"Foreign Bodies" analyzes how our culture defines our naturally-evolved bodies. The author calls upon contemporary ways of understanding the body to explore forms of power, pleasure and pain, and libidinal identity. The theory is then contrasted with the practice of the body as found in quite different kinds of language - the language of plastic art (body building as the creation of an artwork), biography, anthropology and literature. This book explains how we experience our own powers of perception, our postures, gestures and attitudes; how pain and pleasure are no longer what they once were; and how our sensuality is coded by identities that are either phallic or fluid. The author illustrates how we make our bodies foreign to ourselves and envisages the sort of bodies we may become.