The body has become an increasingly significant concept over recent years and this reader offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories which surround the issue. This broad consideration of the body presents an engagement with a range of social concerns, from the processes of racialization to the vagaries of fashion and performance art, enacted as surgery on the body. Individual sections cover issues such as: * the body and social (dis)order * bodies and identities * bodily norms * bodies in health and dis-ease * bodies and technologies. Containing an extensive critical introduction, as well as a series of introductions summarizing each section, this reader offers students a practical guide and a thorough grounding in the fascinating topic of the body. Contributors include: Elizabeth Grosz, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, Marcel Mauss, Mary Douglas, Erving Goffman, Mikhail Bakhtin, Norbert Elias, Michel Foucault, Barbara Creed, Nicola Diamond, Chris Gilleard , Paul Higgs, Eve Kofosky Sedgwick, Michael Moon, Beverley Skeggs , Rosanne Allucquere Stone, Thomas Laqueur, Steven J.
Gould, Alan Sekula, Lennard Davis, Peter Freund, Georges Canguilhem, Emily Martin, Douglas Crimp, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Arthur Frank, Arthur Kleinman, Carlos Novas, Nikolas Rose, Donna Haraway, Claudia Springer, Paul Gilroy, Catherine Waldby, Margaret Lock, Anne McClintock, Jean Baudrillard, Roberta Sassatelli, Celia Lury, Marilyn Strathern, Peter Brown , Orlan, Zigmunt Bauman, Arthur Frank, Elaine Scarry
