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The boundaries between culture and nature have collapsed and the body has become flexible: 'Flexibility is an object of desire for nearly everyone's personality, body and organisation' (Martin 1994: xvii). The body has become plastic, a lifestyle accessory, a thing to be sculpted, shaped and 'stylized' (Featherstone 1991a). It has been transformed from a biological fact into a 'project' (Giddens 1991) and a 'performance' (Goffman 1971b). Contemporary culture is marked by a quest for physiognomical and physical regimes of embodi-ment that are based on the assumption that the surface and the interior of the body are amenable to reconstruction or re-incorporation. As Anthony Giddens (1991: 7-8) has argued: 'The reflexivity of self in conjunction with abstract systems pervasively affects the body [ . . . ] The body is less and less an extrinsic given functioning outside the intern-ally referential systems of modernity, but becomes itself reflexively mobilised.' These claims, which transform our ideas about the body from obdur-ate matter to flexible performance, have powerful empirical...

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