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INTRODUCTION: ENTER âTHE BODYâ
Most people tend to take their body for granted as a ânaturalâ fact of existence without thinking about it too much on a moment-to-moment basis. In western culture, the body is construed to be a fairly reliable instrument through which people express and represent their conscious self, their individuality, in their everyday life. The tendency is not to question or think about bodily actions in any detail as individuals go about their daily business; the body and the self, for the most part, seem to operate in a relatively stable relationship to each other, a kind of unspoken mind/body integration, in which the conscious, willed self is considered to have the upper-hand.
Needless to say, there are also numerous occasions when this taken for granted integration is momentarily disrupted and the body, yours and others, is called into question. This is increasingly so with the current preoccupation with and on the body in contemporary consumer culture. On a fairly mundane level, think of the shock of seeing yourself in a mirror when you are not expecting it. The passing vague awareness that you are observing another personâs image turns into instant horror when you realize that it is you in that mirror and you never thought you looked quite like that. At which point you attempt to adjust your âlookâ to make it more in keeping with the bodily image you have of/for yourself in your head, or the one you put on when you âintentionallyâ look in the mirror, or that which you wish to display to/for others. Similarly, images of other peopleâs bodies (usually of a fairly uniform kind), in various dressed, semi-dressed, undressed states, which are constantly on display on billboards, in the tabloids, magazines, television and film, act as a reminder to us of the observed differences and similarities between the âtouched upâ, often idealized, bodies on display before our eyes and our individual âordinaryâ, perceptual, ârealâ, usually more fleshy, flawed body. Whilst women have traditionally been the subject and object of such representations, and there is evidence to show that young women today feel more free to play with these (Crossley 2006), men have also been recently brought into the ubiquitous circulatory economy of bodily images (Featherstone 1991; Goldstein 1994; Bordo 1994; Davis 2003).
On a more serious and perhaps more sustained note, the customary out-of-awareness body is also disrupted when, through illness, ageing, injury, trauma or disability, the body does not perform as it is expected to, or as it has habitually done in the past. For example, sometime before his death, the septuagenarian author John Mortimer (2001) wrote movingly of the day he realized that he could no longer bend down and put on his socks as a moment of stark recognition of his impending old age, bodily decay and mortality. In The Scar of Visibility, Petra Kuppers, a cultural disability activist, feminist and scholar of performance studies, notes that her methodological approach is grounded on âembodied acts of perceptionâ which entail âattention of corporal acts of meaning making, coding and decodingâ (2007: 3). Drawing on the work of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin, Kuppers approaches her study of medical performances and contemporary art as a âflâneur of bodily creative practicesâ (ibid.). Benjaminâs notion of the flâneur, as Kuppers notes, âis always male and moves with disinterest and non-attention to movement around the spaces of modernityâ (ibid.). The flâneurâs practice of bracketing out attention and interest in movement, however, has never been available to her because, as a disabled woman, attention and interest in movement are a necessary and consistent part of her everyday life. Hence, Kuppersâ âproductive interventionâ into the domain of the flâneur challenges the idea that âthe bodyâ usually remains out of awareness in everyday life, rather, it is perhaps not the case for certain social groupings and âdifferent bodiesâ.
Wendy Seymourâs (1998: xiii) qualitative analysis of people who have âexperienced profound permanent bodily paralysisâ also shows how severe physical impairment disrupts the sense of self. In such instances, the routine stable relationship of the self and the body is thrown off balance and the body seems to take on the character of an external or foreign object, which demands attention. It is no longer perceived as an instrument of the mind or human agency. A crisis arises between the body and the mind, in which the objectified body seems to have a mind of its own, which demands attention; it takes on a âthing-likeâ status, which the individual concerned becomes acutely aware of and attentive to, the subtlest, smallest changes in its condition. Seymour does not restrict her analysis to the negative ramifications of the assault on the taken for granted self-body integration which occurs as a consequence of sudden, major physical impairment. Rather, her study explores the processes involved in âremaking the bodyâ because, as she argues, it is impossible to have a self without a body. At the same time, the study proposes, as others have also argued (see Evans and Lee 2002) that ârealâ bodies/selves are not fixed or immutable.
There are areas of work or activity in everyday life, of course, which require significant attentiveness to the body and which, over time, seem to become ânaturalizedâ in the habitual everyday behaviour of the individuals involved. Dancers, for example, generally have what appears to be a ânaturalâ attentiveness to the body (see also, LoĂŻc Waquantâs [1995, 1998] ethnographic study of professional boxers). They seem to move in more precise and considered ways than the bulk of the population, even as they walk down the street, perhaps as a consequence of their rigorous âbodilyâ training regimes which are designed to hone and transform the body. In her study of sinulog dance forms in the Philippines, Sally Ann Ness (1992) notes that her training as a dancer/choreographer often impacts on her everyday life in a way where mundane tasks, which she terms âtaskless tasksâ, like folding a towel for example, take on the character of a dance. In such instances, Ness senses that she performs the task so much âbetterâ than is necessary or usual:
The rhythm of the arm movements is more articulately phrased than it needs to be, the sections of the towel come out to be more equally divided than they really need to be, the contact of my fingers with the fabric of the towels is more delicate than it needs to be, and so forth. These characteristics begin to turn the ordinary action into choreography âŚ
(Ness 1992: 7)
The overwhelming majority of professional performers in western theatrical dance are young, predominately female and thin, with bodies that have to be able to master the ever-increasing technical challenges that specific dance training regimes, choreographers and performance practices require of them and which are predicated on the idea of an abstract body without âimpairmentâ and/or âdisabilityâ. For a discussion of the debates around the use of terms such as âimpairmentâ and âdisabilityâ in disability studies see Tom Shakespeare and Nicholas Watsonâs article on âThe Social Model of Disabilityâ (2001). However, although in the minority, it is also the case that disabled performers, as with some of the dancers in the modern dance company, CandoCo, which is a company of disabled and non-disabled dancers, can and do demonstrate the remarkable possibilities of moving bodies both on and off the stage, regardless of and to an extent because of, what are generally considered as specific (physical) âimpairmentsâ. Indeed, it can be argued that wheelchairs and partners, for example, extend the individual body in new relational ways, opening up new possibilities for performance from both the performerâs and the audienceâs point of view.
The restaurant trade provides a heightened, although often unnoticed, concern with bodily matters, in addition to the more obvious concerns with hygiene. Waiters and kitchen staff, often carrying plates, implements or hot pans, which function as bodily extensions, have to learn to move around each other in confined spaces with great economy, spatial precision and timing, if they are to prevent bodily clashes, accidents and food disasters, or the wrath of the chef. Elspeth Probyn (2004), for instance, describes to great effect the choreographic-like practices of the front of house and kitchen staff in a restaurant in Quebec where she worked while she was a student. These involved the staff, including herself, dancing around each other, through kitchen doors, between tables and customers, with consummate ease, economy of movement and at breakneck speed, to someone elseâs timing, usually the chefâs. That is, when it all came together and âyou were just on the vergeâ:
Thatâs when everything flowed: your drink orders were ready, then the appetizers were quickly eaten, the plates cleared just as some inner clock told you the mains were up. On huge bus-trays you could easily stack a couple of tables of grub. Then with a heft to your shoulder, a kick to the kitchen door youâd be out, meals delivered and back again for the next. Along the way making eye contact and a promise to be back to the new tables, youâd direct the busboy to wipe down an empty table, while you deposited bread on the table.
(Probyn 2004: 222â3)
This attentiveness to the body, encapsulated in these few examples, the recognition that we are embodied beings, that we not only âhaveâ bodies which are enabling and delimiting, but that to a certain extent we âareâ bodies connected to other bodies, as Bryan Turner (1984) has noted, and that some are more privileged than others, is precisely what inspires this text on the sociology of the body. In this book, the ânot everydayâ is used to shed light on everyday bodies. By drawing on a range of performative practices which include dancing, live art, documentary photography and boxing, I hope to cast light on the complex relations of the body in the social world and vice versa, raising questions along the way as to âwhat is a body?â (Fraser and Greco 2005). The answers, as will become evident in the course of the book, depend on the approach that is taken by the social or cultural analyst.
BODIES â THEN AND NOW
If you are studying sociology or a related discipline at undergraduate or postgraduate level, you will be aware that a great deal of work has been published which has the word âbodyâ in the title or sub-title over the past 20 or so years. This fascination with the body in sociology, at least in a systematic way, however, is relatively new in terms of the development of the sociological tradition.
Whilst working on my PhD on the sociology of dance in the late 1970s and early 1980s, for example, I sought out sociological and anthropological sources that included an interest in âthe bodyâ in order to critically review the literature. The body is heavily implicated in dance, particularly in the west, where it largely constitutes the means of expression and mode of representation. As there was a paucity of material on dance or dancing from a sociological perspective at that time, I imagined that I might gain some sociological insight by seeking out studies on the body. It soon became apparent, however, that the body was not exactly a âhot topicâ at that moment in sociology, any more than was dance. Instead, my attention was directed towards certain interdisciplinary âbehaviouristâ-based studies which sought to generate a serious âscientificâ approach to studying body language in the US (Birdwhistell 1973; Hall 1969; Scheflen 1964); social constructionist approaches to the body as a medium of expression in the UK (Benthall and Polhemus 1975; Polhemus 1978); Durkheimian-inspired anthropological work on body symbolism (Mauss 1973, Douglas 1970, 1973; Needham 1973), and the occasional one or two collections which explored the issues confronting the anthropology of the body from the vantage point of psychology, anthropology and ethology (Blacking 1977; Polhemus 1978). The burgeoning second-wave feminist movement in the 1970s, which directed attention towards womenâs bodies as a site of political contestation, identification and representation (see Bordo 1993), also warranted my close attention.
Much of this work, apart from the body symbolism approach, as Ted Polhemus (1978) noted at the time, along with feminist scholarship, remained marginal to sociology. What was important sociologically about the Durkheimian-inspired work is that it pointed to âthe bodyâ as a legitimate topic of sociological investigation and sought to provide a method for analysing the relations between the body and society. I will return to the impact of feminist scholarship later in the chapter as it could be argued that feminists blazed the trail that led to sociology treating the body as a serious topic of inquiry (see Frank 1991; Davis 1997).
A few sociologists, such as Harold Garfinkel (1984 [1967]) and David Sudnow (1993 [1978]), did raise questions concerning the body in their research, drawing on the influence of social phenomenology. Erving Goffman, the maverick âinteractionistâ sociologist of the 1960s and 1970s, produced remarkable insights into the ways we present ourselves to others in everyday life (1971 [1959]). He also explored our routine negotiation of the unspoken and for the most part, out-of-awareness, rules of appropriate bodily behaviour in public places (1963, 1972). In this work, he combined the insights of Ray Birdwhistellâs (1973) study of kinesics (everyday body movement) and Edward Hallâs (1969) study of proxemics (the comparative study of interpersonal spatial relations), with a strong Durkheimian concern with societal rules and norms. Although these studies were sporadic in that period, in retrospect they perhaps hinted at something that was about to appear on the academic horizon.
Fast-forward twenty years and the socioscape with regard to the study of the body looked remarkably different. As the 1980s progressed, evidence of a more sustained interest in the body began to emerge, through key âbody booksâ such as Bryan Turnerâs Body and Society (1984) and John OâNeillâs Five Bodies (1985).
Since the late-1980s, hard on the heels of what has come to be known as the âcultural turnâ in sociology (Chaney 1994), sociologists and cultural analysts have become increasingly interested in exploring and reviewing the complex relations of âthe bodyâ in society and culture from a variety of perspectives and thematic concerns (see for example, Featherstone et al. 1991; Synnott 1993; Shilling 1993; Morgan and Scott 1993; Crossley 1994, 2001a; Davis 1997, 2003; Williams and Bendelow 1998; Nettleton and Watson 1998; Burkitt 1999; Evans and Lee 2002; Coupland and Gwyn 2003).
This interest has been evidenced in a range of sub-disciplines of sociology, such as the sociology of health and illness (Nettleton and Watson 1998; Watson and Cunningham-Burley 2001) and the increasingly interdisciplinary subject field of âbody studiesâ, perhaps best exemplified by the journal Body and Societyi which was instituted in 1995 by founding editors Mike Featherstone and Bryan Turner. But interest has also abounded in other areas such as feminist scholarship, which brought to bear new ways of thinking about embodied subjectivities, drawing on a range of theoretical frames from poststructuralism, phenomenology and psychoanalysis (Martin 1987; Butler 1990, 1993; Grosz 1993, 1994; Grosz and Probyn 1995; Davis 1995, 1997, 2003; Gatens 1996; Shildrick 1997; Price and Shildrick 1999; Frost 2001; McKie and Backett-Milburn 2001; Aaron 2001; Fraser 2003).
The burgeoning field of performance/dance studies provided fruitful ground for exploring the body in performance, particularly around the area of gender and sexuality (Phelan 1993; Goellner and Murphy 1995; Koritz 1995; Burt 1995, 1998; Foster 1996; Schneider 1997; Desmond 1997). Anthropology, which has demonstrated an interest historically in âotherâ bodies in particular, also began to apply different theoretical tools to study the body (Csordas 1994, 2002; Martin 1994; Hastrup 1995). Although philosophy, like anthropology, had not ignored the body, it tended to see the body in negative terms. The work of philosophers such as Lingis (1994); Welton (1998, 1999); Weiss and Haber (1999); Weiss (1999); Punday (2003) and Shusterman (2008) sought to get away from the negative connotations and reinstate the somatic into their work. Cultural studies also took to exploring the body in the context of the media, culture and society (Gaines and Herzog 1990; Goldstein 1991, 1994; Gamman and Makinen 1994; Falk 1994; Desmond 1997; Entwistle 2000; Entwistle and Wilson 2001: Cook et al. 2003; Pitts 2003; Thomas and Ahmed 2004).
While artists have traditionally paid a great deal of attention to the body and its expression, recent visual culture analysis has challenged the all too easy celebration of the âbeautifulâ body in western art which is revealed to be underscored by objectification in terms of gender and race in particular (Pollock 1988; Nead 1992; Betterton 1987, 1996; Curti 1998; Gilman 1995, 1999). The topic of the body has also strayed into the domain of social geography (Pile 1996; Duncan 1996; Nast and Pile 1998).
The aforementioned references represent a small section of the many monographs, edited collections and readers which came to have the body as their focus. Indeed, it is fair to say that the study of the body turned into a significant academic cultural industry, if the number of conferences, articles, collections and books which have focused on the body in social and cultural studies in the past 20 years or so are anything to go by. Moreover, in 2003, as if to give the âsomatic turnâ in sociology the legitimate seal of approval, Routledge published a four-volume library edition entitled The Body in its Critical Concepts of Sociology series, with 2,888 pages, which would have been unthinkable 13 years before.
The first thing we might want to ask is, why did sociology show little interest in studying the body until relatively recently? I do not intend to offer a detailed discussion of this for fear of not getting off the starting blocks and because it is something which is not quite as simple as first appears. There are a number of key texts that address this in a more sustained and systematic fashion (B. Turner 1991; Frank 1990, 1991; Shilling 1993; Williams and Bendelow 1998; Burkitt 1999) than is possible here. Rather, in the following section, I will offer a gloss of the reasoning behind this seeming lack of attention in the sociological tradition. As I hope to show in the course of this book, this apparent absence has impacted on new developments in rather surprising ways. After this brief âhistoricalâ discussion, this introductory chapter will address the explanations that have been offered for the recent surge of interest in âthe bodyâ, which was thrust on to the intellectual map in the late twentieth century. I will also explore key issues that emerge from various attempts to bring the body back into the light. Again, as will be shown in the course of the book, these often reflect back on the very concerns that writers sought to overcome in the first instance.
THE NEGLECTED BODY PROBLEM IN THE SOCIOLOGICAL TRADITION
Sociology, it has been argued, did not generate a thoroughgoing interest in the body until relatively recently because the discipline had largely been premised on the Cartesian heritage, which advocated a split between the mind and the body (B. Turner 1984; Howson and Inglis 2001). The mind, in Cartesian thought, was not only perceived to be distinct from the body, it was also superior to it. The former was deemed to be the world of culture, rationality and action, and the latter of nature or inert matter; âfleshâ or âmeatâ, as Drew Leder (1990) has put it. In order to establish itself as an independent âscientificâ discipline in the late nineteenth century, sociology needed to have its own object of study and rules of investigation, which were different from and not reducible to those of psychology, anthropology or the natural sciences. The clearest statement of this can be found in Emile Durkheimâs The Rules of the Sociological Method (1964 [1895]), which he operationalized subsequently in his influential study of Suicide (1952 [1897]). In so doing, classical sociology sought to make a radical distinction between âcultureâ, the realm of the social, and ânatureâ. The social realm was deemed to be the proper domain of sociology, distinct from and n...
