Pain,purification, pleasure: Representations of the body in contemporary women's writing in Serbia

Based on Elizabeth Grosz' division of the main approaches to the issue of the body in feminist theory, this article aims to present the gradual change in understanding corporeality among the prominent contemporary women writers in Serbia. The examples selected, from writings by Svetlana Velmar-Jankovic, Jelena Lengold and Ljubica Arsic, illustrate the shift from approaching the body in "generic human" terms and as a locus of collective identity, over the psychological and social construction of the body, its disassemblage in the parodic game, all the way to the integrative understanding of the body as lived. This gradual recognition of the lived body in the works by the three selected authors is to be found in the stories about dead bodies, corpses and simulation of the human body.