Legal embodiment: analysing the body of healthcare law

In this essay and the contributions that follow, we advocate an expansion of the parameters of mainstream healthcare law to include feminist analyses of embodiment. We suggest that a more thorough engagement with the meaning and value of embodiment can better inform normative assessment and critical appraisal in healthcare law. Law's conventional approach to regulating bodily interventions has been to consider the body as an object of analysis rather than as a category of analysis. In our view, legal analysis could offer a richer understanding of law's engagement with bodies and bodily materials if it adopted a thicker conception of embodiment. Such a conception would seek to account for the ways in which we value the living physical body as it enables our being in the world and our interactions with others.