Emilie Egger // In July 2019, Dr. Leana Wen resigned from her post as president of Planned Parenthood, citing philosophical differences with her former employer. In an op-ed published in The New York Times published days after her resignation, she summarized their differences as medicine versus politics. “I have long believed that the most effective…
Author: emilieegger
grad student
Morality, aesthetics, and fatness: review of Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body
Emilie Egger // Strings, Sabrina. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia. New York: New York University Press, 2019. Bathroom scales, sugar, Cosmopolitan magazine: these three items are linked in contemporary Western understanding of weight loss and management. The first is a gauge of adherence to medical and cultural norms of health;…
In reproductive health care, experience frames more rigorous academic questions
Emilie Egger // “Is it anti-feminist to question the Pill?,” asks writer Anna Silman in her June article in The Cut. In her discussion of the birth-control pill and its side effects, Silman chronicles rising concerns among people who take hormonal birth control. In a piece released the same week in The New York Times,…
Review: “Quackery” highlights history of trusting medical experts
Emilie Egger // Review of Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen. Quackery: a Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything. New York: Workman Publishing Company, Inc. 2017. The publishers of Quackery promise “67 shocking but true medical misfires that run the gamut from bizarre to deadly,” and the book’s authors are well-suited to this…
Book Review: “Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes”
Emilie Egger// Rojas-Perez, Isaias. Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared in Peru’s Postwar Andes. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. “I have interrogated [the] formulation of death as the limit of power or as the power relationship’s outside edge,” anthropologist Isaias Rojas-Perez writes in Mourning Remains: State Atrocity, Exhumations, and Governing the Disappeared…
Zika Coverage and the Limits of Repronormativity
Emilie Egger // After nearly two years of distressing headlines, the Zika virus had receded from mainstream news coverage. That was until a newly pregnant Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, set off for a tour of the South Pacific, where the virus has spread in recent months. The optics of hand wringing over the health…
Seeking Purity: Essential Oils and White Motherhood
Emilie Egger // Last summer at a conference on organic farming, I took a “weedwifery” walk with a longtime herbalist. Near the end of the hour-long event, during which the herbalist pointed out the extensive health uses of commonplace plants that usually become subject to removal when they appear in people’s gardens, another conversation emerged….
