In this article I use conceptual frames drawn from autobiography studies and
feminist theory to examine the relationships between bodily experience and the
social construction of sex, gender and class as they play themselves out in a
selection of womens medical consultation letters written to the eminent Swiss
physician, Samuel-Auguste Tissot, during the second half of the eighteenth
century. My analysis of a selection of consultation letters - all of which are
situated and read in the context of a rich archival collection of some 1,200
letters - considers the role that bodily experience plays in the construction of
self and suggests that not only the experience, but also the textual
articulation of the body, were imagined both through and against accepted
understandings of sex, gender and class during this period.
The Social Construction of Self
