ABSTRACT
The relationship between cultural values and constructions of the body, as part of what Foucault calls the power/knowledge regime, is a symbiotic one. In the discourse of women’s health, whatever else goes on, the dominant concern is with women as reproducers, regardless of any individual intention or ability to exercise that capacity. Throughout the childbearing years of a woman’s life rhythmic changes concerned with the process of reproduction take place in a monthly cycle’. Preformationists held that all living things were created at the beginning, later generations being enclosed within earlier ones. Each sperm in effect contained a perfectly formed homunculus which was simply activated by being implanted in the female womb. The metanymic circulation of specific body parts simply emphasizes the absence of the body itself. And in the discourse of psychoanalysis, which Foucault characterized as the paradigmatic human science, the material, and by now representational, absence of the penis has been taken as the defining factor of femininity.
