The paper explores the relevance of recent theorising around the body for
the discipline of social policy. It aims to show how such work opens up
new ways of thinking within the core areas of social policy as well as
proposing new subjects for social policy consideration, arguing that the
common image of the body as an absent presence that has been characteristic
of sociological accounts in the recent past still applies in relation
to social policy, but that considerable gains can be made from incorporating
this new theorising and new subject matter into the scope of
the subject. It explores this by means of six areas of relevance: health
care, community care, disability, no-power consumption, as well as cross-cutting
themes of age, ‘race’, gender, sexuality.