Bodies Beyond Boundaries: Mapping New Territory in Embodiment Studies

Three weeks before reading the books reviewed here I gave birth to a son through an unplanned C-section. My evolving relationship with my recently "delivered" body thus informed my initial reading of and subsequent reflection on these books. I read and thought about the bodies that appear in these texts while keenly attuned to the changes taking place in my own; while nursing my son, one hand cradling his head while the other gripped the page; while watching my body, now emptied of the child it had carried for nine months, begin to resume its "normal" shape; while adjusting to the awkward absurdity of breast pumps and the embarrassment of leaking breasts; while trying to find discreet ways to nurse my child in public; while struggling with the sense of loss and guilt that occasionally swept over me as I reflected on the experience of labor and birth and my inability to deliver my son "naturally"; while reading and writing my body as the body of a mother. And while I have no desire to descend into therapeutic self-reflection, I nevertheless wish to observe that each of these books, in its own way, has influenced the way I view and live in my postpartum body.

Over the last decade the publishing world has witnessed a virtual explosion in books on and about the body.¹ Scholars working in diverse fields ranging from sociology and medical science to religious studies and geography have taken up the call raised in the 1990s by poststructuralist philosophers Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz, Susan Bordo, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, and others to counter Western somataphobia and engage more critically in an examination of how bodies are made, understood, and discussed.²

The three books reviewed here offer a vivid demonstration of the exciting work that is now emerging within body/embodiment studies and testify to the richness and breadth of this interdisciplinary subfield. Although their methodologies vary, each author attempts to at once complicate and advance our knowledge of historical bodies by challenging previous interpretations and approaches. Indeed, what these books have most in common is not so much an analysis of a specific period or gender (although two focus on nineteenth-century women) but rather a shared dedication to pushing old disciplinary boundaries, definitions, and theoretical frameworks.

In Out in Public: Configurations of Women's Bodies in Nineteenth-Century America, Alison Piepmeier moves beyond traditional readings of female bodies as either active agents or passive victims by demonstrating that nineteenth-century women managed to occupy a multitude of subject positions simultaneously. This elegant, persuasive, and thoroughly engaging book is in line with recent scholarship that reinvestigates assumptions about nineteenth-century domesticity and identifies previously overlooked sites of collision between the public and private realms. Aligning herself with such poststructuralist scholars as Lora Romero, Carla Peterson, and Cathy Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher, Piepmeier argues that a rejection of stale binary categories (public/private, agent/victim) is necessary to identify the numerous and often contradictory ways that women built subjectivities within an intricate web of power relations. Those who continue to rely on binary categories for interpreting the past, she explains, "foreclose many possible readings of nineteenth century womanhood" (4). For example, previous interpretations of the domestic realm as a site of entrapment and misery for women have prevented historians from not only considering the range of women's experiences within the home but, perhaps more importantly, from identifying the ways that domesticated women also participated in the public sphere. In these histories, women are neatly pigeonholed...