This article engages critically with issues surrounding the theorization of the self and body relation, where the body is interpreted as material increasingly open to human intervention and choice. It is argued that this theorization rests upon a mind/body split that limits an understanding of embodied identity. The significance for feminism of undermining representational practices that rely upon this dualism are outlined and criticized for reproducing the logic of representation they set out to destabilize. An alternative strategy is examined and (...) the argument is made that to understand embodied identity the question must not be what do bodies mean but what can they do. Here feminist approaches that rely upon a radically different ontological position in order to move beyond the mind/body split are utilized. These theoretical debates are made meaningful through the lens of self narratives produced by young women–a context which demands the development of strategies for theorizing lived bodies. (shrink)

Granting that the `soul' was only an attractive and mysterious thought, from which philosophers rightly, but reluctantly, separated themselves - that which they have since learnt to put in its place is perhaps even more attractive and even more mysterious. The human body, in which the whole of the most distant and most recent past of all organic life once more becomes living and corporal, seems to flow through this past and right over it like a huge and inaudible torrent: (...) the body is a more wonderful thought than the old `soul'. (Nietzsche, 1973: 132-3) Man is but breath and a shadow. (Sophocles). (shrink)