Representing the Un/healthy Body Susan Craddock and Tim Brown Introduction Recent media images of SARS, AIDS, and avian flu have made more apparent than ever the critical role representations of bodies play in our understandings of disease, and by default, of health. Photographs of Chinese tourists to Toronto, Vietnamese chicken farmers, or urban gay communities signal transmission routes of pathogens through mobile bodies, the role of social and economic practices in epidemics, and the kinds of bodies at risk for particular diseases. Yet many scholars inside and out of geography in recent years have critiqued such images for lending as much mis- understanding as understanding to diseases, populations, and geographic regions by providing selective information or perpetuating stereotypes of people and places in the midst of documenting pathogenic transmission. In this chapter, we examine representations of diseased and healthy bodies over time and place as a means of situating wellbeing or its absence within a set of social, ideological, and geopolitical relations. Representing particular kinds of bodies as diseased or healthy is not new to recent epidemics. Historians of colonial medicine have pointed out that constructing “native” bodies as either more or less susceptible to disease and as less hygienic, formed important foundations for subsequent colonial policies regulating labor, settlement patterns, and health care in areas of Africa and Asia (Packard 1989; Arnold 1993; Anderson 1996). Other historians and historical geographers have analyzed examples within the United States and Europe of ascriptions by public health authorities and others of disease or deviance to particular communities, paying close attention to the impact these representations have on perceptions of populations and the places in which they reside (Cresswell 1996; Brown 1997; Craddock 2000; Shah 2001). Another line of inquiry examines notions and repre- sentations of healthy bodies and how these have changed over time. What is revealed in this area of inquiry are the ways in which ideas regarding the “normal,” healthy body are presented alongside, and are interwoven with, Chapter 17 A Companion to Health and Medical Geography Edited by Tim Brown, Sara McLafferty, and Graham Moon © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-17003-1