B

The term habitus was developed by the French social theorist, Pierre Bourdieu. He defines it as a system of shared social dispositions and cognitive structures which generates perceptions, appreciations and actions. Radical feminists have labelled as harassment all the processes of social control enacted by men over women in whom the totality of our lives is available to being policed by them, but others advocate clearer delimitation for strategic reasons. Harassment is an exertion of power. Its content frequently makes verbal or physical reference to bodily difference, objectifying women and minority groups, and threatening or appropriating their bodyspaces. Feminist writings on the body have increasingly become influential in such a rewriting of the subdiscipline and have influenced an increasingly critical take on what constitutes health and more especially on how health is embodied. Numerous applications of hybridity find common ground with feminist approaches to gendered identities and ideas of the subject as multiple and fragmented.