---

Despite several decades of feminist activism and scholarship, women´s bodies continue to be sites of control and contention both materially and symbolically. Issues such as reproductive technologies, sexual violence, objectification, motherhood, and sex trafficking, among others, constitute ongoing, pressing concerns for women´s bodies in our contemporary milieu, arguably exacerbated in a neoliberal world where bodies are instrumentalized as sites of human capital. This book engages with these themes by building on the strong tradition of feminist thought focused on women´s bodies, and by making novel contributions that reflect feminists´ concerns-both theoretically and empirically-about gender and embodiment in the present context and beyond. The collection brings together essays from a variety of feminist scholars who deploy diverse theoretical approaches, including phenomenology, pragmatism, and new materialisms, in order to examine philosophically the question of the current status of gendered bodies through cutting-edge feminist theory.

---

1. Contested Terrains: New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment - Clara Fischer and Luna Dolezal

Part I - Normative Bodies, Ethics, and Vulnerability

2. A Genealogy of Women´s (Un)Ethical Bodies - Gail Weiss

3. The Normal Body: Female Bodies in Changing Contexts of Normalization and Optimization - Julia Jensen and Maren Wehrle

4. How Do We Respond? Embodied Vulnerability and Forms of Responsiveness - Danielle Petherbridge

Part II - New Directions in Feminist Theory

5. Revisiting Feminist Matters in the Post-Linguistic Turn: John Dewey, New Materialisms, and Contemporary Feminist Thought - Clara Fischer

6. Feminist and Transgender Tensions: An Inquiry into History, Methodological Paradigms, and Embodiment - Lanei M. Rodemeyer

7. Expressing the World: Merleau-Ponty and Feminist Debates on Nature/Culture - Kathleen Lennon

Part III - Sex, Violence, and Public Policy

8. Are Women´s Lives (Fully) Grievable? Gendered Framing and Sexual Violence - Dianna Taylor

9. Sex Trafficking, Reproductive Rights, and Sovereign Borders: A Transnational Struggle Over Women´s Bodies - Diana Tietjens Meyers

10. Routine Unrecognized Sexual Violence in India - Namrata Mitra

Part IV - Pregnancy and Reproductive Technology

11. Performing Pregnant: An Aesthetic Investigation of Pregnancy - EL Putnam

12. The Metaphors of Commercial Surrogacy: Rethinking the Materiality of Hospitality Through Pregnant Embodiment - Luna Dolezal

---

Clara Fischer is an EU Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow at the Centre for Gender, Feminisms, and Sexualities, and Co-director of the John Dewey Research Project at University College Dublin, Ireland.

Luna Dolezal is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK.

---