From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.
The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.