The Body’s American Moment, 1979–1993

“The body” became wildly popular in the social sciences and humanities at the end of the twentieth century. The concept anchored hundreds of scholarly articles and books, across a range of disciplines. The present article offers a new answer as to how and why “the body” experienced this meteoric late-century rise. Scholars set out to address a long-running problem in European and American thought: the mind–body problem. To a person, researchers suddenly rejected any sharp delineation between these realms. While warnings against dualism motivated many projects on the body, it only explains the initial rush to this idea. To understand the corporeal turn of the late twentieth century we must attend to the soaring ambition of the body scholars to bridge all of the divisions of modern thought—subject/object, nature/culture, spirit/flesh—at the point of the body. This article analyzes key body books from the fields of theology, political philosophy, sociology, history, black studies, analytical philosophy, anthropology, and feminist philosophy. In the end, it sounds a note of criticism that the corporeal turn rested on a fantasy of control and controllability of flesh.