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Therese Murphy, "Feminism on Flesh", Law and Critique VIII/1 (1997), 37-59: At one time, gender seemed bound to sex. Things changed, however, when Woman appeared. Woman made it difficult to sustain the synonymity of the concepts because, in creating her, feminism took hold of "sex" and "gender" and cemented them into a binary pairing. For a time, Woman seemed multi-talented: she undermined dangerous biological determinism; she exposed the contingency of current gender arrangements; and she offered women a unitary political subject to whom the liberal state was willing to listen. But times change and Woman now stands accused of widespread and ill-considered essentialism. This paper zeros in on one of the allegations of essentialism which have been levelled against her: the fixation with gender and the void as regards the sexed body. Its starting point is that danger attaches to Woman's ongoing disregard of the need for an explicitly feminist theorisation of the body. It is concerned that sex or the body (or Nature or biology) continues to be a blind-spot in most feminist work. Using a recent publication from Liverpool's Feminist Legal Research Unit, Law and Body Politics: Regulating the Female Body, it seeks to determine what might be causing this distance from the sexed body and to suggest ways in which, for the first time, a truly feminist analysis of the body might proceed. therese.murphy@nottingham.ac.uk

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