ABSTRACT
After a long period of neglect, the body is emerging as a legitimate focus and locus of social science enquiry (Turner, 1984; Featherstone et al., 1991; Scott and Morgan, 1992). With this surge of theorizing, battleground metaphors have come to the fore and power struggles are seen as being played out on the field of the body. The nature of the battles being fought, however, and the meaning of the body as a contested site are far from agreed. Most of the academic discussion of the body has taken place in debates between philosophers or at a level of considerable abstraction, so that those not versed in poststructuralism, postmodernism and critiques of Cartesian dualisms can be left floundering. 1
