Abstract

In this article I trace the gendered significance of the postmodern "body project" from feminist perspectives. I examine how these projects challenge feminists from a variety of perspectives to account for the interplay between bodies, power, and individual agency. I see the issue of bodily agency as an important problem facing contemporary feminist theory, and I describe how we might, following technoscience feminism, shift the focus from one of the subject's intentions in body projects to that of what constitutes the technologies used in them, and how and in what context these are deployed. I argue that a critical feminist understanding of the technological demands that body projects as "technologies" be situated in their larger social contexts and attend to the technological issues of speed, visibility, and exposure.