Editors' Note

How do biological bodies become culturally expressive? This question, at the heart of the nature/nurture divide, has long been viewed differently by scientists and cultural constructivists: from the one viewpoint, the belief that the body known to science determines in one way or another human cultural expression; from the other—and this would include most feminist work—a deep mistrust of anything that might be thought of as biological determination and an insistence on bodily meaning as culturally inscribed. But this divide no longer prevails, at least in the most serious scientific and scholarly fields. Today there is the realization that far from being divided, "nature" and "nurture" are inseparably and dynamically related. In 2002-2003, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling led a Pembroke Seminar on "Theories of Embodiment." At issue was the question of how to think about this dynamic relationship and, particularly, how to think about it from a feminist perspective. Four of the contributors to "The Question of Embodiment" were participants in the year-long seminar; the fifth, Elizabeth Wilson, contributed to an affiliated research roundtable.