The emergent field of cultural studies presupposes that we are produced by signifying practices and ideologies, discourses motivated or determined by power, and our gender or cultural identities are contingent politico-cultural constructions, not natural givens. The concept of the body as text signifies poststructuralism's departure from biologistic accounts of the body and 'a world before or without language'. This means that the body is the universal biological stuff written by culture, that dead, inert matter, and this is what is assumed both by the culturalist and the biological reductionist. The former reverses the latter.

Feminist poststructuralism has repeatedly returned to the metaphor of inscription, to a body written on by culture, and often only at the exterior. That implies that the flesh is actually a word. Well not quite. If matter is inscribed, what does the inscribing (if not culture), and on what bedrock (if not nature)? So 'body-as-inscription' position necessarily posits the very body-as-exceeding-representation it wishes to avoid.

Vicki Kirby in Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal, argues for the possibility that 'nature scribbles', that 'flesh reads' (p. 127). I'm not sure what 'flesh reads' means. Does it mean the same as 'bodies speak?

Penelope Deutscher in a review of Telling Flesh says that:

There is a world of difference between thinking the body as natural, essential as opposed to culturally inscribed and thinking the body as natural, essential 'because indistinguishable from culture'.