Thanks to Michel Foucault and Discipline and Punish, history students now graduate knowing more about the history of the body than about the English Civil War or the Industrial Revolution. At the same time, everyone has their own idea about what body history should be about. It was Foucault's view that power always expresses itself by way of the body: his history was (at least in its inception) a corporal politics, intended to reconfigure our understanding of power. At Berkeley he ran a seminar from which two other major books emerged: Peter Brown's The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (1988), which explored the theme of carnality and spirituality, and Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990), which offered a radically new approach to the history of medicine. Now there are bodily histories of the emotions, of sexuality and gender, of political philosophy ('the body politic'), of colonialism, of warfare: indeed, anything that has a history now has, or will surely shortly acquire, a bodily history.

LRB 15 April 2004 | PDF Download