Victoria Pitts
Associate Professor

Office : Powdermaker Hall 252EE Telephone : (718) 997-2807 Fax : (718) 997-2820 Email : vpitts@gc.cuny.edu

Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Associate Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (Rutgers University Press, 2007) and In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body Modification (2003, Palgrave), as well as many articles and book chapters on social and cultural aspects of the body. She is Editor of the forthcoming The Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body (Greenwood Press), and co-Editor of the journal Women’s Studies Quarterly. She has won an Advancement of the Discipline Award from the American Sociological Association. She received her PhD in sociology from Brandeis University.

Selected Articles:
 
2006: “The Body, Beauty and PsychoSocial Power,” Bodies in the Making: Transitions and Transgressions, eds. Helene Moglen and Nancy Chen. Santa Cruz, CA: New Pacific Press.
 
2006: “The Surface and the Depth: Medicalization, Beauty and Body Image in Cosmetic Surgery,” in Judith Lorber and Lisa Jean Moore, Gendered Bodies: Feminist
Perspectives. Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2006.  

2005: "Feminism, Technology, and Bodies-in-Connection," Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 34 (3-4): 229-247.

2004: "Illness and Internet Empowerment: Writing and Reading Breast Cancer in Cyberspace," Health: Interdisciplinary Journal of Health, Illness and Medicine. 8 (1): 33-59.

Reprinted in The Sociology of Health and Illness, edited by Peter Conrad. New York: Worth-St. Martin's Press, 2004.

2003: "Crime and Embodiment" in Controversies in Critical Criminology, edited by Martin D. Schwartz and Suzanne Hatty. Cincinnati: Anderson Press.

2002: "Le Donne e I Progetti di Trasformazione Fisica: Femminismo e Tecnologie del Corpo (Women, Identity, and the 'Body Project,'"), Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia (Italian Review of Sociology) vol. XLIII, no. 3: 379-405. Translated by Roberta Sassatelli.

2002: "Reading the Body through a Cultural Lens," (Review Essay) Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Vol. 31 No. 3: 361-372.

2001: "Popular Pedagogies, Illness and the Gendered Body: Reading Breast Cancer Discourse in Cyberspace," Popular Culture Review 12 (2): 21-36.

2000: "Visibly Queer: Body Technologies and Sexual Politics," The Sociological Quarterly 41(3): 443-464.

2000: “Teaching Homosexuality?: The Queer Theory Challenge for Deviance Studies,” Teaching the Sociology of Deviance. Eds. Michael Maume and Martin D. Schwartz. Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association.

1999: "Body Modification, Self-Mutilation and Agency in Media Accounts of a Subculture," Body and Society 5(2-3): 291-303.

Reprinted in Body Modification, edited by Mike Featherstone (2000). London: Sage, Pp. 291-303.

1998: "Reclaiming the Female Body: Embodied Identity Work, Resistance and the Grotesque," Body and Society 4(3): 67-84.