The late Middle Ages and early Renaissance had conceived, in their brightest moments, that "the Western
Time the body was appreciated as the site of enjoyment and purposeful action, as well as suffering. Ilich states that his research for the recently-published Medical Nemesis had persuaded him that twentieth-century people haveĪllowed a medical establishment and its subsidiary profit-makingĪgents to define the human body in unhealthy ways.
Ivan Ilich's essay, "A Plea for Body History," in the Spring 1987 issue By way of explanation I can do no better than refer the reader to Professors for each other while the rest of the world's problems languish in neglect? It may be useful to remind ourselves why the literature of the body has become so ubiquitous, and not just in the academy. Is all this attention to the body a good thing? Or is it, as Christopher Lasch has charged in a recent essay, simply a "market for selfpity," a chronicle of oppression, anxiety, and resentment fabricated by Reason to welcome it as a reciprocal testament that their voices haveīeen heard, and that the male body, like the female, will never look Patriarchal control over the literature of gender, they also have Though women have reason to be suspicious about theīoom in masculinity discourse, as if it's all just a strategy to reassert Many women have embraced as a means of personal and social Present day, that sense of choice and variety in self-definition that so If recent writings, including those in thisĬollection, are any indication, the task of men's studies is to recoverįrom history, and from empirically-observed behaviors in the Upon them by the iron laws of biology now seems as dubious as theįeminine mystique itself.
Rather, the notion that men have an essential "nature" endowed The opposite sex with such thoroughness in the last three decades. Their own nature now that its consequences have been examined by Have that intention, as that they have been prompted to rethink To the critics of patriarchy, though some best-selling books clearly It is not so much that men want to answer back Polemics have resulted in the flood of publications relating to manhood and its history. Indeed, it is self-evident that feminist scholarship and feminist Margaret Atwood called the female body in 1990: "a hot topic." The subject of masculinity, always implied in feministĭiscourse, has now emerged from the shadows and become what Pondered the possibility of producing a mate for "The Femaleīody," however, a legion of scholars had begun to engage the same Male editor of such a volume, and I took it to heart. "Why is it never the maleīody?" It was a legitimate question for a feminist to direct to the "Why does it always have to be theįemale body that's presented as exotic, other, fascinating to scrutinize and imagine?" one woman asked me. Good humor and sometimes not, why I had chosen this gender as a
That some authors and colleagues had inquired, sometimes with In my introduction to that collection I noted Our special issue on "The Female Body" published in the fall and The fall and winter numbers, is the inevitable companion volume to This special issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, comprising both
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