The Turn of the Body: History and the Politics of the Corporeal1

The last few decades of the twentieth century witnessed the body moving from no one’s particular concern to virtually everyone’s preoccupation – including historians. Roy Porter writing on the history of the body in the revised second edition of Peter Burke’s New Perspectives on Historical Writing declared that “body history” had become the “historiographical dish of the day” (Porter, 2001, 236) – having proclaimed in the first edition, a decade before, that the topic was “in the dark” and “too often ignored or forgotten” (Porter, 1991, 212, 226). The “negligence” side of this “negligence-to-obsession” scenario is not strictly accurate; as Michel Foucault observed in Surveiller et punir (1975), “historians long ago began to write the history of the body”. They had shown, among much else, how the body was