ABSTRACT
Having considered the abstraction of time, we need now to turn our attention to more fleshly concerns. The aim of this chapter is to suggest some of the ways in which contemporary fiction has framed questions of the body and of gender. Over the past three or four decades, the body has transmuted in anglophone writing into a range of grotesque and sublime manifestations, from many-breasted fertility goddesses, through the undecidable unborn, through the scarred bodies of slaves to the image of dancers composed only of light. In order to make sense of the strategies through which the body, gender and sexual identity are refigured in some of these texts, it is necessary to outline some of the wider context out of which these strategies arise.
