ABSTRACT
Interest in the body has swept like a tornado across the fields of social science and cultural studies since the 1980s. Books and articles on the body have been published and journals on the body have appeared. The body has been a topic discussed at numerous conferences. Consequently, Kathy Davis has claimed: 'The body has clearly captured the imagination of contemporary scholars'. I There are two major reasons for this. First, it is a logical requirement of cultural analysis, because the body is the 'only constant in a rapidly changing world, the source of fundamental truths about who we are and how society is organized, the final arbiter of what is just and unjust, human and inhumane, progressive and retrogressive'.2 In short, the study of the body offers a useful starting point for the historical and contemporary investigation of our culture and society. Second, arguably, it is largely the feminists who have put the body on the intellectual map.3 In the past two decades an enormous amount of feminist research on the female body has been generated from a diversity of disciplines, theoretical perspectives and methodologies. The female body has been the subject of numerous empirical studies from reproductive control and postnatal depression to anorexia nervosa and menopause.
