ABSTRACT
The best explanation might be that in a post-Marxist and post-structuralist world such appeals to the body provide a more effective rhetorical rallying point than invocations of common class or gender experience. The body has thus offered a seductively productive site for interdisciplinary work in the humanities, and it was surely no accident that the seminal collection, The Making of the Modern Body, first appeared as a special number of the journal Representations in 1986. The machine was understood in terms of organic metaphors as often as the body was rendered a post-Cartesian machine. ‘Body history’ has gained its considerable currency in part precisely because of this polyvalency and ambiguity. Histories of the body, or aspects thereof childbirth, civility, corseting — derive much of their rhetorical purchase by implicating the body of the reader or auditor.
