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Drawing on Sara Ahmed, this article confronts the often repeated claim that feminists and/or social constructionists -even those whose work appears to focus on 'the body'routinely ignore the materiality of corporeal life. This charge is often accompanied by the claim that poststructuralist feminists have, for connected reasons, also ignored 'non-human animal' life. This article critically interrogates the ways in which the somatechnics of perception and particular universalizing epistemic sexing practices feed into and out of one another in much contemporary work on 'animal sex'. It also aims to build on Ahmed's critique of the founding gestures of the new materialism in and through a close engagement with the work of a small number of theorists who identify with the new materialism.

The trope of the wrong body is of interest to me not least because it is at once a universalizing concept and one which functions variously in relation to different modes of embodiment and different surgical procedures. But the wrong body, I want to suggest, is always something more than simply a metaphor consciously and strategically employed by those seeking access to 'corrective' surgeries of one sort or another. The wrong body is -as transsexual narratives and the narratives of self-demand amputees make clear -'materialized as somatic feeling' (Prosser, 1998a: 70). Starting from Merleau-Ponty's claim that 'the body can symbolize existence because the body realizes it and is its actuality ' (1962: 164), this article aims to interrogate the discursive and phenomenological effects of the trope of the 'wrong' body, as they are lived by those identifying as transsexual 1 and those who refer to themselves as self-demand amputees or wannabes. 2 The initial motivation for writing this article was twofold: first, my interest was aroused by the frequency with which an analogy between transsexualism and self-demand amputation is posited, and yet never critically interrogated, in the medical and popular literature on self-demand amputation; and, second, I was concerned that while the trope of the wrong body has undoubtedly played an enormously persuasive role in the demand for, access to, and justification of sex Body & Society

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