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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Even though we often think of bodies as natural and given, or else as freely plastic objects, bodies are both constructed and fundamental to our sense of self.
This book investigates the body as an essential vector of inequality, shaped by institutions, interaction and culture, and how in turn it contributes to partly modify them. Sassatelli and Ghigi show how the process of embodiment is at the same time naturalized and contested, particularly evident in the case of gender. Drawing on classical sociological research about modernity and contemporary studies that emphasize intersectionality, the book looks at how the gendered body has been conceptualized with special attention to body politics, the power of appearance and the representation of embodied identity. It also considers the interplay between body, sex and sexuality and the way gendered bodies intersect with other dimensions of social inequality such as race, age, class and disability.
This exploration of the rich field of sociological inquiry into the gendered body will be an invaluable read for all seeking to understand gender, sexuality and embodiment in contemporary society.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Embodying Gender
1 The Social Body
1. Embodiment, nature and culture
The social construction of the body
2. The body in the rise of Western modernity
Gender and the rise of consumer culture
3. Gender and social relations
Gendering the body
Notes
2 Gendered Bodies and Subjectivity
1. Interaction and the construction of gender
The contradictions of living with the natural yet social body
A feminist reading of Goffman and the body in interaction
2. Bodies, feelings and emotional life
The home, the market and emotional labour
3. From body projects to habitus
Body projects and compulsion to control the body
Habitus and inequality carved in the body
Notes
3 Body Politics
1. Power and the gendering of bodies
Biopolitics, discipline and power
Sex and gender in feminist thinking
Producing gendered bodies
2. Constructing bodies as distinct and unequal
3. The (dis)empowering of female experience
Reproduction and pregnancy
The management of female sexuality
Gender violence and rape
Challenging the veil, the veil as a challenge
Notes
4 Gender, Sex and Sexuality
1. Disarticulating sex and gender: from Agnes to Herculine
2. Between the genders, between the sexes
The role of medicine in defining and shaping sex
Challenging the gender and sex binary outside medicine
The plastic body and the persistent power of the binary
3. Sexuality and gender identities
Heterosexuality, biological determinism and gender inequality
Social interaction and sexual roles
Notes
5 Intersectional Experiences and Identities
1. Gender and the body across the life course
Denaturalizing the lifespan: the social construction of generations and identity
Childhood, adolescent bodies and the formation of gendered identities
Old age and death as failures of the individual body project
2. The intersectionality of bodily labels
At the intersection of axes: the case of eating disorders
3. Gender and sexuality through intersectional lenses
Sexual development and maturity: from puberty to menopause
Embodied sexual otherness
The power to negotiate
The challenges of disability
Notes
6 The Power of Appearances
1. Gender, beauty and power
Female beautification and status
Feminist interpretations of beauty
Body conforming and sense of self
Men’s bodies in patriarchy
2. The medicalization of ugliness
Cosmetic surgery
3. Body management: from fitness to body art
Body art
Notes
7 Visualizing Gendered Bodies
1. The male gaze
An intersectional lens
2. Gendered bodies in advertising
Displaying gender differences and hierarchies
Towards a new femininity
3. Visions of gender in everyday images
Subtle stereotypes
Body positivity and representation
Ambivalences
Postfeminist turns and continued exclusions
Gender-neutral displays
Notes
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Body and Gender
Sociological Perspectives
Roberta Sassatelli
Rossella Ghigi
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Roberta Sassatelli & Rossella Ghigi 2024
The right of Roberta Sassatelli & Rossella Ghigi to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2024 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5007-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5008-1(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023936948
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Writing this book has been a laborious pleasure, fuelled by many years of research and teaching as well as continuous fertile exchange between ourselves. We would like to thank all those who have provided help and inspiration for the writing of this book. Several friends and colleagues have read and commented on earlier drafts of the manuscript and offered advice and suggestions. In particular, we would like to thank Elia Arfini and Monica Greco for detailed observations on some chapters and sections of the book. We also would like to express our gratitude to Jonathan Skerrett at Polity for his valuable editing and sustained encouragement and to Karina Jákupsdóttir who provided helpful assistance during the publishing process. The limits of the book are ours alone, but the support and suggestions we have received remain priceless.
Introduction: Embodying Gender
Bodies are constructed. They take on form as our lives and relations develop, we model them actively in our everyday choices, while institutions mould them by their demands, whether tacit or overbearing. Yet our bodies also strike us as an essential given, something unchosen preceding us, something ‘natural’, prior to human will or decision. On closer inspection, however, that natural body turns out to be made up of many conflicting truths, played out in our bodily practices and social relations. Thus when, in some trepidation, we scan our medical tests, the values may read like so many obscure signals needing a professional to interpret them, whereas how we feel tells us how we are, and how we look will convey to other people the image of what we are. Medical know-how, embodied feelings, our management of impressions are, alike, truths about our body linking to various dimensions of social existence: interaction, culture, institutions. Navigating through constructionist approaches from classic to contemporary sociology, this book will investigate how the body is moulded by all these dimensions and how in turn it contributes to modify them.
This is not to claim there is no materiality situated in time and space. Yet we only have access to materiality insofar as we are social beings, and society inevitably unfolds through the work we do on our bodies. Interaction, culture and institutions demand that different individuals show emotions in different ways according to the situation, or expect differing degrees of body control, or again use differentiated and highly normative codes to represent body images. In so doing, society makes some processes meaningful and others trite, some experiences imbued with authenticity and difference and others banal or indistinguishable. To our human species materiality is never immediate nor inert. Phenomenologically, it exists and becomes active insofar as we understand and feel it, but our understanding and feeling are mired in social practices. The human being is a social and political animal right to the inner depths of its bodily experience. Even when on our own, face to face with our own material being, we observe it with eyes that culture has fashioned for us, we move in ways we have absorbed in the ordinary rounds of our existence, and we feel by emotional codes that we have been learning since the first day of our lives. By its gestures, movements and make-up, our body acts upon and reflects the pattern our life has taken, stamped in its turn by the web of relations in which we are immersed.
The body thus stands as not just a legitimate, but a necessary object of sociological analysis. As the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962 [1945]) points out, the body’s anatomical organization leaves a great deal of scope open; the way it is used is not something laid down once and for all; its meanings and reactions always need interpreting. For humans one cannot imagine a bedrock of natural behaviour onto which a social or cultural superstructure then gets grafted. Nature and culture are inextricably bound up in our species. One might say that the body’s various ways of deployment are both natural – in being made possible by physiological mechanisms – and social – in that they are arbitrary and conventional.
The kind of approach we shall be adopting – sociological yet also materialistic, phenomenological and critical – investigates the social construction of the body or embodiment in its concrete, historically situated, culturally defined processes. Considering the body as a social construct does not mean that the individual or subject can act upon it at will. Nor that it can be reduced to a text. What it does mean is that embodied subjects living in space and time come about in a diverse, unequal, social manner. They play their part in the social world by consolidating or altering the practical regulations and classification schemas that initially defined their embodied subjectivity. When we come to look at certain features of embodiment as a social process, we shall see that it is scalar, circular, active, incessant and contested.
Scalar
, in that our bodies are forged by social relations at different scales pertaining to appearance and posture, ability and limitations, emotions and physique itself.
Circular
, since in being human we tend to incorporate the differences fostered by interaction, culture and institutions and then act upon those differences beginning with our embodied feelings and experiences.
Active
, because we are fully the subjects of that embodiment – hence not just bound by the power of social organization and classification, but capable of a subjective role upon our own skins when it comes to reproducing, altering or defying the social norms.
Incessant
, since we are not only constantly constructing our body for ourselves and others, but also because it is itself incapable of playing dumb: it will speak for us even when we don’t seem to be saying anything.
Contested
, given that our own ways of experiencing our body are fundamental, if tacit, modes of expressing our identities which in turn are set within hierarchical systems allowing for power and conflict.
A crucial dimension of embodiment is gender. In this book we shall be using gender to reveal the features of embodiment as a social process. The richness of a focus on the embodiment of gender is twofold: it both illuminates the process of embodiment, and it also helps in understanding the deep workings of gender differences, shedding light on invisible hierarchies and power effects in social interaction, culture and institutions that unmask the neutrality of subjectivity. In so doing, we will rely extensively on feminist studies of the past fifty years.
We thus will focus on the phenomenon of naturalization that makes gender both taken-for-granted and powerful. One small experiment suffices: close your eyes and imagine a human body. You may have succeeded in imagining one without a specific race or age, but is it possible to imagine one that is not identifiable with a sexual category? In everyday life, whenever we fill in a form, need a lavatory or even are working out on a treadmill, our eye will be caught, implicitly or explicitly, by an image referring to gender. The boxes on a standard form, the symbols on the toilet doors, the stylized body on a fitness machine depict a human shape that is posited as fundamentally and naturally gendered. Such signs may typically be identifiably male or female, or apparently neuter (tending to take the male to represent the species); or again other categories may be admitted, and left to us to specify, in recognition of the idea that gender identity may nowadays be multiple. But bodies only exist when they measure up to the cultural categorizations of ‘female’ or ‘male’, or such other sexual categories as a society may define. A gender approach to the social construction of the body thus leaves room for the gamut of forms in which gender is expressed, and at the same time highlights its filigree character, now visible, now hidden, in relationships and social structures. As we shall see, then, being a man or a woman is not to do with a natural quality but a constantly enacted taking place or positioning: via the slightest gesture of interaction, by long-established meanings in culture, and according to role and function at an institutional level. Feminist thought and gender studies first challenged the idea that the different social conditions of men and women were based on their biology. They thereby foregrounded the issue of the social construction of the body, although with a variety of different emphases, each pondering on a fundamental question: where does nature end and where does culture begin? In other words, to what extent are the differences (and, as we shall see, the inequalities) between men and women down to biological bodies, and how much does society not only elaborate the biological body but contribute to creating it?
As we shall see in the first chapter, considering the body as socially constructed and embodiment as a social process opens the way to a reappraisal of many aspects of social life. Western modernity itself is not just about large institutions and broad social dynamics, but also about how our gendered bodies have been forged and transformed by the process of rationalization. Historically, body rationalization has been most evident in the sphere of production which has been dominated by men, while women have often been confined to the domain of consumption and reproduction. Raewyn Connell (2021), one of the authors who inform this book, indeed defines gender as a practice of constant positioning within the ‘reproductive arena’ – that is, the field in which embodied individuals take their stand according to their relation to human reproduction. So, in this perspective gender is a ‘doing’ (West & Zimmerman 1987) and intersects other social forms of being in the body, such as race, class and age, to realize a complex process of embodiment which produces a multifaceted landscape of embodied difference and inequality (West & Ferstermaker 1995). As Judith Lorber (2021) underlines in her The New Gender Paradox, we are now witnessing both the fragmentation of the gender binary and its persistence. Gender is not as such a binary status. However, despite the multiplicity of intersections and the fragmentation of gender at individual level, at the social level, in legal arrangements and social practices, representations and institutions, the contemporary Western world is still in many ways a bi-gendered world.
Gender has to do with the body and is the source of what Colette Guillaumin (1993, 41; see also 2016 [1992]) called the ‘fabrication of the sexed body’. This highlights the work of making the body sexed and thus the fact that the ongoing process of subjects becoming embodied sorts them into sexual categories that are accorded to unequal, typically (and normatively) binary and hierarchically arranged gender roles. This is reflected and reflects dominant embodied subjectivities that appear as dependent on such categorization, which is thereby naturalized: thus, in Western culture, on the one hand we find female bodies that take care, look on fondly, caress and make room for other bodies, while, on the other hand, we have male bodies expecting room and attention, and exhibiting strength, command and action.
Gendered bodies are constructed first of all in interaction: in the countless rituals of everyday life, it is chiefly through our bodies, their demeanour, appearance and capacity to fit in or stand out, that we build our sense of self, our subjectivity. As we shall see in the second chapter, there arises the basic question of the individuals’ room for manoeuvre, their capacity and desire to work on their bodies. Anthony Giddens (1991) showed how, in Western societies, gradually over the late modern age the body became a project on which individuals act, reflexively, constructing an identity for themselves and for other people. Yet the details of everyday ceremonies as coded by gender (Goffman 1963; 1982 [1967]; 2010 [1971]) and the habitual manners of our gendered bodies (Bourdieu 1990 [1980]; 2001 [1998]) represent elements which both allow and limit the expression of self in everyday life. Thus, reflexive self-constitution is gendered and works on whatever has already been set up for us in daily interaction and on the conventions we have unreflexively embodied. The result is that we are given differentiated access to body projects, especially those rated highest by our social world.
Such reflexivity is therefore bounded, above all by the gender order, which transpires in even greater clarity if we focus on the emotions, associated as they so typically are with corporeality. A framework in which to consider emotions as accessible to sociological study has been provided by Arlie Russell Hochschild (2003). Hochschild focused on the constant daily work that goes into making us sentient selves. We will see that what appears as deeply engrained in embodied subjectivity is in fact socially mediated and that different feeling rules apply to men and to women. We will also see how both men and women work on their feelings, bolstering or at times altering the forms in which one may appropriately experience and express feeling, and in so doing abide by, reproduce and modify gender relations.
Gender relations are in turn enmeshed with power. Power works not just on the embodied subject, sorting it into categories, but also through it, via its feeling, desires and acts in the social world. Our bodies are never inert or neutral, they are constantly caught in power relations. As we shall see in the third chapter, bodies are political. Body and power are intimately connected, and inequality in daily life is played out on bodies. They bear the marks of hierarchical classification that is taken for granted: they are moulded, as Michel Foucault (1977 [1975]; 1978 [1976]) argues, by many disciplinary devices making them flesh to redeem, a workforce to employ, or organisms to heal. Foucault played a key role in highlighting some of the power mechanisms in the modern world and the development of a form of power that he called ‘biopolitics’. Ranging from the rules for artificial insemination and assisted death, to policies favouring families with children or closing frontiers to migrants, biopolitics has a direct impact on life, delimits its range of action, moulds skills, forges desires, including the most intimate such as sexuality.
Yet Foucault left gender in the half-light, skating over the specific place of women in sexual classification and biopolitical dynamics. His toolbox would thus subsequently be used by feminist studies which have revealed that what on the face of it seems an innocuous, obvious, even liberating difference actually gets translated into a far more problematic form of inequality. Feminist authors as diverse as Judith Butler (1993; 2006 [1990]), Elizabeth Grosz (1994) and Catharine MacKinnon (1987; 1989; 1993) have pointed to the disproportionate weight of society on women’s bodies. A certain kind of masculinity, that Connell (1987; 2005a) aptly called ‘hegemonic’, hogs the central role and tends to downgrade both femininity in its various forms and the many other ways of being a man. The process of gendered embodiment is hence not just relational – femininity and masculinity being continually correlating – but also hierarchized. Feminist thought has endeavoured to uncover such hierarchies and has explored the possibilities of resistance which female bodies and bodily practices may harbour for female subjectivity.
As we have seen, in everyday life gender is often understood as predicated upon sex categorization, and yet the gender order is at the basis of such categorization. Sex and gender are further articulated on sexuality. The fourth chapter will investigate how gender differences relate both to sexual categorization and its naturalization, and to a particular organization of sexuality and erotic attraction. We start with Harold Garfinkel’s (1999 [1967]) study of Agnes, the first transgender person to be studied sociologically, and we consider its importance in establishing a constructivist reading of sex and gender. This in turn opens the space for a sociological analysis of sexuality. The work on transgender and intersex subjectivities has been important to stress that, in considering gender, sex and sexuality, we have to move from a psychologizing attitude, concerned with what is inside people, to relations and the way they unfold in interaction, culture and institutions. Such an approach is also fundamental to consider heterosexuality as a normative frame which is increasingly put into question by the diffusion of alternative ways of experiencing and embodying sexuality. Heterosexuality has long been taken for granted and underexplored in sociology, while we now understand how important it is to shed light on sexual experiences and embodiment and their varieties.
Sex, gender and sexuality intersect other important aspects of corporeality. Corporeality can be defined along vertical and horizontal axes, as it were. Bodies are typically sorted vertically, distinguishing generations and various stages of life, from childhood to old age and at the same time they are sorted horizontally by gender, sex, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class and disability. Such categories are by no means independent from one another, nor are they neutral with respect to power: embodied differences are caught in intersecting systems of privilege and domination which transform them into inequalities.
The coming together of many dimensions of inequality can be properly understood through the concept of ‘intersectionality’. In its original version proposed by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989), this notion was developed to consider how interwoven systems of power are reflected in different elements of subjectivity – especially gender and race – and affect those who are most marginalized in society, combining to perpetuate various forms of discrimination and privilege. All these differences among and in bodies indeed become inequalities. That is, they are assigned a basic value and weight in terms of power, importance and esteem. In the fifth chapter, many examples applying the intersectional approach to the study of embodiment will help to demonstrate how the political side of gender works out in all its concrete details, conditioned by factors of age, race, social class and sexual orientation, and also determined by generation, age and lifetime experience. Sexuality will be a clear example of a domain where such dynamics are deployed.
Corporeality is constructed in depth, by our work on the emotions and desires, and on the surface, by work on appearance. While, as we have suggested, spotlighting the emotions leads us to explore how what is seemingly most deep-seated in the body gets socially moulded, the sixth chapter will explore the surface of the body and how individuals, women above all, are induced to work upon it. The social pressures to shape one’s own appearance and the issue about where power really lies, whether in the looked-at subject or in the famous ‘eye of the beholder’, have been studied by sociologists since the beginning of the discipline. In the case of female beauty, those dynamics are further interwoven with the codes of recognition of female identity itself. We will then revert more directly to the body politics issue from a feminist angle, exploring the politics of appearances. The well-known observations by a variety of authors such as Susan Bordo (2003 [1993]), Catherine Hakim (2010) and Naomi Wolf (2002 [1990]) will help us through an analysis of contemporary ways of embodying, presenting and managing beauty and ugliness which stress powerful asymmetries between masculinity and femininity. Our body projects – ranging from the practices of daily consumerism such as make-up and fitness, to more invasive and extraordinary acts of alteration such as cosmetic surgery or body art – are based on ideals of beauty, degrees of reflexivity and levels of cogency that are heavily marked by gender. The issue, we shall see, is closely bound up with the whole construction of female identity in that, as many authors have pointed out, a woman’s body if unkempt is the less feminine, while nothing similar applies to a man.
A perspective on bodily appearances leads us to consider body representation. How far culture weighs on the body is perhaps most sharply recognized if we look closely at how the body is represented. In studying the various ways bodies are depicted we gain a clearer idea of how cultural products – from the noble peaks of art down to the prosaic business of marketing goods – play their part in putting forward ideals of masculinity and femininity that speak to our gendered ways of inhabiting the body and show us how to move, what expressions to assume, how to accost other people. In the final chapter we will go into the way the gendered body is staged in cultural products, especially those of a visual nature. From the classic depiction of the female nude in Western figurative art, and likewise from women in classic Hollywood cinema, there turns out to be a masculine gaze which, as Laura Mulvey (1989 [1975]) pointed out, casts women in the passive, decorative camp, whilst eroticizing them voyeuristically. The media often reproduce the visual codes in extreme form, as Erving Goffman (1979) wrote regarding commercial messages where gender features are hyper-ritualized. While we still find commodities being advertised by pictures of docile, decorative and playful female bodies or active, dominant, serious-looking male bodies, there is a growing trend for images subverting conventional gender images, picking up feminist ideas and tailoring them commercially to consumer demand.
Indeed, under the pressure of feminist consciousness and a shifting gender order, Kirsten Kohrs and Rosalind Gill (2021) have documented the development of a ‘confident appearing’ which is particularly appealing to a white middle-class audience of self-conscious women. The way bodies are gendered and represented in the media is a decisive battlefield to reflect, reinforce and continuously reorganize our perceptions of embodiment. Developing on the backdrop of the neoliberal embracing of the reflexive investment of the body as a project, current trends in visual representation intensify the monitoring and disciplining of bodies, especially the female ones, despite todays’ growing rhetoric on body positivity and free expression of our ‘true self’ through the body.
All in all, the literature on bodies and gender in sociology is now vast and it embraces many aspects of our social experience. We wanted to offer a taste of some fundamental theoretical contributions by digging into some of the texts that influenced a constructivist thinking on the body, but we also wanted to show the richness of the empirical research on the body and gender that is unfolding before our eyes. We are dealing with concepts and realities in transition, both because bodies are increasingly scrutinized and because gender is continuously being remade and questioned. In this book we have endeavoured to offer a primer to such a complex problematic.
Of course, like all books, this one too has limitations. First of all, our choice to give ample space to the classical authors of our discipline, sociology, has inevitably led to treating many white, Western, heterosexual male authors. Our aim was precisely to allow studies on the body and gender dialogue with classical sociological literature on the body, since in our opinion this dialogue is extremely fertile for both fields of knowledge. As we teach and research bodies and gender, we are convinced that the gender (and intersectional) perspective cannot be neglected by those in the field of general sociology, and vice versa that the awareness of the androcentrism and ethnocentrism of the discipline should not lead those in gender and feminist studies to throw the baby out with the bathwater: their perspective can be deepened by learning what the classics of our discipline have to teach us about social processes.
The second limit derives from the first. We are very aware that the reference literature is unbalanced to Western production (classics and feminist sociologies inspired by classics) and to the contexts of the Global North. We will try to underline, again from an intersectional perspective, the factors of inequality that cross Western societies but in the awareness that the greatest inequality is between the Global North and the Global South. Despite the forceful critique of sociology that postcolonial theory contains, we agree with those authors who suggest that the two can productively interact (Go 2013). And we believe that this interaction does not entail only studying non-Western societies and colonialism, but rather adopting a theoretical approach and ‘ontology that emphasizes the interactional constitution of social units, processes, and practices across space’ (ibid., 28). Of course, we had to make reductions in complexity and choose a single focus, which is gender and embodiment, from classic authors in sociology to contemporary intersectional research in Western societies. Nevertheless, we try to adopt what we think is particularly precious in the postcolonial posture, the capacity to question received frames and classification at the roots of the often taken-for-granted power imbalances which are either blind to difference as specificity or naturalize it as inequality. We look at Western modernity and its impact on embodiment trying to provincialize our glance: all in all, many of the critiques that postcolonial thought levels at classical sociologists (first of all, their Eurocentric universalism and their portraying non-Western societies as a ‘generalized “other”’) has much in common with both the post-structuralist critique of subjectivity and with the feminist critique of androcentric universalism as well as standpoint epistemology, which inspires this book.
Third, we have made choices between authors and themes, inevitably neglecting many: the aim is not to reduce the text to a pure list of names and topics, but to make it understood, by deepening some examples from empirical research, especially ethnographic, of how the body and gender are mutually constructed, marking the first with the asymmetries of the second, and the second with the materiality of the first.
Looking at bodies and embodiment we have chosen to concentrate on gender since it is a fundamental experience which remains crucial for the constitution of embodied subjectivity, intersects with other fundamental dimensions of social differentiation such as race, class and age, and traverses both everyday experience and social institutions. Gender differences have themselves become the object of much reflection in the social sciences and actions in politics and public life. This has greatly contributed to a continuous evolution of the way we live the gendered body. A call to go beyond gender is becoming significant in our societies as the gender binary is simultaneously under dispute and persistent. We reckon that in contemporary Western society, we still cannot easily think of a body without assigning it a gender. In most social and cultural settings gender, and its dichotomous organization, is the prime way of differentiating bodies. As mentioned, we will argue that such differentiation brings with itself the badges of hierarchy. Gender brands bodies as difference; social dynamics turn difference into inequality. Our view of the sociology of the body inclines us to explore such dynamics. We believe that a gender approach to embodiment, tracing the fast evolution, mutual construction and incessant interweaving of masculinity and femininity as they take bodily form, will enable us to capture the whole social fabric in its deeper as well as its apparently shallower facets, bringing to light conflicts, ambivalences and opportunities.
1The Social Body
Hailed as ‘the Sistine Chapel of the ancients’, in 2019 a formidable collection of prehistoric rock art was discovered in Colombia in the midst of the Amazonian rainforest. One of the most captivating traces of the earliest humans to have come down to us is indeed prehistoric graffiti. These first visual representations of the body give a lively and expressive glimpse of our ancestors’ everyday experience. The simple outlines reveal a human body that appears as fully socialized, acting in scenes that depict the organization of everyday life. The emphasis is on certain physical properties, linked to the body’s biological endowment, of course, but properties socially acquired: thus, what we sometimes call primitive art is all arms and legs since those are the body parts chiefly being used in a task of vital importance for those societies. Among those first populations we know of, posing triumphant beside a large mammal that one was hoping to bring home for oneself and one’s clan served as an auspicious ritual that naturalized the body depicted. We gaze at these images, and the human body takes on a neutral, universal appearance, though in point of fact it is a hunter or warrior: a man rather than a woman, adult but not elderly, forged by a specific culture and its practices and wearing headgear and decorations to denote his rank in it.
As the centuries passed, society’s impact on bodies grew above all because societies became more complex: a whole range of material developments called for manual skills, enhancing some of our physical powers and atrophying others. As the ability of people to communicate grew and diversified, we became more subtle in how we presented our body and read other people through their physical attributes. Techniques of representation, manipulation and control multiplied, making bodies a mobile frontier of knowledge, experience and power. The just over eight billion human beings now inhabiting our planet lead widely diverse lives and have diverse access to technology increasingly enabling people to see, check and tweak their bodies the way they wish, or as their social life requires. Tomorrow’s archaeologist will be faced with a gamut of often competing representations designed to fix today’s truth about the body.
In today’s societies of the so-called Global North – basically the post-industrial West steeped in capitalist consumerism – more and more objects are being bought and used to decorate and care for the body, which is at the same time expected to respond submissively to the demands of work and serve as an authentic reservoir of experience and emotion. Ever since the Second World War, and especially for the last three decades, this increasingly central role of the body and the care we lavish on it has coincided with sociology’s flourishing attention to bodies and embodiment as socially-mediated processes (Adelman & Ruggi 2016; Blackman 2021; Boero & Manson 2020; Burkitt 1999; Cregan 2006; Featherstone, Hepworth & Turner 1991; Fraser & Greco 2004; Howson 2013; Moore & Kosut 2010; Moore & Lorber 2011; Shilling 2012; 2016; Thomas 2013; Turner 2008). Sociology, in short, has taken stock of the infinite scope that body culture and body modification provide as an expression of our acts and desires. In societies that are incessantly, blatantly, self-reflexively attentive to the body, sociology above all – the branch of knowledge that reflects on how we live together – could not fail to notice that human bodies are moulded by social organization, the practices that it structures and the meanings it sustains. Conversely, embodied subjects with their lived experience of their own embodied subjectivity contribute to define the limits and possibilities of social organization.
This first chapter focuses on the co-constitution of bodies and society, something that often goes under the rubric of the social construction of the body. We will complicate the nature/culture divide, showing that the body – which may seem like a biological given – is in fact always socialized, experienced and understood in a social context. We will see this in relation to the evolving understanding of the body in the West, which has been shaped by the development of modernity and capitalism. We will see how the body has assumed a central importance in social organization and how the world of consumerism and mass consumption has increased the opportunities and pressures to present our bodies to the world. The production/consumption divide has historically been articulated by and mapped onto gender. Gender has been a fundamental category for figuring out bodies and society: drawing on the work of, among others, Raewyn Connell and Colette Guillaumin, we will explore how its understanding helps us to define the contours of embodiment. The gender approach to embodiment which we introduce in this chapter will allow us, throughout the book, to consider issues of power and the way embodied subjects collaborate in the reproduction (or otherwise) of the social structure through their very bodily experiences and practices.
1. Embodiment, nature and culture
When we claim that the human body is socially constructed, we suggest that it is primarily experienced and managed in ways that differ from culture to culture and epoch to epoch. To consider the human body as mediated by society implies a recognition that, flesh and blood though it manifestly is, it cannot be reduced to a brute fact unconditioned by the social environment in which it grows, acts and interacts. What we experience as its characteristics varies according to the changing forms of social organization and classification.
As anthropology has shown, different cultures inculcate differing notions of person, the relation between person and body, between human body and nature, between the body and its parts, and so on – differing notions that descend from different forms of social organization and correspond to equally distinct forms of individual experience (Mascia-Lees 2011). Traditionally, Western thought separated the body’s material side from intangible thought and culture. It decreed a fundamental rift between what pertains to ‘nature’ and to ‘culture’, casting the body in the former domain. From ancient times, the body was separated from the soul (Ferguson 2000; Judovitz 2001; Ruberg 2020). Gradually, the body ceased to be explained in terms of myth or a circular animistic view of nature in favour of maps of the body based on the anatomy and physiology of its parts. From the primitive symbolic ambivalence of the body, whereby it was seen as belonging to a cosmic order preventing it from being recognized as an isolated singularity, we arrived at a society of individuals where the individual body, not the social group, is the insurmountable boundary for each and every one of us. The human mind – socialized, rational, detached, the organ of knowledge and truth – came more and more to be placed at one pole of a pair of opposites, the other being the body, the natural seat of desire, pleasure, suffering and indiscipline.
The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes picked up on the Platonic-Christian dualism of body and soul, stripping away the mythical and religious overtones and casting the body once more as res extensa, an expression of animal rather than human nature. In the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the body is objectified on a par with the outside world, and hence must be governed by the same laws of physics. But it was modern Western science, modern medicine in particular, that played the greatest part in cementing the objective status of the body, which it reduced to a mere biological effigy (Turner 2008). The scientific view of the body, which only admits physical and chemical relations that can be exactly calculated, has become our reality, such that we routinely measure our subjective experience by counting calories and measuring temperatures: these are now largely considered as the objective indexes the condition and internal processes of our body.
Thus, the typical modern Western view of the body rested on a specific conception of the human being: separate from the cosmos, from other people, and from its own body (Bordo 2003 [1993]). Science, religion and even our domestic habits, the rules of etiquette or the educational values instilled in school, became so many ways of culturally socializing people into this understanding of the body and prescribed ways of experiencing our bodies, even at the most personal and intimate level, such as pain and pleasure.
Social science serves to uncover the cultural frames by which these attitudes are socially mediated. In an influential sociological study conducted at an American hospital, Mark Zborowski (1969) showed how different ethnic groups had a different reaction to pain. Italians, Jews and third-generation Americans had a quite dissimilar way of experiencing pain: the specific cultural frameworks by which they faced illness and physical suffering made their experience of pain and how to cope with it well-nigh impossible to compare. Elaine Denny (2018) explores the structural and interpretive perspectives on pain to challenge the objectivity of the biomedical approach, testifying to variations across gender, ethnicity, culture, age and disability. Yet in medical contexts attempts at measuring pain by the use of pain scales is widespread, resulting in an experience of marginalization which increases the pain of those whose pain does not fit a clear medical diagnosis.1
Pleasure, too, is an experience mediated by the social context which surrounds it and the significance we attach to it. Here the classic study is Howard Becker’s (1953) on marijuana smokers. Becker explained that to derive pleasure from the substance it is not enough to smoke it; you need to master a ritual approach to smoking, relishing it, describing and understanding its effects, handling it in a group situation, and so forth. Far from being instantly able to enjoy the experience, the youngsters that Becker studied were learning to appreciate it by trial and error via a proper social apprenticeship which gave them the tools, the taste buds and the language. Recent works support the case. Angela Jones’ (2020) Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Work Industry looks at the erotic webcam industry and at the way workers, called cam models, engage with the job. Pleasure is a fundamental element of camming, and it is constructed through the very experience of the interactive computer-mediated sex, which asks and allows freedoms that would not be possible in face-to-face interaction. The online context makes it easier for cam models to deliver embodied authenticity to clients, fostering a space in which workers have a greater potential to experience various pleasures. Jones demonstrates that pleasure itself reflects a complex interplay of social and cultural arrangements: ‘(f)or cam models, there is pleasure in simultaneously being good capitalist entrepreneurs and sex workers who also have orgasms for a living’ (ibid., 40).
Even death is by no means independent of social circumstance and takes specific forms in different ways in contemporary societies despite being linked to the materiality of the body (Walter 2020). Judith Lasker, Brenda Egolf and Stewart Wolf (1994) showed, for instance, that the rate of deaths by heart attack will tend to vary according to the degree of social cohesion. At Loseto, a small town in Pennsylvania inhabited by a compact community of Italian Americans, the heart attack index long remained about half that of the rest of the country. What protected that community from heart attack was not diet or physical exercise, but the town’s close social cohesion: attendance at the local church was keenly kept up, as were family links and an extremely active community life. Leen Van Brussel and Nico Carpentier (2014) show how various aspects of dying, from the experience of life ending to management of the corpse, are experienced through negotiation of typically medicalized frames of understanding that nonetheless converge into a precise image of a good death, connected to values such as independence, control and awareness (see chapter 5).
Placed as it is on the uncertain boundary between the social and biological sciences, the body or, better, embodiment is first of all a set of processes, whose boundaries are never set once and for all but are continually constructed in ongoing practices, through institutions and objects, images and discourses, interaction and social relations. This is increasingly being recognized by fields as diverse as epigenetics, neuroscience, microbiology and immunology, where novel research is ‘making starkly visible how the assumption that a self is located in a bounded, unitary body is in fact … a naturalised legal and political fiction’ (Frost 2020, 4; see also Blackman 2016 and Rose 2013). Let us therefore look more closely at that constructivist position which views bodies as socially constructed.
The social construction of the body
In broad terms, the constructivist position has developed in two theoretical directions: one symbolic and communicative, the other practical and mimetic. In the first theoretical direction the body looks like a system of signs and symbols, a written text or surface to write upon. Anthropologist Mary Douglas (2003 [1973]) is a key figure in this tradition. Douglas showed that in many cultures the body acts as a system of natural symbols used to mean or communicate something else: the sick body stands for social malaise, the healthy body indicates moral uprightness, the confines of the body are social confines, its detritus is what our societies discard. No natural way of considering the body exists without also implying a social dimension: the individual body and the social body dialogue with one another in a constant interplay of symbolic reference. Hence, argues Douglas, investigating the individual’s experience of the body’s structure, margins and boundaries means we must look at the symbol constructed by the society to which that individual belongs: ‘(w)hat is being carved in human flesh is an image of society’ (Douglas 1984 [1966], 117; for a discussion, see Duschinsky, Schnall & Weiss 2016). The more intimately that experience is felt and the more expressive its message, the more eloquently it will reveal the structures of society itself, like in the case of individual disease which becomes a symbol of social disorder. As a set of symbols, the body is also a highly standardized means of individual expression, reflecting the cultural and social pressures bearing upon it.
In the second theoretical direction, the body is seen as the subject’s main vehicle for cultural development. Subjects are fleshed out by a process of embodiment: individuals’ materiality and disposition are moulded by social interaction and institutions and, circularly, via their embodied subjectivities, individuals take their place within society. In other words, the embodied subject finds its social being via physical techniques that reproduce differences and hierarchies (of gender, age, ethnic background, class and so on). This approach is a radical development of sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss’s suggestions in his classic essay on ‘techniques of the body’. Techniques of the body, writes Mauss (1973 [1934], 70), are ‘ways in which from society to society men [sic] know how to use their bodies’. The way we walk, sleep, feed, swim or laugh, wash ourselves or make love may seem spontaneous and somehow pre-social; but they change from culture to culture and between different groups within the same community. The norms that regulate the use of the body are deeply ingrained in individual subjectivities, but they are communal and are transmitted by learning and imitation. They are central to how we differently occupy the social space, something which will be picked up by Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1992 [1980]) in his reflections on embodiment and society (see chapter 2).
In all cultures different body features and practices are regulated more or less bindingly; they are thus classified, sorted and organized, often in such a way that what is dubbed as ‘natural’ acts as a prop or pedestal to an overall view of the world. We may be persuaded by the thought that certain tribal societies’ ideas of sickness – for example, that it is punishment for some sacrilege – are symbolic constructions framing reality via cognitive tools devised by a particular organization of knowledge and social behaviour, yet we are much less prepared to accept that our own way of perceiving the body and looking after it is likewise a social construction. For instance, Western science and modern medicine are dominantly presented as universal forms of knowledge, objective in being tested by the rigorous procedures of an experimental method. Yet, sociologists have highlighted the potential perils of universalizing particular bodies and embodiments. For example, by understanding male physiology as universal, advancements in medicine and health care fail to consider how differences between male and female pathophysiology may mean that men’s and women’s bodies display symptoms of illness differently or respond differentially – qualitatively and quantitatively – to medications (Annandale 2021; Bird & Rieker 2012). It also appears counterintuitive to hold that pain and pleasure are not essential, pre-social data bearing upon us according to a biological substratum that determines and defines their basic characteristics, but as we have seen above, this has been challenged by social scientists.
In contemporary Western culture, where the body is regarded as ‘natural’, it is important to remember that the natural is perceived both as an objective datum – something that does not depend on us – and as a moral datum – something right or wrong, to the point where, in order to denigrate some action, we claim it is ‘against nature’. Thus ‘naturalness’ acts as the last frontier of people’s room for manoeuvre. We invoke nature when we want to terminate discussion by a self-evident, unfathomable value, when we want to come up with a definitive judgement or justification. The construction of a nature/culture divide is thereby an inherently political issue. Many studies have laid bare the politics of the natural, in science and culture (Franklin, Lury & Stacey 2000; Latour 1999). As Nigel Thrift (2000) has suggested, modern Western society is relying on ‘nature’ even more than previous societies. To ponder the boundary between nature and culture and see how they construct one another is particularly urgent in an age when technology is altering what is held to be natural about the body, the environmental crisis is making us reappraise the changing limits of human existence, and the experience of the pandemic has pointed to the interlocking of the limits of human embodiment and social organization.
2. The body in the rise of Western modernity
Despite being considered a natural, pre-social datum, the modern body in the capitalist West is primarily the fruit of a long historical development in which its appearance, postures and gestures gradually changed. In his seminal work on the process of civilization, Norbert Elias (2021 [1939]; see also Shilling 2012) demonstrated how, in the course of time, there arose a special ‘civilized’ body behaviour connected with certain forms of control or management of the body, apparently distancing humans from animals. The development of the modern State and of its monopoly on physical violence resulted in the spread of ‘pacified’ social spaces whereby the individual’s prime object of fear was no longer physical violence, but that of not giving the right impression. The ensuing conflict and cooperation dynamics between social classes led to the genesis of modern Western society, the catalyst of the ‘civilizing process’ being when the dominant nobility turned from being a class of knights into one of courtiers whose bodies were increasingly rationalized. Court life called for and produced different qualities from those needed in armed combat. One needed constant ‘reflection and forethought’, and ‘stricter regulation of one’s emotions’, because every greeting and every conversation has an importance far exceeding the single occurrence as they reveal one’s own status and contribute to social standing in the court. Courtiers learnt to foresee others’ acts from tiny signals in their interaction: in ‘psychologizing’ the other and guessing their motives by an increasingly subtle ability to read body language, they held their emotions in check as strategic counters to be played in the social dance; they pursued carefully contrived personal objectives by their ability to keep self-expression under tight control.
In the early modern age, the transformation of nobles into courtiers went with a steady rise in the middle classes, making it necessary for the former to distinguish themselves from the latter. Unconsciously felt ‘rejection of vulgarity’ permeated the conduct of the superior courtier class for whom, like ‘good taste’, it held ‘prestige value’. Later, in the nineteenth century, the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie gained the upper hand. Instead of the courtier’s skills, the bourgeoisie’s ‘code of conduct’ privileged professional competence, possession of money and, in general, customs prizing self-control above refinement, again communicated through rationalization of the body.
Given the colonial setting it operated in, the rationalized body was also uncompromisingly white. More and more, the Black body came to figure as a savage ‘other’, excessive in its prosperous form and at the same time sexualized as a deviant object (Gilroy 1993; hooks 1992; McClintock 1995; Stoler 1995; Strings 2019).2 As African people had been turned into commodities in the Atlantic slave trade, Western countries identified some specific bodily differences to justify their subjugation: dark skin was at the negative pole in the dichotomy of white and good versus black and evil, broad facial features stood for undue sexual appetites, unruliness or stupidity, muscularity cried for hard labour. Such rationalization of the body, which was first and foremost male, white and bourgeois, translated into a means of domination on a global scale. As Edward Said (2003 [1975], 207) showed in his influential work Orientalism, non-Western people featured en masse as the ‘Orient’, being variously ‘designated as backward, degenerated, uncivilized and retarded, the Orientals were viewed in a framework constructed out of biological determinism and moral-political admonishment’. The body in Western modernity has indeed been the central site for the process of racialization whereby bodily differences are naturalized and inscribed with social meaning and value. Even today, blackness is often constructed as being trapped within the web of nature while the white body has freedom to disembody itself, locating whiteness (and masculinity) firmly within modernity and rationalization. Black embodiment still arguably battles against what Frantz Fanon (2021 [1952]) suggested characterizes Black consciousness: that the Black body is objectified in representation, rather than perceived as the subject of experience (see chapters 5 and 7).
In its white, Western form, the ideal of the embodied subject of modernity corresponds to an increased rationalization that embraces all aspects of life and is imposed on all social classes. As argued by Chris Shilling (2012), classical sociology could not ignore completely the issue of the body. Sociology was born in the age of industrialization and thus it studied labouring bodies, how they were strictly moulded by the capitalist manufacturing system and the rise of Western rationalism. Typically, interest focused on the male body complying with the demands of capitalist production. Thus, Karl Marx thought work enabled human beings to fulfil themselves in harmony with nature, or else be alienated from themselves and their body, as in the capitalist manufacturing system. With the development of manufacturing, the labourer ‘performs one and the same operation’ all his life and converts ‘his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation’ (Marx 1977 [1887], 321). Factory discipline ‘exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity’ (ibid., 398). Capitalism thus steals corporeality of its meaning: the worker ‘only feels himself freely active in his animal function – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and dressing-up, etc.; in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal’ (ibid., 66). Marx proposes the idea that the boundaries between animality and humanity are socially constructed. This construction is, however, the result of domination and exploitation, something to be criticized on the basis of a truly human and natural way of being in one’s own body and deploying one’s own labour.
Max Weber (1992 [1922]) in turn considered the modern factory an example of rational conditioning of labour activities. As a result, he reckoned that the human body had become totally geared to the demands of work, a ‘function’, a ‘tool’: workers are stripped of their natural rhythm and completely recast to suit the work conditions, adjusting their bodies to the task for the creation of a better ‘economy of strength’. This rational conditioning of the body in factories forms part of the Western development of ‘discipline’ which has its roots in the early modern age. Seen as ‘uniform’, ‘exact’, ‘consistently rationalized’, ‘methodically trained’ conduct, discipline is found in any society whenever the masses need continuous management, but it especially developed via the bureaucratic and productive systems of modernity.
