The discourses of science and medicine are a powerful influence on constructions of the female body, and on what it is to be a woman. Concurrent with the growth of the women's health movement, feminist inspired studies of the body in science and biomedicine began to historicise the taken for granted categories of female/male; nature/culture; body/mind. The relationship of feminists to bioscience has been an ambivalent one. It reflects on the desire for a way of understanding the lived experiences of women, embodied as they are in flesh and blood and bones, and it strives to see in science a source of good in the world. One of the central themes of feminist activism within health has been the call for women to 'take control of our bodies'. The body is positioned as an object apart, something upon which the forces of biomedicine act, and of which women must struggle to regain control.