Bridget Hanna

The Book

Your Body of Work is a work of criticism about fitness culture, structured by a personal memoir of growth, loss, and change, that smuggles in a complete evidence-based fitness manual. It takes on the divide between the fitness and body-positivity movements — two camps that founder on two conflated questions: can I lose weight, and should I? Can I is mechanistic. Should I is a private moral choice caught in a storm of gendered and racialized politics. Fuse the two, and every plateau arrives as a moral verdict.

Written for the reader who already knows the shame economy is real — and who still longs for transformation — the book teaches the mechanistic science that inoculates against the wellness industry’s salesmanship, leaving the reader able, for once, to honestly answer: what body do I want to choose?

Bridget Hanna holds a Harvard PhD in medical anthropology — the discipline whose subject is the social life of the body: how cultures decide what a body should be, who gets to say so, and what it costs to fall outside the line. She trained as a student, research assistant, and co-author of Arthur Kleinman; co-wrote The Bhopal Reader, the standard documentary history of the disaster, with the survivors’ movement; and wrote her dissertation on how catastrophe, structural violence, and uncertainty get inscribed on bodies. During the COVID-19 pandemic she served as an Outbreak Specialist with Partners In Health, doing epidemic intelligence for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.

She is a certified evidence-based fitness coach, trained through Menno Henselmans’s Bayesian Bodybuilding program — where she passed the certification exam magna cum laude — and the ISSA; a Somatica®-trained relationship coach and sexologist certified by the American Board of Sexology; and a trained improv and standup comedian. Your Body of Work is her first book.