Body Politics

Theorizing the Body

Academics have long debated the body's significance. To some theorists, the body is a mere physical, biological being of little social importance; this is largely a perspective taken by many medical researchers. Socio-biologists, in contrast, see the body as a necessary precursor to social relations: They assume that the body shapes social interaction. Sociobiologists have contended that dysfunctional bodies produce deviant behavior; for example, women's dysfunctional bodies have been thought to cause hysteria and hypersexuality.

Many sociologists view the body as affected by social location. Sociologists frequently assert that cultural, economic, and political factors are literally visible on the bodies of society members. On a basic level, social location affects what people do with their bodies: whether they use their bodies for physical labor or leisure and the types of food, shelter, goods, and services they can access. Social location impacts individuals' access to and quality and scope of health care. Sociological research has demonstrated that economically disadvantaged people are more likely to have poor health than the well-to-do.

While positivist sociologists frequently analyze impacts of large-scale social factors, poststructuralists and postmodernists reveal the influence of social norms and values upon individuals' body consciousness. Michel Foucault, the influential French theorist, argued that people and their bodies are continually observed and closely controlled. Individuals' bodies are “disciplined” by social structures, others, and even themselves. Consequently, people engage in body modification practices, such as dieting and exercise programs, to bring their bodies into alignment with dominant social standards.

Feminist poststructural scholars have extended Foucault by arguing that bodily regulation affects women differently and more strongly than men. While both women and men are told how to act, modify, and carry their bodies, men are permitted more freedom, space, and body leniency. Women, in contrast, are especially encouraged to discipline their bodies through feminized comportment and restricted movement and to minimize their bodies' size.

Embodied Appearance

Gender-differentiated body conceptions reflect a popular—and sometimes scholarly—conception of men and women as essentially different. Historical and contemporary social divisions in the United States portray males and females as the only acceptable sexes and men and women as the only accepted gender designations. Moreover, Western conceptions of gender and sex assume symmetry between maleness/ men and femaleness/women categories. This binary system imposes limitations on gender and sex variance and frequently compels people to alter bodies and behaviors that are not perfectly attuned to dominant [Page 87]gender/sex categories. In actuality, human bodies can vary in many ways that negate the absolutist classifications of dominant sex/gender understandings: Intersexuals complicate the conventional sex binary through containing phenotype and/or genotype characteristics of males and females; transgender and transsexual people disentangle normative assumptions of sex and gender correspondence. Social constructionist feminists have refuted essentialist conceptions by revealing varying definitions of appropriate sex and gender categories throughout history and between geographically disparate locales.

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