Now the Body Is Everywhere

Religion, Dress and the Body by Linda B. Arthur. New York: New York University Press, 1999, 224 pp., $65.00 hardcover, $19.50 paper.

The Emperor Has a Body: Body-Politics in the Between by Elise S. Peeples. Tucson, AZ: Javelina Books, 1999, 291 pp., $16.95 paper.

Body Matters: Feminism, Textuality, and Corporeality edited by Avril Horner and Angela Keane. New York: Manchester University Press, 2000, 260 pp., $79.95 hardcover, $29.95 paper.

The Anthropology of Food and Body: Gender, Meaning, and Power by Carole M. Counihan. New York: Routledge Press, 1999, 256 pp., $19.99 paper.

Feminism and the Biological Body by Lynda Birke. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000, 224 pp., $49.00 hardcover, $19.00 paper.

Attempting to escape biological determinism, as feminist biologist Lynda Birke emphasizes in her introductory chapter to Feminism and the Biological Body, feminists have, until recently, downplayed the body, particularly in the development of feminist theory:

The biological body has been peripheral to much feminist theory, at least partly because of that very necessary rebuttal of biological determinism. The one exception was the part played by the body in the activist work of feminist health groups (mostly in the 1970s); for to understand women's health and our relationships to the medical professions required women to grapple with medical knowledge about the (biological) body. But apart from that, the emphasis in our theory was on the social construction of gender; the body hardly featured at all in emerging feminist theory--until recently. (1-2)

Sharing a similar background and training with Birke, I spent years trying to convince my colleagues in science to integrate feminist theories and gender into their research and teaching, while I urged my women's studies colleagues to focus more on the body, biology, and science. In 1988, I puzzled over reasons why, despite women's health and reproductive rights having served as major issues catalyzing the rebirth of the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, feminism by the late 1980s included very little on science and/or the body:

For years I have always felt an outsider at national professional meetings in either science or women's studies. At the science meetings, I was usually the only, or one of a very small group of feminists interested in feminist questions and/or critiques of science. At women's studies meetings I was usually one of a very small group of scientists interested in scientific questions within feminism. (Rosser 1988, 105)

As Birke suggests, "thinking about the body has, however, now become highly fashionable, reversing those earlier tendencies to ignore the body altogether" (2). These five books illustrate the extent to which the body has currently become a central focus of feminist critiques and discourse in virtually all disciplines. Now the body is everywhere.

Although each of these books features the centrality of the body, the authors and researchers use the differing methods and unique questions evolved in their primary disciplines of literature, religion, anthropology, philosophy, or biology to explore how new conceptions of the body inform and reform the traditional disciplinary questions. The authors vary extensively in how they use the body to examine contemporary issues from body coverings (Arthur) or their absence (Peeples) through descriptions in fiction (Horner and Keane) to effects on the body of food ingested (Counihan) and the internal physiology and organs (Birke). Despite these differences and varieties, all of the scholars simultaneously integrate feminist approaches and draw on work in other disciplines to bring rich, new, interdisciplinary perspectives to their own areas.

The collection Religion, Dress, and the Body edited by Linda Arthur, curator of the Historic Costume Collection at the University of Hawai'i, investigates how American religious communities constrain the bodies of their members, especially their women, through dress. Because dress controls the external body, it has the potential to become a symbol of social control. As Beth Graybill and Linda Arthur illustrate in their chapter on the Amish...