ABSTRACT
These excerpts from stories appearing in British national newspapers in recent years provide some insight into the substantial interest in issues pertaining to the human body in many contemporary societies. They serve to highlight a number of themes that frequently run through discussions about the body, regardless of the specific topic under consideration. These include the question of the ‘naturalness’ and modifiability of the body particularly in light of recent developments in biomedicine and biotechnology; changing conceptions of the human; expectations about science and its power to alter or control the natural; the mediation of the body in popular culture (e.g. news stories such as the above); the blurring of fact and fiction in portrayals of the body; the relationship between the mind and the body; and the significance of the economic, political and social contexts shaping body classification, regulation and modification. Perhaps more fundamentally, such stories raise the question, why has ‘the body’ come to achieve such prominence in everyday life and what can we learn from this about the structure and dynamics of contemporary society? This book explores these and a number of other themes and discusses their implications, drawing on ideas from diverse fields of study and using a range of empirical examples. To begin, this chapter discusses the context and rationale for this book, outlines the assumptions and perspectives which guide my argument, and then finishes with an outline of the chapters that follow.
