Body

What Can a Body Do?

Everyone has one. Some people like theirs, but many don't. They have a definite use-by-date, and once they're expired, that's it. What is it about the body that makes it a source of anxiety and pleasure, pain and life? If we all basically have the same body components, how are bodies marked so as to make us different, excluded, accepted, liked, or reviled? Is the body a biological fact of life or the most basic element in all forms of sociality? These are some of the questions that might interest a sociology of the body.

For all its evident appeal, as an object of social science research, the body has only relatively recently emerged as discrete site of study. This is not to say that the body and bodies, collective or individual, have not been important to sociology, but as an entity or phenomenon, the body has tended to be subsumed within the study of larger systems and abstractions: class, gender, health, sexuality, work, and so on. In general, it is feminism that moved the body to the fore, although again the study of the body tended to be via the examination of various systems of exploitation. Much of feminism's interest in the body was to establish a distinction between culture and biology. Against the idea that “biology is destiny,” the body was focused on as a site of cultural inscription and therefore of potential social change.

One of the most interesting insights to have recently emerged is that no one really knows the limits of the body's capacities. This thought originally came from Spinoza, a seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher. It has returned to shake up some of the claims that have been made about the body. To review the dominant ways in which the body has been studied, we can group different approaches under the broad thematics of, on one hand, the body as inscription of power, and on the other, the body as screen upon which the social is projected. Moving beyond these positions, we will also consider how the study of the body is uniquely placed to provide insights into the differences and similarities of our species. As such, the body might provide the basis of a truly expansive project: a sociology of humanity.

Beyond “Docile Bodies”: Power and Inscription

In the 1970s, following the publication in English of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1977), the body became associated with the study of mechanisms of power. A new perspective was introduced into Anglo-American social sciences. This had as its cornerstone the notion of power as all encompassing, seen most clearly in the idea of “docile bodies.” In Foucault's conceptualisation, power was no longer seen as something wielded by distinct groups. Previous ideas about power had tended to be influenced by different forms of Marxism. The most prevalent at the time, at least in the areas that were to turn to the body, was a form of structural Marxism introduced by Louis Althusser's (1971) influential theory about ideological state apparatuses. Centrally concerned with how power permeated into society and how individuals were rendered subjects of ideology, Althusser made the crucial distinction between [Page 63]power wielded through repression and violence, and power in terms of what he called “ideological state apparatuses.” He argued that violent repression was quite rare in capitalist societies and that the real work of ideology was accomplished through education, the family, law, and the media or culture.

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