As a starting point to engaging with ideas in Theory for Theatre Studies: Bodies, it will be useful to think about how you experience your body and how you perceive your body and other people’s bodies. Also, what are your expectation and assumptions about bodies on stage and how the body works in theatrical productions? Bodies explores how the ideas of theorists from Karl Marx to Michel Foucault to Judith Butler apply in the context of an art form that has theorized the body for centuries, endowing it with meaning while contending with the way it carries meaning forth into every theatrical event. Marx explores how labor and economic conditions shape the body, Foucault examines how power structures inform perceptions of the body, and Butler considers how desire, discursive practices, and the repetition of behavior produce the body. All three theorists understand the body as emerging in relationship to discursive, historical, and material networks that set expectations for individuals before they step on the scene or on the stage. Bodies explores how theories of the body that emerge through theatrical production and as a result of philosophical writing inform the field of Theatre Studies.