Bite Your Friends: Stories of the Body Militant

Posing crucial questions about what drives certain individuals to risk physical suffering in the name of freedom, Bite Your Friends also asks what we ourselves might learn from such examples to become braver, more authentic individuals. From a Roman amphitheatre in the 4th century, where martyrs are fed to wild beasts, to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s and the programmatic defiance of groups like Pussy Riot, this sinuous and illuminating mix of memoir and social history explores 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.