The Body Is Not an Apology (2018)

A mantra we should all embrace.

The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength.

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A solid introductory text about body positivity and its relations to social justice, oppression, and radical self-love. I appreciated Sonya Renee Taylor highlighting the role of capitalism, racism, and transphobia in promoting body shame. So many books and research articles about body image focus on cisgender, heterosexual white women’s experiences and often neglect the role of systems of oppression in making people dislike their bodies.

“Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength”

The Book Guide® Editor

Taylor draws several arguments about how various social inequities and injustices lead us to disdain nonnormative (e.g., nonwhite, nonthin or nonmuscular, etc.) bodies, as well as how we can cultivate radical self-love to view and treat our bodies better. She makes astute points about how professionalism promotes white supremacist and oppressive norms, how children’s bodies are not public property, and how color blindness blocks us from seeing each other and ourselves as who we truly are.

I refer to The Body Is Not an Apology because I feel like there’s so much room for more writing about each of the topics Taylor presents in this book. While I loved pretty much all the ideas she raised, I wanted more depth about each of them, more intellectual richness, and nuanced emotional exploration. For example, in one section she writes about how children’s bodies should not be treated as public property and then transitions right into the perils of color blindness, and I felt confused about how that transition happened, even though I appreciated both topics.

Recommended to those who are interested in body image and want a quick foray into how social justice concepts and topics related to body image. I so stand with Taylor’s message that we do not need to apologize for our bodies, no matter what they look like.