ABSTRACT
There is no one ‘neat and tidy’ definition of the body. On the one hand, it seems counter-intuitive to even attempt this given that we all have bodies, or rather we are all bodies. We cannot exist, materially at least, in cities (or anywhere else for that matter) without them. On the other hand, defining the body has been a pursuit of philosophers across the centuries from the Ancient Greeks to the postmodernists, although there has been little agreement as to what constitutes the body. In actuality, there is no the body. Bodies come in a variety of forms that exist in a variety of temporal and spatial contexts. The body is an illusion. Bodies are gendered, sexed, raced, aged, imbued with culture, a particular size and shape and so on. They are inscribed and inhabited by intersecting sets of power relations. Their materiality, cultural inscriptions, and psychological dimensions make them complex entities which have been theorized differently at different times. Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (1995: 6) argue the meaning of the body is ‘equivocal, often ambiguous, sometimes evasive and always contested by those who attempt to understand it’.
