The Body

The Key Concepts

Lisa Blackman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000180503
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Anatomy & Physiology
• Index: Social Sciences

Questions around 'the body' are central to social theory. Our changing understanding of the body now challenges the ways we conceive power, ideology, subjectivity and social and cultural process. The Body: the key concepts highlights and analyses the debates which make the body central to current sociological, psychological, cultural and feminist thinking. Today, questions around the body are intrinsic to a wide range of debates - from technological developments in media and communications, to socio-cultural questions around representation, performance, class, race, gender and sexuality, to the more 'physical' concerns of health and illness, sleep, diet and eating disorders, body parts and the senses.The Body: the key concepts is the ideal introduction for any student seeking a concise and up-to-date analysis of the complex and influential debates around the body in contemporary culture.

I REGULATED AND REGULATING BODIES

DOI: 10.4324/9781003086901-2

In writing about sociology’s neglect of the body, it may be more exact to refer to this negligence as submergence rather than absence, since the body in sociological theory has had a furtive, secret history rather than no history at all.

Turner, The Body and Society: Explorations in Social Theory

INTRODUCTION

This chapter will review some of the body concepts that were introduced within sociology in the call to take the body more seriously as an object of analysis. As we will see, the invitation to sociologists to accord the body a more central place did not mean that the body until that point had not been considered. Rather, one of the strategies of this work was to reveal to sociologists how the body had always been central to sociological analysis, albeit in a silenced and unacknowledged way. One of the key concepts it introduced, that drew attention to the central yet marginalized role of the body in theoretical work, was the notion that the body was an absent presence. That is, that assumptions about the contribution of ‘the body’ to the question of how social processes worked was implicit in the theories put forward by those considered to be the founding figures of sociology. One trend of this work is a reengagement with the concepts introduced by some of those founding figures. These are names considered to be part of the canon or intellectual heritage of contemporary sociology and they will appear in most discussions of the historical development of the discipline. They are scholars who are considered important to how the project of sociology was shaped and framed so that it became distinct from other disciplines, such as psychology or media studies, for example. Let us begin the work of this chapter by breaking down the concept of the body as an absent presence further, and situating it within some of the broader moves and debates that were beginning to characterize the emergence of body studies within sociology and social theory.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL BODY

The emergence of sociology has been linked to two key questions: how to account for social change, and how to account for social reproduction. Early sociology was concerned more with the latter question and is often aligned to the work of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim argued that sociology should be an examination of the constraint and imposition of social structures on the formation of human subjects. What puzzled sociologists, psychologists, biologists, economists and other scholars in the nineteenth century was how ideas, beliefs, practices, traditions and even emotions could spread throughout populations to such a degree that they would achieve a uniformity or social unity. Durkheim argued that sociology should be an examination of this social unity, and made the concepts of imposition and constraint central to his project. He fiercely rejected the contribution of other disciplines such as anthropology and psychology to this question, and instead reified the importance of understanding the role of social structures in the formation of what it means to be human. Durkheim’s approach is now regarded as functionalist as social structures were seen to constrain the individuality of subjects so that there appears to be no room for manoeuvre. The term ‘functionalism’ identifies how the privileging of the role of social structures ignored or devalued the agency of the human subject, who was seen to be at the mercy of social institutions and practices. So what kind of body was Durkheim implicitly mobilizing within his analyses? As we can see, Durkheim starts from the presumption that institutions and the state are the seat or centre of power, that individuals are mere pawns within broader ideological processes. However, these processes are effective for Durkheim because they change or transform human subjects. The changes are realized both in the bodies and minds of subjects with the result that they become particular kinds of subject or citizen.

This approach to the formation of human subjects is also characterized as part of a tradition within sociology that focuses upon cultural inscription. As this term suggests, what is important is how social or cultural processes inscribe or speak through individuals. These processes are manifested in the thoughts, actions, bodily dispositions and habits of subjects with the result that they appear natural and automatic. The body, within these accounts, is important for understanding the workings of ideology and power, for example, but what is brought into the analysis, albeit in an under-theorized way, is a view of the body as a malleable entity that cannot speak back. Thus, as Turner (1991: 5) argues, forming the backdrop to sociology is an assumption that ‘the body is the central metaphor of political and social order’. However, in his earlier seminal work on the subject, Turner also argues that although a central metaphor, the body tends to make a ‘cryptic appearance’ (1984: 2). Thus, Durkheim assumes ‘the coercive nature of moral facts’ (Turner 1984: 21) to be such that power is taken to work through constraint and repression of bodily and psychic processes. Durkheim was not interested in what he termed the organismic basis of the body, for bodies were always ‘made social’ and existed within a network of ties, obligations and duties. These social ties were what mattered, relegating ‘the body (as a possible collection of instincts, drives, desires, passions, physiological processes and so forth) to the sidelines. Although he made the argument that sociology should maintain itself as separate and distinct from work developing across the psychological and biological sciences, he did, however, increasingly turn to these areas in his later writings to reflect upon the dualism of so-called human nature (see Durkheim 1960). We can see, then, that even early sociologists found the separation between mind and body, nature and nurture, and individual and society difficult to maintain.

If we revisit the basis of some of these arguments, as other sociologists of the body have already done (Shilling 1993; Turner 1984; Featherstone et al. 1991), what might this tell us about the status of the body within this work? We must be careful not simply to dismiss this work as devaluing the agency of the body. As Shilling (1993) argues, one of the important insights of this work is that the body is always a body that is an unfinished entity. In other words, the body is not simply a body defined by a fixed human nature, but, rather, bodies can, will and do change and transform given the particular set of historical circumstances within which they are socialized. Thus, talk of the body is always talk of the social context, social practices and ideological processes that produce bodily matters. However, somewhat ironically, the body that is ‘a hidden base, under-theorized and taken for granted’ (Shilling 1993: 20) is also deemed to be a body that cannot be explained by understandings of its biological or physiological processes. Thus, what characterizes, and has characterized, models of cultural inscription is a distance from both biology and psychology and a reification of social structure in the importance of understanding bodily matters. This is why Turner characterizes the development of sociology as ‘a somewhat hostile reaction to Darwinistic evolutionism, eugenics or biologism’ (1991: 7).

THE NATURALISTIC BODY

DARWINISTIC EVOLUTIONISM

This critique of the foundations of sociology is really important for some of the moves that have been advocated in contemporary work on the sociology of the body, so we will examine it in more detail. To start with, what does it mean to dismiss the foundational assumptions of sociology as being a reaction to Darwinistic evolutionism, eugenics or biologism? We will start with the tradition of Darwinistic evolutionism and examine some of the assumptions it is taken to make about what makes us human. Darwin (1859) was also interested in the question of transmission or reproduction characterized in the process of natural selection. Natural selection referred to the processes through which physical and mental traits are passed on, become modified or disappear when viewed across generations. As well as an account of physical adaptation across time, Darwin also provided an account of already existing social hierarchies at the time of his writing in the late nineteenth century. This is by far the more controversial aspect of his writings, and one that has led to the most hostile reaction by sociologists and others, such as feminist and postcolonial writers, wanting to distance themselves from the political ramifications of his theories.

EUGENICS

Eugenics was a nineteenth-century governmental strategy that incorporated the knowledge of Darwinistic evolutionism as a way of managing and governing key social issues of the time. These included the problems of vice, criminality, madness and unemployment, for example. These problems were framed within the strategies of eugenics as a problem of degeneracy. Degeneracy is a term that is derived from Darwinistic evolutionism and understands certain problems as reversions to more primitive forms of behaviour and experience. Thus, the problem of madness,

Case Study

The idea of madness and its link to degeneracy became a coherent explanation of madness from the mid nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. This developed a view from physiognomy that saw madness as literally ‘written on the body’. Madness was taken to be expressed physically as a form of biological decay, deterioration and reversion to what were viewed as more ‘primitive’ modes of existence. Thus the German psychiatrist Emile Kraepelin, often heralded as developing the concept of ‘dementia praecox’, made the following statement about the identifying features of this disease process: ‘all sorts of physical abnormalities exist with striking frequency, especially weakliness, small stature, youthful appearance, malformation of the cranium, and of the ears, high and narrow palate, persistence of the intermaxillary bone, abnormal growth of hair, strabismus, deformities of the fingers or toes, polynastia, defective development and irregularity of the teeth and like’ (1919:236).

criminality, vice and unemployment were understood as the expression of inferior primitive psychic and bodily qualities and processes.

The idea of madness as a state of degeneracy was also seen to be expressed psychically, through what we might now view as psychological states, as well as physically through the signs and symptoms of the decay of the body. For some, according to Emile Kraepelin, degeneracy could even be expressed through ones choice of career or lifestyle. At this time homosexuality was considered a sign of degeneracy manifested through a disease process and it appeared as a psychiatric diagnosis and classification within the textbooks of the time. This particular form of degeneracy, according to Kraepelin, could be expressed through one’s choice of employment, ‘such as among decorators, waiters, ladies’ tailors; also among theatrical people’. He even claimed that women comedians are regularly homosexual (Kraepelin l913: 510). These views were incorporated into governmental strategies, such as eugenics, that argued that the identification, mapping, elimination, segregation and rehabilitation of Otherness (as degeneracy) would allow for the smooth running of the social order.

BIOLOGISM

Sociologists and other humanities scholars who politically want to distance themselves from what are taken to be biologically reductionist arguments coined the term ‘biologism’ to refer to arguments that reduce the complexity of human psychological and social life to the biological make-up of individuals and groups. These arguments are also considered essentialist, as, again, they reduce the complexity of life to essential components of our biological make-up that are viewed as fixed and pre-given. Diana

In this example we can clearly see how madness was seen to wreak havoc on the body causing deformities, irregularities and physical signs that the body was progressing to more ‘primitive’ forms of behaviour and experience. This view of madness as a form of degeneracy was repeated to explain and reinforce the social positioning of groups who were also considered Other to a white, male, middle-class version of rationality. This included the place of the bodies of children, colonial subjects, the working classes and people with different sexualities. Their bodies were considered potential sites of atavism. ‘Atavism’ was an evolutionary term used to refer to madness as an expression of biological decay and regression to so-called pre-civilized modes of conduct Thus, certain groups and individuals were viewed as bearing the seeds of their own destruction within their biological make-up or constitution.

Fuss thus defines essentialism in the following way: ‘Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in true essence - that which is most irreducible, unchanging and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing’ (1990: 2). We can see in this context why the arguments of Durkheim and his view of cultural inscription were in opposition to many of the views prevalent at the time of his writing. This was not only the case in the psychological and biological sciences, but also in practices of government and regulation. This has led in Turners view to a suspicion of biological explanations by social theorists and to a lasting commitment to the central role of social processes in the formation of human subjectivities. As he argues, ‘any reference to the corporeal nature of human existence raises in the mind of the sociologist the specter of social Darwinism, biological reductionism or sociobiology’ (1984: 1).

However, Turner (1984) was writing at the beginnings of what many are now referring to as the emergence of a distinct ‘body theory’ or area of ‘body studies’ within sociology. That is, theory that takes the body as a central locus of concern and analysis in relation to broader questions related to power, ideology, technologies, agency and so forth. At this point, what is clear from Turner’s position is that what defined the sociological project, as we have seen, was a distance from and even hostility to any engagement with the ‘biological’. I have placed the term biological in speech marks as I want to stress that sociologists and social theorists now prefer to use other terms to refer to the body to avoid the spectre of biological reductionism. They also wish to show an awareness that biology is itself a discipline characterized by competing perspectives on the question of how to understand the role of biology in the formation of subjects. Thus there are three interchangeable terms that tend to appear in the literature: the first is the term corporeality, used by Turner in the quotation above, which pertains to the body and is a way of referring to the body that does not reduce it to the biological; the second term is materiality, which, again, recognizes the material basis of human subjectivity but does not privilege biology as the unique discipline to provide a purchase into this realm; the third term is somatic, which again refers to the body but within many perspectives also introduces the concept of feeling or vitality into the body. See, for example, the Introduction, where we encountered the concept of the somatically felt body.

THE MATERIALIST BODY

The kinds of perspectives in opposition to which sociology was seen to be defining itself are those that have been characterized as taking the naturalistic body as their object of study. Indeed, in his seminal book in the field of the sociology of the body, The Body and Social Theory, Chris Shilling devotes an entire chapter to the naturalistic body. He argues that it is this body that has exerted a far greater influence in other traditions than the kind of body that Durkheim, for example, was implicitly formulating within his theories of cultural inscription. He finds the influence of the naturalistic body evidence of the ‘power of the biological body’ (Schilling 1993: 41), and links this specifically to the rise of sociobiology. This is a contemporary formulation that offers a revision of Darwin’s theories, reproducing the idea that there is a biological explanation and basis for human behaviour. As Shilling argues, ‘socio-biology begins with an interpretation of current social life - which is often sexist, ethnocentric and factually wrong in other ways - and projects this back onto a mythical history of human societies’ (1993: 52). However, although, hopefully, it is now clearer why cultural inscription became one of the dominant traditions within sociology, we need to explore why this move is one that is seen to eclipse or avoid the issue of exactly what we mean when we call for the body to be taken more seriously. A contemporary variant to emerge from this early work on the sociology of the body, as we will see, is one that argues that the implicit body of social theory needs fleshing out. One criticism relevant to this variant is that within cultural inscription models, the material or corporeal body disappears and is replaced by cultural signs and symbols. We will explore this ‘socially constructed body' in the next section. For now, I wish to signal that one aspect of bringing the body back into social theory has been a revisiting of the materiality of the body, and a reengagement with the biological sciences as potential allies rather than adversaries. We saw this in the Introduction in Shilling’s argument that one uniting principle of contemporary work in body theory is a commitment to exploring the intersection of biological, social and cultural processes in subject formation. As Thrift (2004: 57) cogently puts it, ‘distance from biology is no longer seen as a prime marker of social and cultural theory’.

We have seen so far that cultural inscription models moved as far as possible away from biological explanations that were viewed as essentialist, reductionistic and universalistic. In other words, cultural inscription models were based upon an assumption that the idea of a fixed universal human nature that could define subjects for all times, in all places was politically a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Thinking through the Body
• 1 Regulated and Regulating Bodies
• 2 Communicating Bodies
• 3 Bodies and Difference
• 4 Lived Bodies
• 5 The Body as Enactment
• Conclusion: Imagining the Future of the Body within the Academy
• Questions for Essays and Classroom Discussion
• Annotated Guide for Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index