Joyce Carol Oates has pictured the human body in almost all its different forms and shapes. Human bodies, although treated differently as male or female, black or white, healthy or diseased and strong or weak, are all subject to pain in similar ways. The differences in bodies range from injured and tormented bodies, diseased bodies, gendered bodies, and reproducing bodies to modified and deformed bodies. This study aims to shed light on the versatility of the body and its implications in Oates’s short fiction. Excerpts from her fiction presented here, prove that Oates has been concerned with human physical manifestation and the contradictions associated with it. She has speculated on how human beings are treated differently based on what body they dwell in. For this study, Oates’s collections of short stories in different periods have been investigated. The collections studied in this research are: I Am No One You Know (2005), Dear Husband (2010), Sourland: Stories (2010), The Corn Maiden (2011), Black Dahlia and White Rose (2012), Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014), and High Crime Area (2014), Night Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018).
