The body, deemed as an object proper to social theory, arrived late on the scene. This field has since burgeoned into an important area of research and theorizing, and it now seems surprising that the body and bodily life received such scant attention for so long (albeit with some honourable exceptions, e.g. de Beauvoir 1972 [1949] and Elias 1982). However, the success of this new realm of study also masks a problem. The further that social research uncovers and describes the very sociality of the body, the further such analyses both empirically and conceptually distance themselves from the “biological” body. As a result the “natural” body is viewed more and more rigidly as either some kind of a fiction (paradoxically, a fiction created by science yet not simply a “science fiction”), or as an irrelevance to the varied levels of social and cultural meanings which are somehow attached or written upon such a body. As Fraser points out, in many accounts of gender ‘the “naturalness” of the biological body is hardly challenged’ (Fraser 2002, 610) so that the “cultural” body becomes the object of study for the social sciences and the “biological” becomes the concern of the natural sciences. Such divisions are not only unhelpful but replicate a way of thinking which itself is historical (and gendered) in that they reproduce the subject/object, active/passive binaries of modern Western thought. They are a prime example of the bifurcation of nature.