Introduction

Explicitly named as a theoretical and methodological ‘problem’ for social science, the body has become a crucial site for rethinking the scope and the limits of the social scientific imagination. A number of important social changes may help to account for the relatively recent turn to the body in social theory. The equation of corporeality with biology and the correlated assumption that natural science has a more direct access to the ‘truth’ of the body are commonplace, although they may be contested even by natural scientists. The sick living body, in this rational framework, can be read as the anticipation of the corpse it is likely to become: otherwise it remains unintelligible, opaque. Bodies, like and as commodities, can both encapsulate and efface social contradictions. As zones of contention, they necessarily raise questions about power and resistance.