Toward a Theory of the Body in Critical Social Change

Conceptions of Embodied Knowing and Being in Reform Environmentalism, Ecofeminism and Environmental Thought

Abstract

Understanding the significance of the human body as · a locus in which to access and analyze environmental. approaches requires first an understanding of the role of the body in post -modem culture and life. It is notable that the human body should, at this poi_nt in history, come to play a major role in some of the most important social issues of our time. After all, the development of Western civilization was premised on the cultivation of the human capacity towards calculative and analytic thought, ways ofkriowing reached via the suppression and denial of the animated body through its disassociation from, arid therefore relfication by, the human mind.