ABSTRACT
It has been more than a decade since The Making of the Modern Body1 proposed a new acceptance of the historicity of bodies (or at least of Western bodies). Inserting itself at an intersection of social history and cultural anthropology, of feminist studies and the work of Michel Foucault, the volume advised attending to the ways in which ‘representations and routines of the body were transformed’ in relation to the emergence of ‘modern forms of social organization’.2 The editors of the collected essays were not, of course, the first to offer such advice; but the volume’s title was intended as a provocation, and perhaps ought still to disturb us. The very pairing of ‘modern’ and ‘body’ appears to challenge any easy recourse to a primordial or else timeless human form-even if we remain unsure precisely how to relate the adjective to the noun (the body in modernity? modernism’s body? the body made modern?). The claim that bodies are made and not merely born is, or once was, similarly provocative. And if today invocations of the ‘constructed body’ scarcely raise eyebrows, we should not forget that this metaphor has enabled a range of contradictory political projects, and remains in tension with an ambition (in feminist studies, sexuality studies, anthropology and history) to take seriously the materiality of the body-its appetites and desires, its states of health and disease, its coming into being and dying.
