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Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: feminism, postmodernism and (bio)ethics MARGIT SHILDRICK, 1997 London & New York, Routledge
252 pp., 0 415 14616 X, hb, 45.00, 0 415 14617 8, pb 14.99
Leak Bodies and Boundaries offers a postmodern feminist analysis of bioethics, the central theme of the book being women, bodies and ethics. Chapter 1, Fabrica(tions) on the construction of the human body, is concerned with the various and apparently contradictory cultural constructions of the body (and not 'real' bodies). Shildrick begins the chapter by highlighting the domination of the medical model within biomedicine, which, she argues, privileges the mind and body split, where the knowing subject is disembodied and cut off from the corporeal. Thus, this situation devalues embodiment and denies corporeality, which is argued to be the sphere of women. She makes the point here that: ` whatever forms the dominant representation has taken, the bodies of women, whether all too present or disconcertingly absent, have served to ground the devaluation of women by men' (p. 14).
Shildrick moves on by constructing an historical analysis of the body, which illustrates how the 'body' can be...