when she explains how the lowly sanitary napkin disposal bag is a "horrifying" manifestation of masculinist society's revulsion towards female bodies. Interesting thesis, but never does it occur to her that a blood-soaked tampon is in all actuality a biohazard and ought to be disposed of as such. It's not 'internalized misogyny' to not want to encounter another woman's menstrual waste, and sexism is not the reason women are encouraged to bag up their biowaste any more than it's sexist to train hotel maids not to handle soiled linens with their bare hands.
• 
  Robbie Bruens

  a really truly excellent book that will shift your brain around quite a lot, or at least it did mine -- the essays in here changed how I think about and see myself, taught me a lot about autoimmunity and the exacts horrors inflicted on us by industrial/postindustrial society, its shape, its unintended or totally intended consequences
• 
  Kap

  In Body Horror: Capitalism, Fear, Misogyny, Jokes, Anne Elizabeth Moore explores how capitalism breeds violence against and engenders illness within the bodies of women*.
  
  Moore explores the intersection of capitalism and the body within three realms: work, entertainment, and medicine. Each essay is well-researched and thoughtfully presented, interspersed with Moore’s dark humor. I laughed out loud multiple times while reading her essay, “The Presence of No Present”, in which Moore interrogates her in-home “robot—a “machine that has been designed to live in my house and make my life easier by ordering me things off Amazon Prime”—but winds up with a misheard grocery list instead. Through this amusing encounter, Moore explores how language can help shape and reveal us to ourselves and others, and how “silencing what is not understood only ensures it cannot be considered in the future” (p. 177).
  
  My favorite essays in this collection where those that focused on medicine—in particular, the experience of living with chronic illness. As a woman with multiple autoimmune diseases, Moore attempts to understand the body horror that permeates her own life and the lives of so many others. From how modern food additives may contribute to the rise of autoimmune diseases, to the “superbug apocalypse”, to how farm-to-table restaurants are often inaccessible to those with disabilities. Moore supplements journalistic detail with thoughtful cultural critique. I had a hard time putting down this book.
  
  *Moore does attempt to acknowledge nonbinary people, but she fails to properly acknowledge trans men and women and how capitalist violence and illness marks their lives and bodies. I think Moore could have been more upfront in acknowledging and outlining that her essays mostly focus on a certain group of people (i.e., straight cis women). The first essay in the book, "Massacre on Veng Sreng Street" is the one outlier in this regard as it explores Cambodian culture and politics. Additionally, as others have pointed out, Moore's (short) mention/discussion of queerness comes across as biphobic and dismissive.
• 
  Amanda

  A collection of undeveloped and convoluted round-about thoughts. Though there are some undeniably interesting arguments to be made about the relationship of disability and disease to the exploitation of bodies in capitalism, these essays are so haphazardly argumentative and simultaneously fails to underline the bigger picture and give a structured, coherent analysis. Moore loses her focus by going on tangent after tangent, and most of which meant more to virtue signal than explore her points in depth. The relationship between conceiving children and intellectual property was a strange link to draw, and I couldn't see the argument that would inevitably link the patriarchy and white supremacy simultaneously to that relationship. I just don't think her arguments were as smart as she wanted them to sound. Perhaps I wanted a more structured analysis and got a book of rants that lead nowhere instead.
• 
  Roma Linares

  I will admit that there were many essays that I think made very poignant points, but overall it felt pretty all over the place. I would have liked if it were a bit tighter and felt more organized around a point. To be honest thought, I stopped when Moore began to call herself queer but not in the 'girls kissing each other at college parties' way but in the anti-capitalist way. Excuse me, yes being queer is, in large part, about recognizing and resisting these systems but you do have to be some sort of marginalized gender or sexuality identity to call yourself queer? By that point I just had to put it down.
  
• 
  Kendall McClain

  educational but extremely weird
• 
  Courtney

  2-2.5
  Some of the essays I enjoyed and the book overall is filled with very interesting concepts and issues. There are moments when her writing is enthralling and other times when it is insufferable and convoluted. Her arguments are also all over the place, and many essays are definitely filled with white feminist, superficial, shallow takes thinly veiled with feminism 101 vocab words.
• 
  Michelle Hogmire

  Eclectic range of essays involving the theme of real-life body horror, re. the treatment of women's bodies by the patriarchal/capitalist medical establishment, workplace, and film industries, all informed by a queer crip perspective. Moore is a smart, funny, and insightful writer on the sentence level, but the emotional aesthetic logic of her transitions--between sentences, paragraphs, and sections--sometimes loses me and/or the intentional direction of the piece. Despite all the structural wavering, her short essay about the history of sanitary napkin bags is a knockout and her conclusion that horror offers nothing too terrifying for anyone non-male identified is perhaps the most apt criticism of the genre I've ever heard, especially in the context of our current political climate. Will definitely check out her other work.
• 
  Greyson

  Tw: biphobia
  
  This book was so messy and left me angry by the end. In one essay she not only showed her biphobia and the decided to co-opt the word queer when she's not! : "not queer in the online dating check-box sense - the hip synonym for bisexual that indicates I kiss girls at bars to impress boys. I mean queer in the anti-capitalist." (Page 169)
  As someone who is queer, this made me angry.
  
  I also didn't like how she compared how models are treated to garment factory workers. I'm not saying models aren't treated badly but it's not the same.
  
  Her privilege is very apparent in most of her essays; the introduction was the best part. I do think that her essay(s) on Healthcare in America are good and she is disabled herself so some of her thoughts are good and insightful. But overall this collection was a huge letdown and I was left thinking wtf.
• 
  Stephanie McGarrah

  The title is misleading. I rarely dislike a book so much I give it two stars, but there was so much leftist jargon in here, including a sentence where they make sure to include seemingly every "ism" they could think of. Its written by someone (i'm assuming they are some form of socialist) who doesn't seem to particularly like horror, even though they've seen "thousands" of horror films. The critiques of capitalism and misogyny weren't anything new. Also, I'm not sure where the jokes were because it wasn't funny, but maybe that's just my sense of humor.
  
  It wasn't all bad though, I found the sections on autoimmunity to be interesting, even if her conclusions seemed to rest on reforming everything, put more money into research and a plea for more accessibility in daily life. If you're looking for a liberal take on capitalism, Naomi Klein is probably a better choice (at least I don't remember her writing focusing too much on identity politics). There are much better books on all of these subjects.
• 
  Kristine Olsen

  Although some pretty weighty topics are discussed in this book, it isn't the best feminist text I've read. I don't really know what I was expecting when I came across this book. Moore discusses some fairly weighty topics here and she's obviously well read on them. She speaks quite a bit about her autoimmune diseases, yet we never really learn what they are. I do respect privacy, however, it may have informed me a little more on what she deals with on a day to day basis so I could better understand her discussions. There were definitely some interesting points I didn't know before, like how underfunded research is regarding autoimmune diseases and I can certainly see how that would be so frustrating for those who would directly benefit from such research. Overall, an interesting read. Looking forward to trying Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist.
• 
  Lily

  I'm still thinking about these essays. While sometimes Anne Elizabeth Moore comes across as a feminist conspiracy theorist, other times she is touching raw nerves about illness, capitalism, time, femininity, the body, horror, medical instituions, Cambodia, and life itself with such powerful and honest words its hard to critique her style at all. Also, the illustrations throughout are glorious and bizarre. The last essay about death and humor wrenched me to the core, I almost cried.
• 
  Diane Bluegreen

  this is a very good collection of essays,some of them very brutal and frank,about health issues,including autoimmune diseases,as well as how being a woman affects one's health care under our USAian brand of capitalism. that is where a lot of the horror lies.
  
  i really enjoyed her writing and thoughts,and i hope someone will write a more eloquent review for this book on goodreads. i am going to be seeking to read more of her writing.
  
  the cover illustration as well as those inside the book are pretty awful,not as a judgement on talent,but probably appropriate to the tone of this book. it's body horror art,after all.
  
  though not listed on goodreads as far as i can tell,i read this in a paperback edition that i borrowed from my local library. i am grateful that someone had the wisdom to order this book for our library.
• 
  Julene

  On board for some essays more than others, though I appreciate their feminist approach (replete with feminist-queer-etc vocabulary!) to tackling their subject matter.
  
  Probably the most significant body of work I've encountered with great focus on autoimmune diseases; the following figures especially caught my eye:
  
  1 in 12 people (or, 1 in 9 women) will develop autoimmunity [issues] over the course of their lives, while 1 in 14 people will develop cancer. Cancer research gets 7.5 times the funding as autoimmune diseases, of course. No wonder the leading cause of death for those suffering from autoimmune diseases is suicide. :(
• 
  Matt Sautman

  Body Horror is a potentially misleading title, as the book engages with discourse about the genre of body horror fairly minimally. However, every essay in Elizabeth Moore’s collection pertains to the body in some way- the bodies we exclude, the bodies we watch die on screen, the female body, time’s relationship with the body, etc.- and these essays are fantastic exemplars of creative nonfiction. Coming into this collection expecting peer reviewed writings on horror all but guarantees a reader will be disappointed. Yet approaching Body Horror as a collection of feminist essays makes the reading experience far more fruitful.
• 
  Sucre

  the author is often condescending and the essays become disjointed and hard to parse. the author also identifies as queer because she is anti-capitalist, not because she dates women or fits under the trans umbrella. she is white and straight and too often appears to avoid acknowledging that trans women exist in any relation to the subjects she is discussing. some of what she wrote on disability is good, and I will be doing further reading on articles she has referenced, but I often disagree with the conclusions she comes to. the art is really what is pushing me to give this 2 stars instead of 1.
• 
  Savannah Jackson

  Maybe this book just wasn’t quite my style but had many good things to it as well. In some ways the writing comes off as bitter but I’m not saying it isn’t justified-just makes it a bit of a tougher read.
  This book takes on topics I don’t see much in the feminist literature sphere and for that I love it. There isn’t anything held back. Things are talked about unflinchingly.
  Some essays are better than others as is usual in a read like this. The author has a particular gift about writing about health issues and challenges. Those were my favorite pieces.
• 
  Ariane Schang

  What a great collection of essays. The topics meander all over the place (international, national, personal) but the logic makes sense. Interesting stuff about the genre of horror and what is considered horrific/who decides what is horrific. Lots of really interesting commentary on health in America and women's health. Even more interesting things about femininity and how it's consistently undervalued.
• 
  Lynne

  READ THIS BOOK! Personal and also full of data. Funny and sad and frustrating and heart-breaking. The final piece ("Three Months After Emerging from Your Deathbed") made me cry because it was so beautiful and evocative. As someone with an autoimmune disease (Graves', which is one of the Moore's illnesses), I found a lot of those pieces very interesting and applicable to my experience, even though I am currently in remission. But yeah, pick this up. It's amazing.
• 
  Karen

  This book didn't quite work. Most of the essays tried to stick two things together that almost connected but didn't quite, like one not-very-famous horror movie and a novel. And the essays themselves didn't really cohere - all related to bodies somehow, but they were very disparate. Similarly, the points she made often almost but not quite worked, like when she defined queer as anti-capitalist. It was an interesting point, but that isn't what the word means.
• 
  Veronica

  In this updated edition of her 2017 cult classic, Anne Elizabeth Moore ties personal reflection of chronic health issues and near-death experiences with the national horror that is the US Healthcare system to global capitalism. Full review at Storygraph:
  https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...