“Illuminates how our culture came to be unrecognizable to so many. … It is a careful and vast intellectual history. … This deeply considered work is a welcome contribution to the present literature on the body, gender ideology, and the self. … Substantive, careful, and expansive.”
intellectual history
Civitas Outlook
“A remarkable book, which belongs on the shelf next to identity-interested thinkers like Charles Taylor or Carl Trueman. Indeed, Franks may be the most helpful of the three in making sense of present controversies. … Rich and nuanced … a work of considerable value.”
Religion and Liberty Online
"Body and Identity, years in the making, … is nothing short of masterful in both scope and depth. It shows why we desperately need public conversations about gender, sexuality, and culture to include trained academics. Indeed, very few academic researchers can dedicate years, perhaps decades, of intense research and reading to produce a comprehensive book like this one, which could never have come to fruition otherwise. Combining intellectual history and theology, cultural analysis and biology, psychology and literary reflections, Franks shows that how we think about our bodies is inextricably connected to questions of identity."
Mary Harrington: Substack
“Her aim is gratifyingly ambitious: essentially Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self but more Catholic in its priors, less turgid in its prose, with post-structuralism and the missing bit between Augustine and Descartes added back in. …
She is remarkably erudite, a lucid writer, and comfortable toggling back and forth between metaphysical and postmodern vantage-points, meaning she can draw intellectual flexibility from the latter, without ever sacrificing the former’s commitment to truth. Absolute catnip … just so, so good.”