Books by Sander L. Gilman

Are Racists Crazy?: How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity (Biopolitics, 11)

by James Thomas, Sander L. Gilman

The connection and science behind race, racism, and mental illness
In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that - based on their clinical experiment - the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine cited the study, posing the question: Is racism becoming a mental illness? In Are Racists Crazy? Sander Gilman and James Thomas trace the idea of race and racism as psychopathological categories., from mid-19th century Europe, to contemporary America, up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford, and ask a slightly different question than that posed by Time: How did racism become a mental illness? Using historical, archival, and content analysis, the authors provide a rich account of how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’ - including anthropology, medicine, and biology - used race as a means of defining psychopathology and how assertions about race and madness became embedded within disciplines that deal with mental health and illness.

An illuminating and riveting history of the discourse on racism, antisemitism, and psychopathology, Are Racists Crazy? connects past and present claims about race and racism, showing the dangerous implications of this specious line of thought for today.

Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture

by Sander L. Gilman

Our bodies are not fixed. They expand and contract with variations in diet, exercise, and illness. They also alter as we age, changing over time to be markedly different at the end of our lives from what they were at birth. In a similar way, our attitudes to bodies, and especially posture—how people hold themselves, how they move—are fluid. We interpret stance and gait as healthy or ill, able or disabled, elegant or slovenly, beautiful or ugly. In Stand Up Straight!, Sander L. Gilman probes these shifting concepts of posture to explore how society’s response to our bodies’ appearance can illuminate how society views who we are and what we are able to do.

The first comprehensive history of the upright body at rest and in movement, Stand Up Straight! stretches from Neanderthals to modern humans to show how we have used our understanding of posture to define who we are—and who we are not. Gilman traverses theology and anthropology, medicine and politics, discarded ideas of race and the most modern ideas of disability, theories of dance and concepts of national identity in his quest to set straight the meaning of bearing. Fully illustrated with an array of striking images from medical, historical, and cultural sources, Stand Up Straight! interweaves our developing knowledge of anatomy and a cultural history of posture to provide a highly original account of our changing attitudes toward stiff spines, square shoulders, and flat tummies through time.

Fat Boys A Slim Book

by Sander L. Gilman

He isøthe epitome of health?or a walking time bomb. He is oversexed?or sexless. He is jolly?or hiding the tears of a clown. He is the picture of wealth and plenty?or the bloated, malnourished emblem of poverty. He is the fat man?a cultural icon, a social enigma, a pressing medical issue?and he is the subject of this remarkably rich book.

The figures that Sander L. Gilman considers, from the ugly fat man with the beautiful sylph trapped inside to the smart fat boy to the aging body desirous of rejuvenation, appear and reappear in different guises throughout Western culture. And as is often true of marginal cases, they serve to define the shifting center of our dreams and beliefs. A tentative exploration in the world of male body fantasies, Gilman?s book asks how the representation of the fat man alters with time and alters how men relate to their own bodies and the bodies of others, both men and women. His examples?ranging from Santa Claus to Sancho Panza, from Falstaff to Babe Ruth, from Nero Wolfe to Al Roker?illustrate the complexity perennially associated with fat men. From discourses about normality to the playing fields of baseball, from Greek male beauty to the fat detective, Gilman?s book examines and illuminates how cultures have imagined and portrayed the fat boy.

Freud, Race, and Gender

by Sander L. Gilman

A Jew in a violently anti-Semitic world, Sigmund Freud was forced to cope with racism even in the "serious" medical literature of the fin de siècle, which described Jews as inherently pathological and sexually degenerate. In this provocative book, Sander L. Gilman argues that Freud's internalizing of these images of racial difference shaped the questions of psychoanalysis. Examining a variety of scientific writings, Gilman discusses the prevailing belief that male Jews were "feminized," as stated outright by Jung and others, and concludes that Freud dealt with his anxiety about himself as a Jew by projecting it onto other cultural "inferiors"--such as women. Gilman's fresh view of the origins of psychoanalysis challenges those who separate Freud's revolutionary theories from his Jewish identity.

Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?

by Cass R. Sunstein, Sander L. Gilman, Saskia Sassen, Joseph Raz, Susan Moller Okin, Azizah Y. Al-Hibri, Yael Tamis

Polygamy, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, punishing women for being raped, differential access for men and women to health care and education, unequal rights of ownership, assembly, and political participation, unequal vulnerability to violence. These practices and conditions are standard in some parts of the world. Do demands for multiculturalism--and certain minority group rights in particular--make them more likely to continue and to spread to liberal democracies? Are there fundamental conflicts between our commitment to gender equity and our increasing desire to respect the customs of minority cultures or religions? In this book, the eminent feminist Susan Moller Okin and fifteen of the world's leading thinkers about feminism and multiculturalism explore these unsettling questions in a provocative, passionate, and illuminating debate.

Okin opens by arguing that some group rights can, in fact, endanger women. She points, for example, to the French government's giving thousands of male immigrants special permission to bring multiple wives into the country, despite French laws against polygamy and the wives' own bitter opposition to the practice. Okin argues that if we agree that women should not be disadvantaged because of their sex, we should not accept group rights that permit oppressive practices on the grounds that they are fundamental to minority cultures whose existence may otherwise be threatened.

In reply, some respondents reject Okin's position outright, contending that her views are rooted in a moral universalism that is blind to cultural difference. Others quarrel with Okin's focus on gender, or argue that we should be careful about which group rights we permit, but not reject the category of group rights altogether. Okin concludes with a rebuttal, clarifying, adjusting, and extending her original position. These incisive and accessible essays--expanded from their original publication in Boston Review and including four new contributions--are indispensable reading for anyone interested in one of the most contentious social and political issues today.

The diverse contributors, in addition to Okin, are Azizah al-Hibri, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Homi Bhabha, Sander Gilman, Janet Halley, Bonnie Honig, Will Kymlicka, Martha Nussbaum, Bhikhu Parekh, Katha Pollitt, Robert Post, Joseph Raz, Saskia Sassen, Cass Sunstein, and Yael Tamir.

Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness

by Sander L. Gilman

Review

In ten chapters filled with literary examples and historical evidence of astonishing diversity, a major historian of psychoanalysis develops enough theses for several books. Acknowledging stereotypes as necessary and ubiquitous, Gilman traces some important destructive ones from Aristotle to the present: women, Jews, and blacks seen as repositories of sex, disease, and madness. Embracing history, philosophy, psychology, public health, and the arts, this landmark work clears a path through terrain strewn with false historical pointers, and puts Freud's influence in a welcome new light. ― Library Journal


About the Author

Sander L. Gilman is Goldwyn Smith Professor of Humane Studies in the Departments of German Literature and Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University and is also Professor of the History of Psychiatry at the Cornell Medical College.

Doc Or Quack Science and Anti-Science in Modern Medicine

by Sander L. Gilman

From pharmaceutical companies to acupuncture, an essential investigation of the constantly evolving relationship between mainstream Western medicine and quackery.

Reaching from the beginnings of scientific medicine in the nineteenth century through to the present, Sander L. Gilman examines the ever-shifting boundary between scientific medicine and quackery, asking if such a fixed boundary can actually exist within mainstream medical practice. Through detailed case studies—of stomach ulcers, eye disease, and acupuncture—Doc or Quack reveals the influence of pharmaceutical companies in determining the science of medical practice, the pros and cons of the increasing specialization in medical practice, and the murky issue of “race” in scientific medicine. This readable account covers medical practice from the Enlightenment to the present, offering a realistic view of health politics in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. It’s an essential read for anyone interested in the history and politics of Western medicine.