The Female Body

The female body has been a topic much discussed during the past two decades as scholars have attempted to place the subject in historical and theoretical contexts. Acknowledging the topic's emergence as a central one in contemporary debates, Laurence Goldstein, editor of the acclaimed Michigan Quarterly Review, invited a group of anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, philosophers, sociologists, and art historians, as well as poets, artists, and fiction writers, to provide their reflections.

The range of vantage points is impressive. Carol Gilligan defines how the body, as "a repository of experience and desire" is a source of resistance to complex family and social demands. Ruth Behar, speaking of hysterectomy and abortion, asks whether the female body is nothing more than the pliant subject of the "master narrative of medical science."

In other writings, Susan Bordo studies the plasticity of the female body in the technological age; Andrea Dworkin portrays the terror of a woman on urban streets; Anne Herrmann considers cross-dressing in society and film. Still other writers examine the presence of the female body in fiction, poetry, and ballroom dance, among other venues. The book also features an essay by art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, accompanied by a rich portfolio of women artists' representations of female bodies.

The Female Body synthesizes and extends the previous literature, increasing the possibilities for understanding and experience. General readers and specialists alike will find abundant new information and insights, and much to argue with as well as to agree with, in this engrossing book.

Praise / Awards

• "The Female Body is a good example of what pluralistic principles can produce. It is a large anthology that includes works by people who, bringing the expertise of their respective fields to the collection, cross boundaries of gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, class, and religion. It does not attempt to eradicate difference by normalizing the terms of the discourse, editorially speaking, and thus avoids the common pitfalls of a nominal pluralism."
  --The Drama Review