ABSTRACT
This chapter presents both a partial historical account of the body (in early twentieth-century Britain), and a theoretical intervention into debates concerning “the body” itself as a category of historical analysis. Reviewing attempts to historicize the corporeal, the chapter identifies the challenge of developing a meaningful concept of “the body” that resists biological essentialism while at the same time avoiding abstraction from the material. Drawing on the neglected work of François Guéry and Didier Deleule, the chapter suggests a re-centering of the category of production in historicizing the relationship between body and society. Using the example of the British “science of work” in the first decades of the twentieth century, it shows how the demands of industrial capitalism shaped the creation of medico-scientific knowledge about the body and how that knowledge was in turn put to use for the more efficient extraction of surplus-value from the bodies of workers. Finally, the chapter considers the potential of the body as a site of resistance to exploitation in the present.
