A body is the physical structure of a person or animal, including all the bones, organs, and tissues. It can also mean a group of people acting together.
It comes from Old English “bodig,” meaning “trunk, chest, or body,” with unclear earlier roots. Over time, it expanded to cover whole physical forms and organized groups (“a governing body”).
We talk as if body and mind are separate—“mind over body”—but our language constantly reconnects them: “somebody,” “nobody,” “everybody” refer to whole people. The same word that names our flesh also names our institutions, as if both were living organisms.
‘Body’ has been central in debates over women’s autonomy, reproductive rights, and objectification, with language often treating women’s bodies as public property or aesthetic objects. Medical and legal discourse has historically discounted women’s own accounts of their bodies.
Use ‘body’ in ways that respect bodily autonomy and avoid objectifying or reducing people (especially women and marginalized genders) to their physical form.
["person","individual","self"]
Feminist movements have insisted that women define and control what happens to their own bodies, reshaping law, medicine, and public discourse.
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