The Humanities Review

Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007

Historians long ago began to write of the body. They have studied the body in a field of historical demography or pathology; they have considered it as the seat of needs and appetites, as the locus of physiological processes and metabolisms, a target for the attacks of germs or viruses; they have shown to what extent historical processes were involved in what might seem to be the purely biological base of existence; and what place should be given in the history of society to biological "events" such as the circulation of bacilli, or the extension of the lifespan. But the body is also directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks to perform ceremonies, to emit signs.

-Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punishment

"If the skin were parchment and the blows you gave me were ink. . ."
-Dromio the slave to Antipholus his master
William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors


BODIES ARE MANIPULATED TO PRODUCE MEANING AND PURPOSE. They accumulate meaning by way of attribution, designation, authorization, and naming. But bodies are just as often made to be social and symbolic markers in life. The import of a live body is encountered in the world by way of the dynamic combination of both inscription and self-determined expression. As impressions of life are continually inscribed on flesh, living bodies make present the passing of time. Such a fact contributes to the daunting and complex realization that our bodies are actually living texts, texts that are constantly bearing and transforming meaning. But how might we understand what it is about our bodies that is "natural," and what it is that is culturated? The nature versus culture debate is at the center of any contemplation of how we might read bodies. Is the body, in any final sense, "natural" or "raw" (i.e. non- or pre-social)? On the other hand, can the body itself be regarded as purely a social and signifying effect lacking in its own weighty materiality? The interaction and engagement of "the natural" with "the cultural" needs careful consideration. It is not adequate to simply dismiss the category of nature outright, but in turn the cultural too must be seen in its limitations, as a kind of insufficiency that requires natural supplementation.

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