The Body

Abstract

This chapter offers an overview of central issues and themes in feminist philosophical reflections on the body. It discusses at greater length three specific examples from recent debates in feminist philosophy: how concepts of sex and gender and their juxtaposition have been contested; how the phenomenological tradition has been reworked by critical feminist philosophers; and how feminist philosophers of disability challenge the reification of bodies, refocusing philosophical attention on bodies as always in process. All three debates provide complex and connected challenges to understandings of bodies as both natural and extra-cognitive, especially where these understandings imply that the body is not a proper subject for philosophy, or that the philosopher’s body is not relevant to their work.