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This paper is based on the premise that the body is the most local site in the struggle between the local and the global in the knowledge demands of the new economy. It examines the relevance of gender research on the body to questions of learning workplace safety. It begins with two stories of apparently insoluble dilemmas for training in occupational health and safety in the mining and aged care industries. The aged care workplace has been researched using a phenomenological approach. Twelve aged care workers were interviewed using semi structured in-depth interviews about their experience of manual handling. Conventional thematic analysis of the interview data yielded banal findings that were already apparent in the workplace and did not provide a solution. Feminist poststructural analysis, focussing on the body, offered significant findings about gendered subjectivities and the body that have potential relevance to both genders and a wide variety of workplace learning problems. A discourse analysis of miners' workplace yarns confirms these findings and suggests productive directions for further research.