Choice Review

This focused volume critiques three discourses on women's health issues situated in personal empowerment narratives. Through an intersectional lens that brings feminist and racial perspectives into sharp contrast with neoliberal and postfeminist assumptions, the idea of risk--of breast cancer, postpartum depression, and human papillomavirus (HPV)--is deconstructed and contextualized in Western medical and social narratives of power and vulnerability. Drawing heavily from critical biomedicalization theories developed by Adele Clarke, Dubriwny (Texas A&M) offers undergraduates a challenging but approachable introduction, due to its grounding in three highly visible, tangible health topics. However, because of the heavy emphasis on feminism/postfeminism, readers need at least some familiarity with feminist theory along with a basic grounding in the concepts of Foucauldian power and medicalization. The introductory and concluding sections illustrate the author's careful reflexivity in, for example, treading a fine line between respecting individual medical decisions (such as for prophylactic mastectomies) and criticizing the surrounding ideological context; this will be valuable for advanced scholars both within biomedicalization-oriented research and outside it. The examples of more feminist-oriented health discussions at the end round out the critical approach with constructive discussion. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty; informed general audiences. S. M. Weiss Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute