Contested Terrains: New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment

Abstract

Despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, women’s bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive technologies, sexual violence, objectification, motherhood, and sex trafficking, among others, constitute ongoing, pressing concerns affecting women’s bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world, where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital. In this Introduction we argue that New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment engages with these themes by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on women’s bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists’ concerns—both theoretically and empirically (with implications for policy-making)—about gender and embodiment in the current context and beyond.