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Against the backdrop of an increasing interest in visual methods in social research, this paper examines some theoretical foundations of human (inter-)action by reflecting on the interplay between senses, the body, and biography. The main purpose of the paper is to combine an integral, non-Cartesian concept of the self as body (respectively the lived body as self) with biographical research—thus enriching research on the body, as well as on biography. Criticizing the Cartesian split of body and mind, classical phenomenological (Leib) and recent concepts of the body ("embodiment") are sketched, resulting in a processual model of the sensual construction of the lived and living body in its environment. Given the interplay of bodily foundations of the self and processes of biographical structuring, so far, distant fields of research are converged. Some suggestions for conceptual improvements, an attentional shift to body aspects, respective research topics, and the extension of methods exceeding the narrative biographical interview in biographical research are indicated.

In the perspective of cultural history, "health" is a late 18th century construct. It appears as a term that legitimates the organized concern for the well-being of others. Under the banner of health, institutionalized intervention related to the redefinition and management of women's bodies multiply during the 19th century. Recent women's studies have amply documented the sexist use to which the new health-related concepts have been put. But the semantic reconstruction of the female body as an implicit result of the new scientific concepts has unfortunately attracted less attention. Because it is precisely in the mirror of gynecology that the insidious new dependence of the citizen's well-being from professional management can be best studied. The historical study of body images and related scientific themes is fundamental to the critique of the now prevalent ideology of "health."

This article is concerned with Jeanette Winterson's use and reworking of post-modern concepts of the body in her novel Written on the Body. Feminist appropriations of those concepts can be problematic: they tend to focus on the way in which a coherent body image is constructed and then imposed on the body parts, whereas many feminist theorists continue to emphasize the wholeness and integrity of the female body. Written on the Body offers constructive ways of theorizing the female body within a postmodern framework, because it is shaped by concepts of wholeness and fragmentation at the same time. Winterson develops a critique of androcentric science and medicine that strives to know the female body by dissecting it, analogous to the way modern society compartmentalizes human lives into neat manageable units. Against this, a concept of wholeness is strategically employed. Likewise, Winterson criticizes the equation of the female body with a penetrable surface. The androcentric concept of sexuality that associates penetration with the exploration of hidden depths and the achievement of power and knowledge is unmasked as necrophiliac. However, by constructing a lover/narrator whose gender remains undeclared, Winterson manages to unsettle perceptions of gendered difference. The text produces different meanings depending on whether the narrator is read as a man or a woman, and sexuality requires a basic human sameness from which a host of differences emerge that may or may not be gendered. In Written on the Body, Winterson disturbs fixed boundaries and rigidly gendered identities that objectify the body in order to build up a concept of the body that is fluid and leaves room for changes and mergings with other bodies, where bodies are held together not by a stable body image and a gendered identity, but by forces of connection and interaction between parts of the body.

The importance of bodily and mechanical analogies in everyday political argumentation has been seldom discussed in the academic literature. This article is based on a contextual analysis of the uses of bodily and mechanical analogies in parliamentary and public debates in eighteenth-century England, as they can be retrieved from full-text databases of printed literature. The author demonstrates the continuous use of bodily analogies for much of the century particularly in defence of traditional conceptions of a unified political community. The article considers the expanding use of mechanical analogies as well, tracing their evolution in political debates and the effect of the American and French revolutions in their usage.