Law and Body Politics: Regulating the Female Body

The metaphor of the Body Politic found in the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Hobbes, amongst others, has been drawn upon by feminists to permit investigations of the politicization of the body and the saturation of the body with political meaning. Feminists have shown that whilst the female body has emerged as a site of struggle and a focus of legal fascination, the legal system has at the same time played a role in silencing women and rendering women's needs, if not their bodies, invisible.