This book looks at the physical and metaphorical attributes of the human body as a site of contention, politics, and cultural protest. It discusses a range of issues, from torture and moral panics to the "AIDS plague" and the homosocial subtexts of George Bush's political speeches.

Introduction -- Disease, War, & The Family -- The Politics of the "Gay Plague": AIDS as a U.S. Ideology -- Fatal Abstraction: The Death and Sinister Afterlife of the American Family -- Not in Our Name: Women, War, AIDS -- The Meaning of Property: Real Estate, Class Position, and the Ideology of Home Ownership -- Homelessness and Poststructuralist Theory -- Orphans' Dreams: Panic Wars and the Postmodern -- Drugs Hysteria Pain -- A Short History of the Parasite Cafe -- James Bond and Immanuel Kant's War on Drugs: A Nosography and Nosegrammatics of Male Hysteria -- AlphaBet City: The Politics of Pharmacology -- The Broken Self: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and Native American Selfhood -- Political Bodies -- George Bush, or Homosocial Politics -- Postmortem on the Presidential Body, or Where the Rest of Him Went -- Torture, Knowledge, & The State -- Subjected Bodies, Science, and the State: Francis Bacon, Torturer -- Body Memories: Aide-Memoires and Collective Amnesia in the Wake of the Argentine Terror -- The Official Story: Response to Julie Taylor -- The Electronic Body at the End of the State: Ethnicity, National Identity, and the Japanese Emperor System -- Alternities -- Toni Negri's Practical Philosophy -- The Physiology of Counter-Power: When Socialism Is Impossible and Communism So Near -- Possible Worlds: An Interview with Donna Haraway -- Frankenstein's Dream: Constitutional Revision and Social Design, or How to Build a Body Politic