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 t...

2-2.5Some 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.

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 he...

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.

I came into this book with the wrong expectations, as I didn't realize how wide-ranging the essay topics would be. The author's unique perspective is fascinating and insightful, and I loved the illustrations by Xander Marro. I find it very interesting how much the author has thought about (auto)immunity, but found some of the interpretations of the immune system to be surprisingly skewed, if not off-base. Some of this was fairly minor - for example, talking about "lymphocytes, which develop into...

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

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 Co...

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

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

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.

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

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 understa...

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

Tw: biphobiaThis 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 mod...

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...

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...

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 wave...

educational but extremely weird

She is an extremely sloppy thinker and it’s extremely frustrating to read tbh. The introduction was the most interesting part: the rest was garbageAlso 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.

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...