ABSTRACT
Although we struggle for rights over our own bodies, the very bodies for which we struggle are not quite ever only our own.1
Is it possible to write a history of the body for a particular period of time? What constitutes the subject of our analysis? What, after all, is signified by the body? Such questions invite us to think less about the different types of body that may have existed over time and more about the meanings that bodies have been accorded in different cultures and places historically. Thinking about the body in this way means that rather than analysing a single body, we focus on numerous kinds of body that inhabit particular periods of time. These periods are in turn subject to changing understandings of factors such as race, gender, sex and sexuality, qualities that are often presented as essential but differentiated characteristics of particular bodies. Instead of the body remaining an ‘elusive presence’ in history, recent sociological and historical research has placed the body in a central location and has shown that such differences arise not necessarily because of any fundamental physical or anatomical distinctions between bodies, say between Asian bodies and white European bodies or between heterosexual or homosexual bodies, but because the significances that are invested in these bodies and in the persons that inhabit them vary over time in accordance with social and cultural dynamics.2 The body of an aristocratic Englishman in the late 1700s was understood to be subject to, literally to embody different mechanisms and finalities, particularly in respect of the mind, than the body of a black slave in a European colony.3
