The female body occupies a central place in Western imagination: its representations permeate poetry and fiction, mythology and religion, visual arts, and scientific dissertations. It inspires attraction and awe as exquisite and impure, seductive and dangerous, a source of pleasure and nourishment but also a source of woes and destruction.

In The Female Body in Western Civilization, twenty-three internationally recognized thinkers from the fields of humanities and social sciences and art critics explore the representations of the female body and the impact these have had on contemporary art and culture. Their essays, while covering a wide range of approaches and topics, converge on issues of power and powerlessness, voice and silence, subjectivity and realization, and highlight new possibilities and potential shifts in the traditional roles of the two genders.

In a vivid and substantiated manner, the book concludes with the generally and politically useful insight that the removal of boundaries between the sexes does not necessarily mean the removal of their differences.