Development of the human body used to approximately judge a child's age based on physical development. Puberty is the process of physical changes through which a child's body matures into an adult body capable of sexual reproduction. It is initiated by hormonal signals from the brain to the gonads: the ovaries in a girl, the testes in a boy. In response to the signals, the gonads produce hormones that stimulate libido and the growth, function, and transformation of the brain, bones, muscle, blood, skin, hair, breasts, and sex organs. Physical growth—height and weight—accelerates in the first half of puberty and is completed when an adult
History of beliefs about the human body is important to understanding histories of coercion and control, sex and gender, and other important but culturally varied aspects of human experience. Another prominent voice in the field at the same time was Caroline Walker Bynum, whose 1988 "Holy Feast and Holy Fast" became a landmark study. Both Bynum and Porter noted that during the 1980s Western history of the body research drew on post-structuralist thought, such as Michel Foucault's ideas of biopolitics and biopower, which emphasised that state power is not abstract, but exercised through and over human bodies. But both expressed a concern that research was focusing too