ABSTRACT
The body has without doubt generated a vast array of scholarship and stands as a critical site for the generation of concepts: concepts that manifest ways of thinking on and with the body. All attempts to destabilize subject object distinctions in various ways: by showing how such distinctions are grounded in the experience of the body; by showing how ways of working with the body manifest it as the nexus of the individual and the social; and by showing how systems of classification actively make up people with particular kinds of bodies. These tensions constitute our engines of discovery ones that provide us not only with a rich conceptual landscape for articulating the body, but the methodological approaches that underpin them. Thus, in starting with the body and moving outwards from its boundaries, as we have done, we become aware of the social and cultural worlds within which it finds its particular moorings and modes of understanding.
