ABSTRACT
This book brings together a number of different accounts and perspectives on that complex and contested – yet also most commonplace – of topics: the body. In this introduction, we want to begin the task of looking at how we think about the body, and to map out a number of key domains that we feel can help us in that task. We begin by examining the place of the body in contemporary theoretical work; this search foregrounds our discussion, and sets an agenda for the book as a whole. While there has been an incredible explosion of work on the body in theory, it’s often hard to spot the material, the corporeal, the guts and goo that constitute the body itself. Even less obvious, perhaps, are the ways in which the body might usefully be implemented in the development of theoretical insights about how subjects live in, and come to know, their social and cultural worlds. How we write about the body, which bodies we write about, and whose body does the writing – these must be central concerns in advancing the project of academic body-work.
