Clare Chambers

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Clare Chambers is Reader in Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. She is the prize-winning author of four books: Sex, Culture, and Justice: The Limits of Choice (Penn State University Press, 2008); Teach Yourself Political Philosophy: A Complete Introduction (with Phil Parvin, Hodder, 2013); Against Marriage: An Egalitarian Defence of the Marriage-Free State (Oxford University Press, 2017); and Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body (Allen Lane, 2022). Against Marriage was awarded the 2018 David Easton Award from the American Political Science Association.

Clare’s work has been featured by various media outlets and think tanks, including BBC Radio 4 (PM, Sweet Reason, Broadcasting House, Woman’s Hour, How To Disagree), the Guardian, Sky News, local radio, the IPPR, the Fabian Society, UK Feminista, Aeon, opendemocracy.net, Philosophy Bites, The Philosophers’ Magazine and 3:am magazine. She has given public lectures in venues such as the Festival of Ideas and Women of the World Festival.

 

Non-Fiction

Publication DetailsNotes
2022

Allen Lane

The pressure to change our bodies is overwhelming. We strive to defy ageing, build our biceps, cure our disabilities, conceal our quirks. Surrounded by filtered photos and surgically-enhanced features, we must contort our physical selves to prejudiced standards of beauty. Perfection is impossible, and even an acceptable body seems out of reach.

In this mind-expanding book, Cambridge philosopher Clare Chambers argues that the unmodified body is a key political principle. While defending our right to change our bodies, she argues that the social pressures to modify undermine equality. She shows how the connected ideas of the natural body, the normal body, and the whole body have been used both to disrupt and to maintain social hierarchies - sometimes oppressing, other times liberating. The body becomes a site of political importance: a place where hierarchies of sex, gender, race, disability, age, and class are reinforced.

Through a thought-provoking analysis of the power dynamics that structure our society, and with examples ranging widely from bodybuilding to breast implants, deafness to male circumcision, Intact stresses that we must break away from the oppressive forces that demand we alter our bodies. Instead, it offers a bold, transformative vision of the human body that is equal without expectation.