This book explores the personal value of healthy behavior, arguing that our modern tendency to praise or blame individuals for their health is politically and economically motivated and has reinforced growing health disparities between the wealthy and poor under the guise of individual responsibility.

Talia Welsh is UTAA Distinguished Service Professor & UC Foundation Professor of Philosophy and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, USA. She is the translator of Child Psychology & Pedagogy: Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the Sorbonne and the author of The Child as Natural Phenomenologist: Primal and Primary Experience in Merleau-Ponty's Psychology.

Preface; Acknowledgements; Chapter One The Good Health Imperative; Chapter Two A Critical Phenomenology of Health and Illness; Chapter Three Feminist Phenomenologies and Self-Regulating Bodies; Chapter Four Biopolitics and Personal Responsibility; Chapter Five Marxism, Reproductive Labor, and the Body as Fetish Object; Chapter Six Alternative Visions of Health-Somaesthetics and Innumerable Healths; Chapter Seven Toward an Existential Ethics of Working on the Self; Bibliography