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Reimagines the human body as a site of theory, relational care, ethics, and political knowledge rather than an inert object to be regulated, corrected, or erased.
Drawing from South Asian, Indigenous, feminist, and queer philosophies of Kālī’s body, at once beautiful and abominable, wounded and regenerative, violated and resistant, Anatomophilia develops the theory of anatomophilia as a radical love and reverence for diverse anatomies. Moving across medical education and clinical encounters, embodied histories of migration, dance and performance, protest in the streets, visual art, and everyday bodily rituals, Devaleena Das argues that Global South bodies do not merely illustrate theory; they think, resist, and generate knowledge through touch, affect, grief, and resilience. Challenging disembodied and technocratic models of justice and care, she offers an ethically demanding framework for teaching, learning, and practicing medicine and care differently. Essential reading for scholars in health humanities and social sciences, clinicians, and students of feminist, queer, and justice studies, Anatomophilia speaks to urgent questions about embodiment, care, and what it means to live and love through the body.
"In this brave and beautiful book, Devaleena Das forges, out of profound grief and pain and courageous resilience, a theory and method rooted in the transformative power of bodily suffering and love. With the body of the goddess Kālī as presiding spirit, and drawing on the history and wisdom embodied in marginalized bodies worldwide, she offers a paradigm for care in the practice of medicine and in the world we collectively inhabit. In so doing, she productively challenges the hierarchies, fleshless abstractions, and priorities that characterize the practice and theory of medicine and of culture in the contemporary North." — Priscilla Wald, author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form
"A very welcome addition to the interconnected fields of health humanities, gender studies, and postcolonial scholarship, Anatomophilia is both method and manifesto. Das breathes to life a theory of the body born from deep grief and profound love, from the experiences of bodies of color and bodies from the Global South, bodies engaged in protests and pedagogies, movements and medicines. What she offers, ultimately, is a way of being-in-the-world, a way of living that reorients scholars, healers, teachers, and activists to walk in the footsteps of the goddess Kālī, a path that is fierce, unflinching, powerful, and transformative." — Sayantani DasGupta, coauthor of Principles and Practices of Narrative Medicine
Devaleena Das is Associate Professor of Body, Sexuality, and Health at the University of Minnesota Medical School.