Bodies

Why Bodies?

Scholars immersed in the study of bodies and embodied subjectivities are likely to presume that the reasons for their interest should be obvious. As one colleague put it humorously, ‘The body. Everybody’s got one. What more do you need to know!?’ Her observation was ironic on many levels. ‘The body’ has in fact occupied a central role in vast tracts of social theory; the meanings of bodies are deeply and continuously contested; the political stakes are high; and recent decades have witnessed a proliferation of literature on the subject. If anything, there is too much to know about bodies. Specifically, bodies are the ‘scale closest in’ to individual experience, the locus of our human encounter with the world, the place where people most immediately live and die; hence the site where the human geographies of the world begin and end.1

So it is crucial to ask all manner of questions about the body and to foreground such questions in academic enquiries.Thus,

The body matters enormously beyond the corridors of academia. The ethico-political status of bodies, their limits, and their rights are at stake in debates about human rights, as well as conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. The ways in which individual and collective bodies are understood also matters tremendously to geographies at broader scales of inquiry, such as the ‘national body’ and the ‘body politic’.

[Page 611]‘The body’ is a keyword – in Raymond Williams’s (1976) sense of the term – for thinking through all the big questions of human geography. So, rather than assume the impossible task of chronicling all of the ways that bodies have mattered in human geographies, this chapter has several more modest goals. In what follows, we outline some of the intellectual landscape most relevant to thinking about the geographies of bodies. We examine four angles on the literature, exploring in broad brushstrokes what we see as some key elements of feminist, postcolonial, Marxian, and poststructuralist approaches. Our emphasis is on the synergies, overlaps and points of difference across these four traditions. First, we offer a brief genealogy of feminist approaches. Choosing to foreground feminist work is not to argue that feminists began ‘the bodies conversation’, but, rather, to emphasize the importance of feminist work for pushing forward critical dialogue on geographies of gender, sexuality, and difference. Second, we focus on the contributions of post-colonial and critical race perspectives for understanding the production of different bodies and the embodiment of difference. Postcolonial theories emphasize the politics of history, inequality, and language, while critical race theories make vital advances in understanding processes of racialization through bodies. Third, we highlight the longstanding significance of Marxist perspectives (both broadly and determinedly conceived) for thinking about the laboring body, the production of value, inequality, waste, and crisis. Finally, our focus turns to poststructuralist concerns with a particular emphasis on Foucault’s work in dialogues with classically materialist renderings of ‘the body’.

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