Body Matters. Feminism, Textuality, Corporeality. Ed. Avril Horner and Angela Keane.

• Andrea Gutenberg

Probably one of the most consequential impulses of feminist theory for literary and cultural studies has been a redirection of the critical focus on matters of corporeality and gender. While liberal feminism with its professed aim of achieving intellectual equality between women and men suffered from what has been termed ‘somatophobia’ – a rejection of the body, radical feminism reclaimed the reproductive female body as a source of power under patriarchy. From the 1990s onward feminist postmodernist theorists have redirected studies on corporeality in order to account for the fluidity, multiplicity, performativity and constructedness of ‘bodies’, which they regard as both material and, more importantly, as imaginary morphologies.

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