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Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body, edited by Kathy Davis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1997. 210 pp. $75.00 cloth. ISBN: 07619-5362-0. $26.95 paper. ISBN: 0-76195363-9.
Adolescence, ballet, osteoporosis, transsexuality, excision, prostitution, disability, public toilets, fashion, cosmetic surgery, Frankenstein. These topics, while in many ways diverse, nonetheless converge "in" the body within Kathy Davis's edited volume, Embodied Practices: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. Davis offers several explanations for recent scholarly interest in the body in her introduction to the collection. Although the influence of feminism provides one such explanation, Davis suggests that "new body theory is just as masculinist and disembodied as it ever was" and that "actual feminist scholarship on the body is notably absent from much of the literature within `new body theory"' (p. 14). Davis's volume can be seen, then, as an attempt to foreground feminist bodily theorizing. The essays within Embodied Practices focus on grounding "theories on the body in concrete embodied experiences and practices" (p. 15). The list of topics above exemplifies these experiences and practices-the diversity of which is matched, within the volume, by the...