I am developing a proposal for an edited work on the above topic and would be interested in hearing from anyone who would like to contibute it. The plan is to feature pieces which write into the gap between essentialist and social constructionist accounts of the body - which recognises that neither the essentialist nor the social constructionist actually lives with their own bodies in the way in which they conceive the body to be, that there is, as Jane Gallop puts it in her introduction to the collection "Thinking through the body" something else going on. Another way to get at the focus for the book is to take Adrienne Rich's observation in Notes Toward a Politics of Location, that to think about my body is an altogether different proposition from thinking about the body: She suggests that perhaps we need a moratorium on saying "the body". For its also possible to abstract "the" body. When I write "the body" I see nothing in particular. To write "my body" plunges me into lived experience, particularity: I see scars, disfigurements, discolourations, damages, losses, as well as what pleases me ... To say "the body" lifts me away from what has given me a primary perspective. To say "my body" reduces the temptation to grandiose assertions. (1986, 215) Most of the recent feminist works on the body, or on corporeality and embodiment, theorise "the body". I would like this book to show the kind of theoretical refections which emerge when a feminist starts theorising from "her(my) body". As Vicky Kirby once asked: by what logic do we deem this particular lived body to be irrelevant, and where does this other body of abstract theory reside? and how is this other body so "decidedly disassociated from the flesh"? (Kirby 1991, 7-8). I would be interested in hearing from feminists who may be interested in contributing to such a book - currently I would envisage chapters where particular sites of bodily experience are the starting point for rethinking "the body" ( eg pregnancy, disability, illness, aging, cosmetic surgery, fitness.....) but I am open to other suggestions. If you are interested send a 1 page proposal/synopsis together with contact details to <thiele@central.murdoch.edu.au>