ABSTRACT

Helena Michie opens her review of Suleiman’s The Female Body in Western Culture and Cixous and Clement’s The Newly Born Woman with the following words:

The female body has long been a battleground for debate over meaning, language and subjectivity. The location simultaneously of the sacred and the profane, the figurative and the literal, the representable and the unspeakable, it would seem to have been designated the chosen vessel of cultural anxieties and contradictions.