The Body

Social and Cultural Dissections

Lisa Jean Moore, Monica J. Casper, Monica Casper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781136771798
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This college-level handbook offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of sociological and cultural perspectives on the human body. Organized along the lines of a standard anatomical textbook delineated by body parts and processes, this volume subverts the expected content in favor of providing tools for social and cultural analysis.

Students will learn about the human body in its social, cultural, and political contexts, with emphasis on multiple, contested meanings of the body, body parts, and systems. Case studies, examples, and discussion questions are both US-based and international. Advancing critical body studies, the book explicitly discusses bodies in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, health, geography, and citizenship status. The framing is sociological rather than biomedical, attentive to cultural meanings, institutional practices, politics, and social problems. The authors use commonly understood anatomical frames to discuss social, cultural, political, and ethical issues concerning embodiment.

chapter 1

Introduction

Snapshots of the 21st century

Is the image shown on page 2 a cyborg soldier from the movie Transformers, or perhaps the Tony Stark character from Iron Man? Or is it real life?

The U.S. military has been testing the Universal Human Load Carrier (HULC), an exoskeleton designed to enhance physical capability, including strength and endurance. Such enhancement could certainly yield a more resilient soldier.

Funded by Lockheed Martin with testing supported by the military, the technology (like so many originally developed through military–industry collaborations) has applications far beyond the military.

For example, Figure 1.2 depicts a child born with arthrogryposis multiplex congenita (AMC), a genetic condition that causes muscles and joints to be stiff and immobile, fitted with an exoskeleton. With this “enhancement,” she is able to move her limbs, hug her mother, carry objects, and otherwise function with increased mobility.

As sociologists, we are fascinated by these kinds of technologies. Developed in one context for a specific set of purposes, they are subsequently reconfigured for other kinds of bodies and activities. These images, which resemble characters in science fiction films, now reflect varied human realities. One exemplifies the reach of the U.S. military and a multibillion-dollar defense budget; the other emphasizes the domestic sphere of family life, shared embodied intimacy, and the quest for a “normal” childhood.

These examples of extreme uses of bodily technology illustrate that human anatomy is changeable. That is to say, bodies can be transformed and manipulated. Unlike the staid, two-dimensional drawings of human bodies found in most medical textbooks, the images here point to dynamic anatomies that can be upgraded, fixed, or reordered through human ingenuity and technical know-how. But while these are “high-tech” examples, humans also change their anatomies through seemingly “low-tech” practices, such as application of sunscreen and hair color, exercise, eating, and drinking water.

FIGURE 1.1 A model “Soldier” tries out the exoskeleton
Photo courtesy of Lockheed Martin

FIGURE 1.2 Little girl hugging mother
Photo courtesy of Stratasys

In opening this book, we have deliberately selected spectacular examples from contemporary life in the Global North to highlight certain points about the malleability of bodies. And yet, the impetus for the book is to explore and explain the many ways in which human bodies are culturally shaped, variously deployed, relentlessly political and politicized, sources of potentials and limitations, simultaneously material and symbolic, subject to interventions and transformations, finite and flexible, powerful and vulnerable, and endlessly open to varied, contested representations, and interpretations.

Bodies are anything but simple.

Structure of the book

This book is organized around body parts and functions: anatomy. This may seem like an unusual strategy for a book based in the social sciences and humanities. After all, anatomy is the scientific study of the structure of organisms and is rooted in ancient civilizations. Anatomical ideas appeared as early as 1600 BCE, and expanded through development of the printing press. Anatomy and its representations offered new understandings of human material existence.

Yet, from the beginning, anatomy was firmly grounded in actual dissections and examinations of living and dead organisms, including human bodies. The focus was on the body itself, and not on the person, and the goal was to develop physiological and biological knowledge about bodies and their functions. Anatomical understandings have underpinned everything from biology to medicine to forensic pathology. Anatomy has been foundational for many scientific and popular representations of the body. For example, we speak of “heads of state” in politics and the “long arm” of the law.

We argue, however, that these anatomical renderings are limited in their reliance on stable, static, allopathic, normative, derivative, and standard notions of bodies. Anatomical examinations of bodies are, for the most part, asocial; presented as if bodies are not engaged in cultural, political, and kinetic practices every second of every day. Here, we take up the practice of dissection but we do so sociologically to repurpose anatomy. We use the conventions of standard anatomy to identify body parts and processes, but we examine these through a lens that reveals their social and cultural meanings. We enflesh and animate the flattened human bodies of anatomy textbooks by situating them in social, cultural, and geopolitical contexts.

In this book, dissection does not mean surgically slicing into flesh and organs, but rather conceptually and theoretically opening up human bodies. Our methods—sociological and cultural analysis—allow for sharp, precise, and systematic investigation of layers of fascia, meaning, social organization, and transnational flows. Just as the body is comprised of multiple layers—molecular, fluid, bony, fleshy, interactions between bodies—our analysis addresses the stratified and interconnected layers of society. We are deeply attentive to the body in a social context, including persistent inequalities of gender, race, sexuality, age, ability, geography, and other markers of human status.

Building on the work of scholars such as Donna Haraway, Londa Schiebinger, Adele Clarke, and others who have critically examined disciplinary foundations of biology, we begin with the premise that human anatomy—biology—provides only a limited perspective on the body. Sociologists and others study the body because it has been a key site for power operations, with bodies classified and targeted for both damaging and liberatory ends. We show in this book that social scientists and humanists have a claim on the body; that bodies are not the sole province of the natural sciences. We consider bodies from multiple angles. Rather than focusing exclusively on function, we consider how bodies produce real effects in the world, how bodies are impacted by structural and material conditions, and how bodies are represented in multiple, diverse contexts.

This introduction provides an overview of what we are calling critical body studies. For some 30 years, various fields (e.g., anthropology, sociology, philosophy, literary studies, and history) have examined the body as a component of social relations. Yet only very recently has critical body studies come to be recognized and institutionalized as an area of study in its own right through conferences, journals, and centers. This textbook deliberately and self-consciously marks a moment in the formation of critical body studies as a distinct intellectual field with relevance across a number of other fields, including our home discipline of sociology.

Our introduction proceeds with a moment about being embodied scholars (and learners), and then moves through a range of theoretical approaches to the body. We then offer a brief overview of critical body studies, including its major ideas and theorists, before moving on to a discussion of several interdisciplinary fields related to and, in some cases dependent on, critical body studies. We conclude the introduction with a set of learning objectives for the book, definitions of core concepts, and an owner’s manual.

Our reflexive moment

While working in the field of critical body studies as scholars and human beings, we are relentlessly aware of our own bodies, as well as those of our intimates. Collaborating on this book, as in our earlier collaborations (Casper and Moore 2009), has ignited a fresh awareness of our own body projects. We are middle-aged, highly educated, white women living in the U.S., mothers to five girls with their own body anxieties, and mentors to numerous students who engage in diverse body projects including cosmetic surgery, gender-affirming surgeries, body modification practices, and dieting and starvation.

We have bodies, and we are alternately reluctantly and willfully complicit in body projects and anxieties. For example, we use a variety of facial cleansers and creams to keep our skin looking youthful (especially Monica, who lives in the desert), we dye our hair, we have tattoos, we shave, we have given birth (three vaginal births, two cesarean sections), we have had cancer, we have undergone various surgeries for broken ankles and ovarian cysts and other mishaps, we have buried family members, we have experienced miscarriage and abortion and prenatal testing, we have worn false eyelashes and make-up, and we have engaged in numerous physical activities ranging from sex to sports, sleeping to eating.

And because we are also sociologists, these embodied activities ignite critical reflection and dialogue about broader institutional and interactional frameworks within which our everyday lives unfold. In other words, our own embodied experiences in the world inform and shape our research expertise. For example, Lisa Jean’s reproductive experiences led her to a decade-long study of human semen, sperm banking, and somatic representations of masculinity—she even became the Board President of a California nonprofit sperm bank for six years. Inspired by the feminist self-help health movement, Lisa Jean spent several years exploring 20th century anatomical renderings of female and male genitalia. She has also published scholarly research about gender and birth certificate policies, breastfeeding, sex work and safer sex, and urban homesteading in New York City.

An expert on women’s health, Monica has written about cervical cancer, the Pap smear, the HPV vaccine, abortion, contraception, pregnancy, reproductive politics, breast cancer, genetic testing, fetal tissue research, infant mortality, health disparities, biomedical technologies, environmental health, disability, and traumatic brain injury. She won awards for her 1998 book The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery, and is a frequent commentator in public media on reproductive health and justice issues. She often writes about her own reproductive experiences, including abortion, two cesarean sections, and mothering young daughters. With Lisa Jean, Monica has written extensively about how human bodies are rendered invisible, visible, or hypervisible in public discourse.

The experience of being an embodied learner is necessarily shared by everyone reading this book. We all have bodies. But because no two bodies are alike, our embodied experiences are varied, and they are specific to the reader’s age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class status, ability, family history, culture, and geographic location.

Challenging the “natural” body

When asked about inequities between men and women with respect to economic and political power, our students often claim exasperatedly: “Women’s and men’s bodies are just different!” These presumed differences are cited as evidence to explain why our culture (and that of many others) is organized in certain ways. For example, almost universally women are responsible for care of children (whether their own or those of others) and the maintenance of the domestic or household domain, as it is presumably in women’s “nature” to be domestic. But this so-called natural arrangement is historical, ideological, and also unsustainable, as women have entered the paid labor force in greater numbers beginning in the latter half of the 20th century. The shifts have produced considerable tensions (Hochschild 2012 [1989]).

Importantly, scholars of the body have worked to reveal how these “self-evident” differences are actually culturally produced. Certain bodies survive and thrive depending on economic resources and social power, while others become ill or even die. For example, throughout the world, men’s bodies are at risk of military, athletic, and industrial exploitation, and, for disadvantaged men, imprisonment and premature, often violent, death. Institutions dominated by men, namely medicine and religion, disproportionately control women’s bodies; as struggles to attain comprehensive access to birth control, abortion, and safe maternity care demonstrate, reproductive bodies are particularly targeted.

Through discourses and practices of science and medicine, including human anatomy, these differences are recast as natural, physical, universal, trans-historical, and permanent. It is commonly understood in tautological fashion that men’s and women’s bodies are different because they were born that way. Furthermore, a vast majority of anatomical illustration has been based on male bodies (specifically male cadavers), often without acknowledgment of the gender of the model – rather, the male body is taken as universal. Feminist activism and scholarship has increased awareness of how bodies are gendered by making visible the cultural and social dynamics that produce difference and dominance out of the flesh of bodies (Van den Wijngaard 1997).

In effect, many feminist scholars have challenged the notion of the “natural” body. In general, naturalistic or biological approaches to the body hold that humans—including identities—are constrained and/or enabled by their birth-given characteristics (e.g., sex, skin color, height, genitals); this is a form of biological determinism. Correspondingly, social relationships, institutions, and the ideologies that impact human life are founded upon particular assumptions about the biological body. What the body looks like is thought to reveal who someone is, and thus forms the basis for how people are identified socially and legally.

Naturalistic approaches to the body have produced a highly charged field of work, particularly revolving around the sociology of gender and claims about the physiological basis of women’s inequality. Some of the earliest and most controversial work in this vein emanated out of sociobiology in the 1970s, particularly the work of Harvard sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, who received much praise and publicity for his theories of genetic evolution and social behavior.

According to Wilson (1975, 1979), human behavior is explained by and encoded within the gene. Wilson attempted (many argue unsuccessfully) to link genetic structures in animals to those in humans to establish a biological basis for human behavior. Wilson maintains that women’s social subordination was “natural” because “women as a group were less assertive and physically aggressive” owing to their genetic make-up (Wilson 1978: 128).

Not coincidentally, sociobiology developed simultaneously with the rise of the women’s movement in the Global North, particularly radical feminism. The field of sociobiology quickly became a useful way for social conservatives to undermine the expansion of feminist discourses and calls for gender inequality. Sociobiological beliefs continue today, and “women’s place” remains a contested topic, with conservatives typically linking women’s subordinate status to biological functions such as reproduction.

Ideas frequently circulate between biology an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Building blocks
• Part II Systems and their representation
• Part III What others see
• References
• Index