ABSTRACT
Feminist scholars have recently argued for ‘a new epistemological viewpoint based on the idea of knowledge [and hence power from a Foucauldian perspective] as embodied, engendered and embedded in the material context of place and space’ (Duncan 1996: 1). In this context, and given geographers’ age-old preoccupation with space, it should come as no surprise that feminist geographers are beginning to interrogate the body as a terrain for oppression and resistance at the most minute scale. By exploring ‘the ways in which bodies themselves are imagined as spaces, and the spaces they are imagined as inhabiting … in relation to a range of subjective, emotional and psychic processes’ (Gregson et al. 1997: 196), the body assumes a critical role in understanding the politics (including gender politics) of everyday life. In a parallel vein, critical medical geographers are also beginning to recognise that ‘attention to the embodied subject and a concern with theorising identity and difference provides a language and set of ideas that further the articulation of the complex links between place, space, power relations and health’ (Dyck and Kearns 1995: 140).
