Contested Bodies

John Hassard, Ruth Holliday, John Hassard, Ruth Holliday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134644179
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

The body occupies a prime position in contemporary theoretical work, yet still there is no consensus on exactly what it is and what constitutes it. Contested Bodies brings together a number of different accounts and perspectives on the body, drawing out some of the key connections and disjunctures from this most contested of topics. This volume features fresh and fascinating contributions from some of the leading thinkers and upcoming theorists in the field.

Themes that run through the work include:

* the place of the body in theory
* the notion of labour in the production of bodies
*the transformative potential of bodies on spaces.

Grounded inreal life experience and examples, this key text will be a valuable reference for undergraduates of sociology and gender studies.

1 Contested bodies

An introduction

Ruth Holliday and John Hassard

This book brings together a number of different accounts and perspectives on that complex and contested – yet also most commonplace – of topics: the body. In this introduction, we want to begin the task of looking at how we think about the body, and to map out a number of key domains that we feel can help us in that task. We begin by examining the place of the body in contemporary theoretical work; this search foregrounds our discussion, and sets an agenda for the book as a whole. While there has been an incredible explosion of work on the body in theory, it’s often hard to spot the material, the corporeal, the guts and goo that constitute the body itself. Even less obvious, perhaps, are the ways in which the body might usefully be implemented in the development of theoretical insights about how subjects live in, and come to know, their social and cultural worlds. How we write about the body, which bodies we write about, and whose body does the writing – these must be central concerns in advancing the project of academic body-work.

The body (in) politics

There is no consensus on what the body is and what constitutes it.

(Cream 1994: 32)

This statement gets to the heart of the issues we seek to explore in this book – what we mean when we say the body is contested. While there may be no certainties about the body other than its inevitable mortality (though even this is arguable since the development of technological practices such as cryogenics and gene therapies), there are competing and vigorously fought theoretical formations that stress the body as either a foundation of truth-making claims, or an affect of discourse. Furthermore, central to the contested nature of bodies in theory is the question of whose bodies are articulated theoretically.

There is a huge volume of work that examines ‘the body’. Early work on the body appeared to reclaim theory from the abstract, shifting it to the local, specific and phenomenological. This was, at first, frequently undertaken by feminist, black and queer theorists, whose experiences of their own bodies in the world made them ‘other’ to conventional academic discourses (which foregrounded the ‘mind’).

In her essay ‘(Dis)embodied geographies’, Robyn Longhurst argues that, while the body has become the subject of much deliberation in contemporary social and cultural theory, what we actually mean when we discuss the body remains unclear: ‘There has been much recent debate on the body, yet the seemingly simple question “what is the body?” has not tended to be examined thoroughly’ (Longhurst 1997: 487). Julia Cream has similarly expressed her ambivalence about the way the body is being rapidly taken up as an object of study within social and cultural theory:

The body is in vogue and while I find it exciting that everyone now wants to talk about the body, to include it in their work – to be embodied – I am slightly alarmed at the ease with which the body – both male and female – is being incorporated.

(Cream 1994: 1)

However, whilst we may lament the material body’s lack of presence in such theoretical incorporations, we must also remain wary of the tendency towards essentialism which some work assumes. It sometimes seems that work on the body is polarised – the body is entirely created through discourse, or the body is a prediscursive given. Cream writes of concern about those theorists who see the body as essential:

We should not be accepting our body as given, as natural, as pre-discursive, or prior to culture. The body is not a foundation. It is not a biological bedrock upon which we can construct theories of gender, sexuality, race and disability. The body is not a beginning. It is not a starting point.

(Cream 1994: 2)

The turn to the body in social and cultural theory has been seen as an intellectual response to the crisis of modernity – of universal truth and objective knowledge – the quest for certainty, stability and tangibility. We must be concerned, therefore, with the question of authority: who has the authority to speak about the body, to write about and represent your bodies and ours? Longhurst suggests that those who are already seen as being more embodied are denied the space to produce knowledge about the body; their work is seen as compromised by their very embodiment:

Only those people who conceptually occupy the place of the mind can produce such knowledge. For those people who are constructed by Cartesian philosophy as being tied to their bodies, transcendent visions are not possible. Their knowledge cannot count as knowledge for it is too intimately grounded in, and tainted by, their corporeality.

(Longhurst 1996: 2)

Refocused around the body, postmodern theories instead produce truths and knowledges that are heterogeneous, produced on a small scale and in local contexts. Despite the attempts of modernist theorists to produce all-encompassing theories of the self, centred on the mind, then, such subjectivities are embodied, whether that embodiment is traditionally made visible or invisible. Bodies do have material outcomes, though those outcomes cannot be reduced to the body itself. More frequently such material outcomes are associated with representations of embodied subjectivities, and it is here that the problems of power enter the equation. Who represents and who is represented? Representation is central to the processes by which some groups are denied access to economic and cultural resources because they are not recognised as worthy recipients. So, the body is both material and representation, and these two domains through which we come to ‘know’ the body intertwine in complex ways. As Beverley Skeggs (1997: 82) writes, bodies are ‘the physical sites where the relations of class, gender, race, sexuality and age come together and are embodied and practiced’, adding that ‘class is always coded through bodily dispositions: the body is the most ubiquitous signifier of class’.

Skeggs argues that class makes a difference to the materiality of the body: ‘White working-class bodies are generally smaller, less healthy and live shorter lives. Moreover, the White female working-class body is often represented as out of control, in excess’ (1997: 100). It could be suggested that part of the revulsion of the messy materiality of the body is thus class-based. For example, Skeggs goes on to suggest that white working-class women are marked as being more embodied than middle-class women, writing that ‘working-class women’s relationship to femininity has always been produced by the vulgar, pathological, tasteless and sexual’. Tasteful and tasteless bodies mark class dispositions in particular ways, of course, as the disdain for obesity in postmodern Western societies vividly illustrates. The fat body is constructed as the product of a slovenly – that is, unproductive or wasteful – subject. Obesity is simultaneously read as evidencing lack of self-control, or as a sign of a wilful disregard for medical and social pressure to regulate the body; again, the ways these meanings are made from the fat body are heavily class-marked (the fat body is no longer a symbol of wealth and status – in fact, quite the reverse).

The coding of particular bodies in certain ways also has implications for embodied subjectivity. If working-class, female, black and disabled bodies, and bodies configured as queer, are all coded and read as inferior, then this in turn produces effects upon those bodies. Persistent harassment, shoddy treatment and disciplinary regimes such as dieting lead to anxiety, stress and low selfesteem, all of which manifest physical symptoms, decreasing levels of health. If we seek to ameliorate suffering by making visible the damage done to bodies through the harmful, pejorative ways in which bodies are brought into discourse, we must realise that the materiality of the body defeats any of our attempts to either master it or escape it through writing about it. While reading some academic treatises on the body may give you a headache, reading or writing about the body cannot ease the physical pain or trauma which is located in, and a product of, the body’s flesh. No amount of liberal theorising can prevent illness, suffering, death and decay, as Gargi Bhattacharyya reminds us in ‘Flesh and skin’ (Chapter 3 in this volume).

The academy has long been complicit in the invisibilising of certain bodies, despite the body’s current centre-staging in much intellectual work. Critiques of the production of disembodied knowledge are matched by calls to make visible the pedagogic body in order, to use bell hooks’ evocative phrase, that we might teach to transgress. But making visible the previously invisible is no simple matter: visibility may mean exposure, may mean spoiled identity. Perhaps there are those who would choose not to have their bodies rendered visible, and thus brought into discourse (whether this is done by those who would curtail, or even those who seek to emancipate such bodies).

What this book attempts to do, then, is begin to provide a radical overhaul of some of the key assumptions underlying both traditional theoretical positions and popular representations of particular bodies, and to approach this using specific bodies or body parts (be these real or imaginary). Furthermore, it seeks to take the body as a starting point to destabilise some common theoretical conventions.

The body in culture

Descartes’ proposal is that ‘the mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely distinct from the body’ so that ‘even if the body were to cease, it [the mind] would not cease to be all that it is’ (Descartes 1968: 54). In a Western philosophical tradition heavily influenced by Descartes it is the mind, and not the body which becomes symbolically central. To accept Descartes’ thesis one would have to ignore the effects on the mind of representations of particular kinds of body, for example, black bodies, fat bodies, queer bodies, female, disabled or working-class bodies. For Descartes and his descendants pure mind is equated with the rational, sovereign individual, but since all of the groups listed above are in some ways associated with irrationality (women) or the masses (of working or colonised people), these subjectivities are non-subjectivities. For Descartes, then, ‘mind’ is unequivocally white, able-bodied, heterosexual and male. All ‘others’ are products of their bodies.

The next two sections of this introduction focus on men’s and women’s bodies, examining the extent to which common representations place men as ‘all mind’ and women as ‘all body’. We review the approaches that feminist writers have used to expose the revulsion targeted at women’s bodies, represented as ‘unruly’, and also to point out the extent to which women’s bodies are controlled and constrained by patriarchal discourses. However, we challenge some of these claims by proposing ways in which men’s bodies too are messy but highly regulated. The problem is thus representational, rather than embodied. Finally (using the work of Margrit Shildrick) we introduce the possibility of a new kind of subject, one diametrically opposed to the Cartesian ‘pure mind’ – a subjectivity linked not only to one’s own (messy and unruly) body, but to the bodies of others.

The Cartesian position has problematised the body, for the ‘normal’, or the rational, as something which might be altered or even erased, for instance in religion, where gluttony or lust are controllable by the willing spirit. This position has become commonplace in culture more generally, in the cult of fashion and beauty for instance, where bodies must be starved to fit tiny garments, wrinkles must be eradicated, or at least disguised, and body hair must be removed in line with current conventions. In health and fitness regimes individuals are made accountable for their own well-being through exercising, dieting, eating the ‘right’ food and taking regular health checks. All such regimes, of course, depend on a high degree of knowledge, such as nutritional, dietary, exercise, fashion and beauty information, in order to be carried out successfully. These are just some examples of the ways in which individual minds are made responsible for the control and regulation of bodies, the aim being to produce ‘normal’ bodies. The ‘normal body’, then, is diametrically opposed to the ‘natural’ body (though neither should be thought of as the real body). This is paradoxical in that in the West we are used to thinking of the normal and the natural as one and the same. Thus the body becomes invisibilised through the techniques of normalising bodies, techniques which are at the same time made to appear natural. Labour and knowledge are thus central to the production of normal bodies.

Early feminist writers on the body were quick to point out this paradox. Many have focused their attention on the disciplinary practices on the body which subjects must perform in order to be seen as ‘natural’ women. Writers have concentrated on issues such as the removal of body hair, the wearing of make-up and fashionable clothes, dressing for work, the clinical regimes to which women must stick during pregnancy and birth, dieting and exercising, plastic surgery, feminine deportment and behaviour, menstrual hygiene regimes, intimate deodorants, and so on (see for example Bartky 1988; Davis 1994; Wolf 1991). Many of these writers claim that it is women’s embodiment in discourse (as opposed to the erasure of men’s bodies) that attracts for them a greater degree of bodily regulation. But men do not simply regulate women’s bodies; they also fear them. Women’s bodies are constantly used in cultural representations such as horror (or medical discourse for that matter), to depict the horrific, the monstrous, the threatening or the uncontrollable (Creed 1993). The key to such representations is the depiction of women’s bodies as open and leaky, rather than closed and sealed. Women’s bodies threaten to erupt blood, water, milk, and vaginal secretions (for which there is no medical term), and this threatens to undermine Western philosophy’s conception of the body as individual, self-contained and infinitely controllable, and thus male.

However, though such claims have become accepted foundations for critical perspectives on the body, there are obvious problems with this position. Modern feminist perspectives talking about the materiality of women’s bodies neglect the fact that men must also enact rigorous disciplinary regimes in order to be seen as ‘normal’. Face-shaving must be done each day, the trimming of nasal and ear hair and regular haircuts are imperative. One book advising men on interviews, for example, explains that belts that have been used on a different hole setting should not be worn at interview as this displays loss of control over one’s body, signifying an implicit inability to control one’s work (see McDowell 1997).

Labouring on the body and its functions is, indeed, perhaps even more emblematic of masculinity than of femininity. Since women are already cast as having uncontrollable bodies, this allows for a degree of flexibility in embodiment; on the other hand, the controlled bodies of men prohibit any slippage. Masculinity is created out of the minutiae of bodily regulation. This control is problematic given that during adolescence men have huge growth spurts, their testicles drop and voices break, and erections occur in unpredictable situations. Young men are frequent victims of rampant acne and nocturnal emissions. Bizarrely for the self-contained (male) body it is precisely ejaculation which is definitive of manhood; women may ooze but men spurt! Chest-expanders, muscle-toners and penis-enlargers are commonly advertised in men’s magazines, along with build-me-up dietary supplements. Meanwhile older men develop prostate problems which mean frequent toilet visits, and all men are now encouraged to use antiperspirants to control sweating and deodorants for body odours. In materiality, then, it would seem that men’s bodies are at least as out of control (and as in need of control) as women’s. As Elizabeth Grosz (1994) explains:

Women are no more subject to this system of corporeal production than men; they are no more cultural, no more natural, than men. … It is a question not of more or less but of differential production.

(144)

Many of the feminists who concern themselves with the disciplinary inscription of feminine bodies, thereby neglecting the masculine, thus simply serve to reinforce the binary of man=control=normal/woman=unruly=abnormal. The age-old discourse of embodied women and disembodied men is unwittingly reproduced.

This does not mean that the metaphor of the social inscription of corporeal surfaces must be abandoned by feminists but that these metaphors must be refigured, their history in and complicity with the patriarchal effacement of women made clear.

(Grosz 1994: 159)

It is (quite obviously) not that women’s bodies are messy, unruly and out of control and that disciplinary technologies of repression and femininity have to be imposed upon them, and that men’s bodies are neat, clean and controlled and thus warrant no intervention; but rather these are the body’s discourses, their representations. These discourses, of course, have material effects, but they are not the materiality, the truth of the body itself; and thus the potential for alternative configurations of the body (and mind) does exist.

The body in theory

A fundamental question we address in this introduction, and one which is alluded to throughout many of the chapters in this book, is: What can current work on ‘the body’ do to advance social and cultural theory; and has this ‘corporeal turn’ made our bodies more or less present? Is the materiality of the body still missing in abstract theorisations? Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, for example, has received criticism for neglecting particular bodies in time and space. Such a grounding, of course, can muddy the waters, spoiling the clean and neat lines of abstract theory (Bell et al. 1994). Here we might recall Susan Bordo’s (1992: 171) discussion of Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), in which she argues that ‘when we attempt to give [Butler’s] abstract text some ‘‘body’’, we immediately run into difficulties’. Nevertheless, embodiment is certainly central to Butler’s theory. Gendered performance takes place within and on the surface of bodies. Performativity is thus an explicitly embodied process.

Furthermore, what is it that the body can tell us theoretically? Rather than theorising about the body, perhaps the everyday discourses surrounding it can actually tell us something about theory. For example, we have already established that the natural and the normal body are by no means the same thing, and that women cannot be said to be more subject than men to the disciplinary regimes which they must enact through their bodies. So, if we start with bodily practices or bodily knowledges and discourses, we can show how these interfere with or even contradict accepted theoretical positions on the body.

Some of the best examples of body-work have used this disjuncture to interrupt accepted theorisations. For example, Margrit Shildrick (1997) shows that instead of spending time refuting the claim that women’s bodies leak, ooze, intermingle and are far from self-contained, we must accept this proposition and theorise from it. Beginning with this body rather than the mythical disembodied, self-contained male (the Cartesian subject) overturns the whole premise of a Western philosophy predicated on the notion of a rational individual subjectivity based on the discrete categories of self and other – the radical...