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This article discusses the issue of the relations between social representations concerning the body and more global cultural and social developments. It emerges from this analysis that the body, over a number of stages since the beginning of the twentieth century, can be regarded as the seat of numerous transformations, and also as the locus of inscription of the signs of moral and sexual liberation, in short, as the screen on which the constant struggle between conservatism and modernity is projected. The evolution of social representations revealed by literary productions, cinema, theatre or dance, for example, says much about the ambiguous status of the body in the social imaginary and about the contradictory tendencies that are emerging in our time.