Refiguring bodies / Elizabeth Grosz --
The experience of the body and classical psychology / Maurice Merleau-Ponty --
The burden and blessing of mortality / Hans Jonas --
Ethology: Spinoza and us / Gilles Deleuze --
Bodies that matter / Judith Butler --
Techniques of the body / Marcel Mauss --
The two bodies / Mary Douglas --
Embodied information in face-to-face interaction / Erving Goffman --
Belief and the body / Pierre Bourdieu --
The grotesque image of the body and its sources / Mikhail Bakhtin --
Civilization and psychosomatics / Norbert Elias --
The political investment of the body / Michel Foucault --
Lesbian bodies: tribades, tomboys and tarts / Barbara Creed --
Thin is the feminist issue / Nicky Diamond --
Ageing and its embodiment / Chris Gilleard and Paul Higgs --
Divinity: a dossier, a performance piece, a little-understood emotion / Michael Moon and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick --
Ambivalent femininities / Beverley Skeggs --
In novel conditions: the cross-dressing psychiatrist / Allucquere Rosanne Stone --
Endangered-endangering: schematic racism and white paranoia / Judith Butler --
Orgasm, generation, and the politics of reproductive biology / Thomas Laqueur --
Measuring heads / Stephen J. Gould --
The body and the archive / Allan Sekula --
Visualizing the disabled body: the classical nude and the fragmented torso / Lennard J. Davis --
Bodies, disability and spaces: the social model and disabling spatial organisations / Peter Freund --
Monstrosity and the monstrous / Georges Canguilhem --
Complex systems / Emily Martin --
Portraits of people with AIDS / Douglas Crimp --
The global traffic in human organs / Nancy Scheper-Hughes --
The self unmade: embodied paranoia / Arthur Frank --
Hypochondriasis: the ironic disease / Arthur Kleinman --
Genetic risk and the birth of the somatic individual / Carlos Novas and Nikolas Rose --
The biopolitics of postmodern bodies: constitutions of self in immune system discourse / Donna J. Haraway --
The pleasure of the interface / Claudia Springer --
Race ends here / Paul Gilroy --
Iatrogenesis: the visible human project and the reproduction of life / Catherine Waldby --
Twice dead: organ transplants and the reinvention of death / Margaret Lock --
Soft-soaping empire: commodity racism and imperial advertising / Anne McClintock --
The finest consumer object: the body / Jean Baudrillard --
The commercialization of discipline: keep-fit culture and its values / Roberta Sassatelli --
The united colors of diversity: essential and inessential culture / Celia Lury --
Enterprising kinship: consumer choice and the new reproductive technologies / Marilyn Strathern --
'Clay cunningly compounded' / Peter Brown --
'I do not want to look like ... ' / Orlan on becoming-Orlan --
Survival as a social construct / Zygmunt Bauman --
The body's problems with illness / Arthur Frank --
The body in pain: the making and unmaking of the world / Elaine Scarry.

The body has become an increasingly significant concept over recent years and this work offers a stimulating overview of the main topics, perspectives and theories which surround the issue.