ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the centrality of the human body to different standpoints on women performers by considering how a heterogeneous audience responds to and classifies a female bullfighting body. It explores how different perspectives on femininity make a female body meaningful in relation to the embodied experience of a traditional feminine lifecycle model, and how different subjectivities treat the expression of the embodied experience of bullfighting through a female body. From different standpoints the latter may appear perfectly appropriate or utterly problematic and the chapter relates these contrasting perspectives to wider debates and issues concerning gender and the body both in anthropology and in Andalusian culture. Whilst women bullfighters themselves do not constitute a political movement, their actions can be related to political debates and the issue of the status of women in Spain. The 'practical problem' of the position of breasts, is thought to prevent women from making the movements appropriate to bullfighting.
