Body, Geography of

Many critical human geographers, such as feminist, socialist, antiracist, postcolonial, and queer geographers, focus on the body as one possible route to changing social, cultural, and economic relations for the better. These geographers increasingly recognize that bodies—those that have a particular skin type and color, shape, genitalia, and impairments, are a specific age, and so on—are always placed in particular temporal and spatial contexts. Questions of the body—its materiality, discursive construction, regulation, and representation—are crucial to understanding spatial relations at every spatial scale.

In some ways, attempting to define the body seems nonsensical. We all are bodies, and bodies are more than just possessions. Although there has been a longstanding preoccupation with the body, there is little agreement about the meaning of the body or even what the body is. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks to the postmodernists have attempted to understand and define the body. During the Enlightenment, philosopher Descartes argued that the mind was separate from—and superior to—the body. This dichotomy became known as the Cartesian division, or dualistic thinking, which laid the foundations for the development of modern scientific rationalization. This distinction between mind and body has been gendered, racialized, sexualized, and so on. The mind has been associated with positive terms such as rationality, consciousness, reason, whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity, whereas the body has been associated with negative terms such as emotionality, nature, irrationality, blackness, homosexuality, and femininity.

Claims about allegedly natural biological differences between men and women, or between whites and blacks, are known as essentialist arguments. They assume that bodies have fixed or stable essences. This has been challenged by social constructionists who argue that differences are produced through social and material practices and systems of representation rather than by biology. Dualisms have shaped geographers' understandings of society and space and the production of geographic knowledge to the point that, for example, the public has been privileged to the exclusion of the private. This has been challenged in recent feminist work that shows how bodies are constructed through a variety of public and private spaces.

Bodies are surfaces of social and cultural inscription, house people's identity, are sites of pleasure and pain, are public and private, have permeable boundaries, and are material, discursive, and psychical. Although our bodies make a difference to the experience of places, we might also think of bodies and spaces as mutually constituted. Instead of thinking about space and place as preexisting sites where bodily performances occur, some studies have argued that bodily performances themselves constitute or reproduce space and place. Geographers have looked at the way in which bodies are gendered, sexualized, racialized, aged, and so on by, for example, workplaces, schools, leisure spaces, homes, suburbs, cities, and nations.