Gender and corporality, corporeality, and body image

Resumen

The body and corporality constitute the nuclear axis of our identity. In Foucault¿s words, ¿we are embodied.¿ In this respect, the paradigm of gender is what differentiates human beings at birth in the most nuclear way. The social dimension enters the individual and shapes her/him corporally (embodiment). This chapter includes the anthropology of gender and the body, together with the cult of the body in Western society, underlining its repercussions for women, the body, and language, with the latter understood in Heideggerian terms as the medium that lives within us and shapes us; the body and gender as a nuclear element in constructing an individual¿s identity and, more specifically, in constructing female identity; the female body over the course of history and its medicalization and removal from public life; the body and corporality according to psychopathology, postmodern bodies; and body image, providing the global, complex vision that is the construction of human identity and, in particular, female identity.