"The role of American feminism in developing a “political” understanding of body practice is rarely acknowledged. In describing the historical emergence of such an understanding, Don Hanlon Johnson leaps straight from Marx to Foucault, effacing the intellectual role played by the social movements of the sixties (both black power and women’s liberation) in awakening consciousness of the body as “an instrument of power”: Another major deconstruction [of the old notion of “the body”] is in the area of sociopolitical thought. Although Karl Marx initiated this movement in the middle of the 19th century, it did not gain momentum until the last 20 years due to the work of the late Michel Foucault. Marx argued that a person’s economic class affected his or her experience and definition of “the body.” . . . Foucault carried on these seminal arguments in his analysis of the body as the focal point for struggles over the shape of power. Population size, gender formation, the control of children and of those thought to be deviant from the society’s ethics are major concerns of political organization-and all concentrate on the definition and shaping of the body. Moreover, the cultivation of the body is essential to the establishment of one’s social role. Not a few feminists, too, appear to accept this view of things. While honoring French feminists Irigaray, Wittin, Cixious, and Kristeva for their work on the body “as the site of the production of new modes of subjectivity” and Beauvoir for the “understanding of the body as a situation,” Linda Zirelli credits Foucault with having “showed us how the body has been historically disciplined”; to Anglo-American feminism is simply attributed the “essentialist” view of the body as an “archaic natural."