The Body in Society E-Book

Alexandra Howson

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 492

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

In everyday life we are not, for the most part, actively conscious of our bodies or the bodies of others – we simply take them for granted. This new edition of a lively introduction to the sociology of the body examines what certain aspects of our bodies, such as the size, shape, smell and demeanour, reveal about the social organization of everyday life and how the body is crucial to the way we engage with the world and the people around us.

The human body is endowed with varied forms of social significance which sociology has addressed by asking questions such as: To what degree do individuals have control over their own bodies? What interest does the state have in regulating the human body? How significant is the body to the development and performance of the self in everyday life? What images of the body influence people’s expectations of themselves and others? Written in a clear and comprehensible way, The Body in Society introduces students to the key conceptual frameworks that help us to understand the social significance of the human body. This second edition has been thoroughly updated to take into account recent theories and debates and also includes enhanced pedagogical features. Using familiar examples from everyday life, such as diet and exercise regimes, personal hygiene, dress, displays of emotion, and control over bodily functions, coupled with examples from popular culture, the text has strong contemporary relevance and will strike a chord with all who read it.

This book will be essential reading for students taking courses on the body in sociology, anthropology, gender studies and cultural studies.

Leseprobe

The Body in Society

Second Edition

The Body in Society

An Introduction

Second Edition

Alexandra Howson

polity

Copyright © Alexandra Howson 2013

The right of Alexandra Howson to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First edition published in 2004 by Polity Press

This edition first published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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ISBN: 978-0-7456-6400-2

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1   The Body in Everyday Life

2   The Body, Gender and Sex

3   The Civilized Body

4   The Body in Consumer Culture

5   Regulating the Body

6   Vulnerable Bodies

Glossary

References

Index

Acknowledgements

The preparation of the first edition benefited enormously from the support of the late Mike Hepworth, as it did from students at the Universities of Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Abertay Dundee. In preparing the second edition, I am still indebted to Val Sheach Leith, who was generous with ideas in chapter 6, and to Julie Brownlie, whose work and example inspired me to keep moving forward. Thanks go to Holly Howson-Watt for bibliographic support and to Phoebe Kho of Point Forward for talking with me about her research on so-called intimate hygiene products. The fruits of our conversation are referred to in chapter 3. I am especially indebted to Claire Thain, who researched and retrieved sources for me. Her meticulous work made writing much easier.

It goes without saying that any deficiencies are my responsibility and that completing a book, even a second edition, requires a great deal of domestic and emotional support. Thank you, Richard, Holly and Jodie.

Introduction

Just for a moment, think about your own body. Where do you start? With your appearance (the spot that has materialized from nowhere, the bad hair day)? With its shape and size (the diet you keep meaning to go on)? With its aches, pains and reminders of daily physical struggles? How do you feel about your own body? Are there parts you would like to change? Do you feel the need to keep in shape, or try to be healthy? Are you more aware of your body at some times rather than others, such as when you trip over your feet in a crowded room, belch unexpectedly or break wind in company? How do you feel when you become aware of your body in these circumstances?

Now think about the bodies of other people. What seems most obvious to you is probably the appearance of others – how people look – but think a little harder and soon you will find that the bodies of other people become conspicuous in other ways – smell, size and shape, personal habits. Many of us expect people to smell ‘fresh’ or be devoid of odour, to refrain from touching us until we feel we know them sufficiently well and to demonstrate ‘good manners’ in public places. When you stop to think about it, it isn’t hard to become conscious of the human body, yet in much of our daily life we tend to take our own bodies and the bodies of others for granted. The intention of this book is to examine those taken-for-granted aspects of the human body and what they reveal about the social organization of everyday life.

The intention of this book is to examine taken-for-granted aspects of the human body and what they reveal about the social organization of everyday life.

Sociology and the body

It may not seem obvious why a sociologist should be interested in the human body. After all, sociology is a social science that is interested in rational actors (Weber), collective conscience (Durkheim) and social structure (Marx). Yet sociological analysis shows how important the human body is to the establishment and maintenance of social life. First, people experience and engage with the social world and with other people from an embodied perspective. Put another way, this means that the physical characteristics of our own bodies, our mannerisms, shape, size, habits and movements, contribute to and shape our perceptions and interactions with others in everyday life. Indeed, we see the world and operate within it from the particular vantage-point of our own body, and so embodiment* is a critical component of social interaction. Second, in order to be competent social actors, we need to be able to conduct ourselves in particular, socially prescribed ways. To secure the smooth flow of social interaction we have to pay particular attention to bodily conduct. In Western contexts such conduct typically refers to controlling the natural rhythms and urges of our bodies. When we are unable to do so, bodily betrayals, such as breaking wind, belching or expressing emotion inappropriately, break the flow of interaction, and we need to work hard to recover that flow and repair the damage to interaction.

Third, to present ourselves as competent social actors, we all engage in body work, activities and practices associated with grooming and hygiene, as well as forms of body maintenance such as exercise and dietary management. These activities help to maintain our bodies (according to scientific standards of nutrition, growth, development and hygiene) and, because of their aesthetic component, help us to present ourselves as particular kinds of people. Hence our participation in certain kinds of body work helps us to create an identity for ourselves. But such work is also morally charged. For instance, research suggests that physical appearance, body shape and size influence entry to all kinds of occupations. Put another way, labour markets favour particular kinds of bodies and, by implication, people. Finally, the rules of bodily conduct and norms of appearance that accompany everyday life are socially shaped, have changed over time and differ from culture to culture.

Issues, perspectives and conceptual frameworks

Although the sociology of the body is now a widely taught sub-field within the discipline, and there are many texts exclusively focused on the body in society and culture, this status is relatively recent. In the 1980s, there were very few sociological texts that focused exclusively on the human body. Yet it is not as though sociology was not interested in the human body. After all, medical sociology focused on health, illness and disease, all of which are located within and affect human bodies, and feminist sociology emphasized practices and processes that oppressed women by directly constraining or controlling aspects of embodiment (physical violence, for instance). Yet it was not the body that was the focus of this work, rather medical expertise or gender relations. So, this introduction sets out to do three things. First, it explains the relative neglect of the body in sociology (and other social science disciplines); second, it develops some of the reasons for this disregard; and third, the chapter provides a brief outline of the field of the body in sociology, including key issues, established perspectives and emerging conceptual frameworks.

The Cartesian body

Though sociology is supposed to be a discipline concerned with living, breathing human beings, at first glance sociological writing has rarely acknowledged the significance of the human body in explanations of the emergence of modernity (Freund 1988). Like other disciplines emerging in the nineteenth century, the historical and conceptual development of sociology has in large part been premised on the Cartesian legacy, which claims an ontological distinction between mind and body and privileges the former over the latter (Turner 1984). René Descartes developed what is regarded as a classic statement concerning the relationship between mind and body – a statement that reflected a widening belief – that personhood must be seen as distinct from the human body (see Hollis 1997 for an excellent and accessible philosophical introduction to Descartes). Descartes argued that, if we stop and reflect on ourselves, we cannot reduce our sense of who we are (or identity) to our bodies or to parts of our bodies. If our bodies were to be altered or damaged in some way, our sense of who we are would not disappear. This understanding of the self has three aspects. First, mind and body are considered distinct from each other; second, body is subordinate to mind, where the former resembles a machine or an object in which the self is located; and third, the mind is considered the source of thought through which the self is produced via cognitive rationalization and through which we view the world as external to us. In a Cartesian view of the world, though vision is privileged as the sense that connects the self to the physical and material environment in which the self is located, bodily sensation is not seen to influence or contaminate perception.

In a Cartesian view of the world, though vision is privileged as the sense that connects the self to the physical and material environment in which the self is located, bodily sensation is not seen to influence or contaminate perception.

This philosophical dualism between mind and body, between an isolated, rational self and a world external to that self, forms the basis of Western epistemology and has informed the development of scientific rationality. This is especially marked in the example of the emergence and consolidation of modern medicine, which succeeded in claiming the human body as an object amenable to scientific observation and manipulation. Similarly, the autonomy of sociology was initially dependent on this distinction between mind and body, as it sought to distance itself intellectually from psychology and anthropology (Freund 1988). Indeed, the subject of sociology, the rational actor, was disembodied in the sense that rational thought was located in a mind already disconnected from the body (Morgan 1993; Burkitt 1999). This meant that the body was neither perceived as a source of personal knowledge or understanding, nor deemed relevant to the production of sociological knowledge. Finally, the body’s association with nature and, concomitantly, with femininity (Sydie 1987) further distanced it from sociological analysis.

However, this Cartesian perspective, while subject to criticism in most of the perspectives included in this book, is difficult to renounce completely. A rich and diverse Asian literature on the sociology of the body calls attention to the persistent ethnocentrism of Western body sociology, that continues to be informed by the legacy of Cartesian dualism (Ozawa de-Silva 2002). In this way, while sociologists are critical of Cartesian dualism, nonetheless, Cartesianism continues to exist as a conceptual grid and produces ‘blind spots’ that present some serious limitations as a framework for a sociological analysis of the body (Ozawa de-Silva 2002). A particular blind spot is race, ethnicity and the ‘whiteness’ that informs much theory and many early studies on the body. Although there are examples of ways in which the body is racialized in this book, clearly there is a need for collating material for an undergraduate audience that focuses specifically on the body, race and identity.

Emerging body consciousness

Although not an explicit, tangible presence, the body ghosts through classical sociological texts. We depend on our bodies to engage in productive and reproductive work labour (Marx); the body is central to religious ritual and social classification (Durkheim) and is regulated and rationalized in modern life (Weber). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the body acquired greater significance within sociology. In 1990 Arthur Frank noted that bodies are ‘in’ and provided a valuable overview of the body in sociology. There are now numerous new journals and conferences dedicated to sociological study of the body, and there has been a rapid growth in books that provide sociological treatments of the body in one way or another. As many commentators have noted (Turner 1984; Shilling 1993; Williams and Bendelow 1998), there are many factors, external and internal to sociology, that help to explain this interest. Sociology is a discipline that is uniquely responsive to social change, and the body has become more interesting to sociologists because of social developments that force us to think about it.

First, demographic changes (such as increased life expectancy) mean that a greater proportion of the population live for a longer period of time; however, they do so in circumstances of poorer health and in the likelihood of disability. This kind of change raises important questions about the life course and how it is changing, and about how Western societies ought to respond to and manage the ageing body. It also raises questions about the care and management of ageing bodies, as physical competencies are potentially transformed over the life course and bodily betrayals increase. However, processes and experiences of ageing also raise questions about the significance of the physical appearance and capacities of the body for maintaining self and social identity.

Second, late modern – or postmodern – societies are characterized by their consciousness of and anxieties about the human body. Because bodily conduct has become an important way of socially classifying and categorizing people in Western societies, we spend a lot of time, effort and money on maintaining our bodies. The presentation of the body is an important part of social life, and we may often feel that we can exert control over our own bodies in ways that we cannot over other aspects of life. For instance, we might not be able to control our personal relationships but we can control how and what we eat. We might not be able to influence global politics but we can exercise hard and show our friends how disciplined we are. And we can influence the response of others to us by manipulating how we look, perhaps even by modifying our features to conform to current ideals of beauty or exaggerating our features to sharpen the contrast between our own looks and those of fashion norms.

The body, technology and social change

Third, the expansion and availability of new technologies such as gene therapy or xenotransplantation mean that we can manipulate bodies in unprecedented ways, but these technologies also challenge key assumptions about the human body, such as what is possible and ethically justified in terms of intervention. We can manipulate genes (this causes considerable anxiety); we can replace body parts (with parts from other humans or even animals); we can reshape our faces, tighten skin, build limbs. We live longer and there are more of us on the planet. These new developments influence the meanings people attach to their own and others’ bodies. What will it mean if I have someone else’s heart? Will I still be the same person? If I have plastic surgery, am I merely pandering to the beauty myth or taking control of my own life? Is it demeaning or empowering? The reactions of some people in terms of disgust or disbelief to practices such as xenotransplantation (animal organs in humans) suggest that we have developed boundaries between humans and animal bodies – but what are these boundaries and where do they come from? What purpose do they serve? Hence technological developments, such as organ transplantation and cosmetic surgery, offer the potential to transform and redefine the physical body, and in doing so raise questions about the boundaries between nature and culture.

Fourth, the publication in English of the work of the French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault has directly influenced a largely Anglo-American audience and made the body more amenable to sociological analysis. His analysis of the relation between body and society has shown that we can take nothing for granted about the body, even though we live in ways that take it for granted. Finally, the women’s movement and feminist thought has made visible the significance of the body in the oppression of women. Feminists have drawn attention to the ways in which the female body is objectified through medical, legal and representational practices. In some cases, the objectification of the female body has led to unnecessary surgical treatment or supported its commercial use (such as in pornography).

The body in postmodernity

However, sociological interest in the human body is also in part a reflection of the development of the discipline itself and its openness to influence from a range of perspectives. Intellectual currents associated with cultural anthropology, social psychology, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy and contemporary feminist theory influence many practitioners of sociology. These twin forces of responsiveness to social change and sensitivity to intellectual change mean that the body has become what Frank refers to as a ‘reference point in a world of flux and the epitome of that same flux’ (Frank 1991: 40). To put it another way, in the context of contrasting forces between modernity and postmodernity, the body provides a physical and conceptual space in which the recurring issues and tensions of sociology are revisited and reworked. On the one hand, the impulses of modernity to control and contain have reduced the body to a knowable, anatomical object (Morgan and Scott 1993), which is amenable to sociological scrutiny in terms of how society acts upon the body. On the other, the impulses of postmodernity render the body unstable and establish an explicit challenge to the dualisms inherent in Cartesian thinking. This tension between the body as a known and knowable material object and the body as discursively constituted has led some commentators to question ‘what the body is’ (see Shilling 1993). Is it a particular kind of object that can be known and understood or a socially constructed entity, the meaning of which changes over historical and biographical time and which is, therefore, less fixed and stable?

This uncertainty about ‘what the body is’ is reflected in current sociological approaches to the body. On a very broad level, these diverge between naturalistic and socially constructed approaches. The former explores how social and political contexts impinge on the body, retains an ontological distinction between mind and body and tacitly accepts the body as a primarily biological entity. The latter explores how the body itself (shape, size, movement, action and experience) is socially constructed. In practice, the latter approach often means that the focus of study is on how ideas about the body are socially constructed, and, as we shall see, there is much evidence that ideas about the human body and its significance change over time and vary from culture to culture.

The taken-for-granted body

Howson and Inglis (2001) identify many broad approaches in the conceptual development of the body in sociology and attempt to ‘bring the body in’ to the sociological frame. The process of ‘bringing sociology in’ has worked productively at the margins of other disciplines, such as anthropology, and has developed a range of perspectives such as phenomenology. Sociological studies of the body have centred on the social and cultural meanings conferred on the body, the body’s symbolic relation to the social world and the body as a ‘lived’ entity. Social constructionism and symbolic interactionism highlight the importance of the human body for social expression and interaction, for making and remaking social life. Such approaches concentrate on the surfaces of the body as an interface between the physical body and the social world and often focus on body images. These approaches, which examine the social conditions in which ideas about the body develop, typically do not question the organic basis of the body and tend to take the biomedical model of the body for granted.

This model emerged in the eighteenth century and monopolizes Western understandings of the body (Illich 1986). The emergence and consolidation of modern medicine as a scientifically based occupation was enabled via a range of practices that contributed to the mapping, measurement and reduction of the human body to object status. This model of the human body is characterized by the following (Freund and McGuire 1999). The mind–body dualism associated with a Cartesian view of the world detaches mind from body and views the latter as an object which can be manipulated, handled and treated in various ways in isolation from the self. The biomedical model has increasingly assumed that illness is largely a consequence of biological disorder. This physical reductionism locates disease within individual bodies often to the exclusion of the wider environment and social contexts in which disease develops. The development of germ theory in the nineteenth century further contributed to the biomedical belief that disease was caused by a specific agent. Though modern medical practice is based on more complex and sophisticated theories of disease causation, nonetheless the development of the empirical method to isolate specific diseases underpins the modern Western reliance on and support for ‘magic bullets’ such as antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals. Related to the mind– body dualism associated with the biomedical model of the human body is the assumption of its machine-like status. In contrast to the metaphors in which the body is understood in non-Western cultures, mechanistic metaphors pepper Western understandings of the body (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987), such as ‘running like clockwork’ or ‘feeling run down’. As many commentators observe, the machine metaphor assumes not only that the body can be repaired and its ‘parts’ replaced as in any other machine, but also that it can be standardized and regulated through diet, hygiene and exercise regimes.

The relational body

In contrast to the biomedical model, anthropological traditions have more explicitly questioned the perception of the human body as a physiological and anatomical object and accentuate embodiment as a relation between the physical body and the social and moral world. In particular, the scholarship of Norbert Elias emphasizes that the body needs to be approached not only as a biological entity but also as an organism that changes across both historical and biographical time in response to social and cultural processes. In doing so, these examples of scholarship challenge the specialist boundaries that divide the human body and social life into discrete and compartmentalized areas for examination and study. Furthermore, recent developments within sociology emphasize the instability of the body as a biological and anatomical phenomenon and question the facticity of the body itself. Post-structuralist approaches have been more influential in the arts and humanities than within the social sciences, though even this broad division of interests is under scrutiny. Such approaches highlight the importance of discourses that constitute the social world. The human body is not regarded as a natural and thus immutable entity that exists outside the language in which it is described or the historical context in which it resides (Benoist and Catheras 1993). Post-structuralist thinking poses the possibility of the body as a text and invites us to consider decoding its many inscriptions (Grosz 1994). The human body in this view or the body we know and understand collectively as a universal category is a product of particular historical contexts and social relations (Laqueur 1990). The human body has also been identified as the focus of rationalization processes, regulatory strategies and technologies of control. The work of Michel Foucault in particular has opened up new means of exploring the ways particular discourses have actively produced bodies and ideas about bodies. The development of new environments and experiences, such as cyberculture, imaging technologies and the evolution of the posthuman body, similarly challenges our thinking about what the body is and the significance of ‘boundedness’ for the development and experience of self and others.

The uncertain body

In the last two decades, sociological approaches to the body have multiplied and fragmented, and overviews of the body identify many different kinds of body. These include the ‘discursive’ body, the ‘material’ body, the ‘medicalized’ body and the ‘talking’ body (Turner 1984, 1992); the ‘individual/social’ body, the ‘physical’ body, the ‘communicative’ body, the ‘consumer’ body and the ‘medical’ body (O’Neill 1985); the ‘sexual’ body, the ‘disciplined’ body, the ‘somatic’ body and the ‘corporeal’ body (Frank 1990); the ‘uncertain’ body, the ‘naturalistic’ body and the ‘socially constructed’ body (Shilling 1993); and the ‘commodified’ body and the ‘regulated’ body (Lupton 1994). Such an elaborate list of bodies underscores Shilling’s observation about the ‘uncertainty that sociologists have in identifying what the substance of the body is’ (1993: 39). Moreover, the list points to a recurring tension within the sociology of the body over the existence of the body as an entity independent of processes of social constitution, or whether bodies exist only in relation to the practices and processes that produce them.

This distinction is posed as one between foundationalism and antifoundationalism (Nettleton 1992) and refers to tensions between the real or apparent body. The tension itself is a product of historical and social change. In late modernity, it is difficult to define the body (Shilling 1993) such that its ‘beingness’ disappears. Though the human body has been produced as a universal category, as ‘the’ body, this is now under question. In contrast, an embodied sociology begins from a sensitivity to the relation between ‘being’ and ‘having’ a body, in which embodiment not only serves as a bridge between action and biology but also alerts us to ‘the practices that conceptualise it, represent it and respond to it’ (Crimp 1988; also cited in Frank 1990: 135). Of particular importance to the emerging field of the sociology of the body is feminism as both a social movement and an academic field. Indeed, feminism has forced body politics onto sociological and other disciplinary agendas. The raising of body consciousness and the reclamation of the body as central to self and identity mark a historical turn in the relationship of sociology to the body.

Sociological approaches to the body also seek to rediscover the body in the work of classical theorists or, as Williams and Bendelow (1998: 9) put it, to re-read the classics in a ‘new, more corporeal light’. This approach has some parallels with the diffusion of gender and the retrieval of ‘herstory’ from the vaults of the founding fathers (for instance, see Sydie 1987 or Bologh 1990). Moreover, it challenges the view that sociology has ‘neglected’ the body. A key claim associated with this approach is that corporeal concerns underlie the writings of the ‘founding fathers’ and, moreover, lie at the heart of traditional sociological concerns (Williams and Bendelow 1998; Morgan and Scott 1993). Goffman, for instance, is identified by many scholars as a key proponent of the corporeality of social interaction and order, and of the fundamental importance of the body in establishing society (e.g., Crossley 1995a).

Binary oppositions

Of particular significance to sociological approaches to the human body are such binary oppositions as mind/body, subject/object, self/ other, and so on. Hence sociologists may pull together a range of perspectives in order to address conceptual dualisms that place limits on establishing adequate accounts of the relationship between not only body and society, but body and self. This framework requires an analytic focus on ‘lived experience’ as a contrast to what some view as abstract and overly theoretical accounts of the body, and defines the body as a site of knowledge and experience, action and intention. Moreover, this framework redirects sociological attention from the body as a reified object (of processes, forces, theory) towards the body as lived (Nettleton and Watson 1998; Williams and Bendelow 1998). This shift is described as an ‘experientially grounded view of human embodiment as the existential basis of our being-in-the-world’ (Williams and Bendelow 1998: 8, emphasis in original). Among the concepts deployed in this framework are corporeality, physicality and materiality to emphasize the body as a physical place/location from and through which the person knows and speaks.

This move is one shared by a range of sociologists, including many whose work focuses on issues associated with health, illness and disease (for a range of examples, see the collection in Nettleton and Watson 1998). Williams and Bendelow’s text The Lived Body (1998) is typical of the work identified here. It belongs to a strand of thought which seeks to challenge the dichotomous relationship that pertains between the body as a universal (material) object and the body as a variable system of, and resource for, representation. Part of their concern is to address the way in which sociological approaches to the body appear to privilege either representational/ discursive understandings or material/foundationalist understandings. They argue persuasively (as do Mellor and Shilling 1997) that dualist understandings of the body must be placed in their social and historical context. Cartesian concepts are neither universal nor persistent across time. Consequently, dualisms that are part of the contemporary period represent an inheritance from historically specific conditions in which the body became a discrete object of the mind. This observation leads several authors to argue that the binary thinking associated with Cartesian dualism can be transcended.

Such an approach is shared by other disciplines. In social psychology, for instance, Radley (1995) reformulates key themes and concepts in relation to the human body; similarly, Csordas (1994) provides extensive argument concerning the implications of reorienting anthropology towards embodiment as a key concept. Although this type of move is explicitly concerned with, and privileges, experience, overall its concern is to develop a framework in which it might be possible to specify and delineate relations between the ways in which the human body is socially shaped in culturally and historically specific terms; the body as a site of knowledge, consciousness and experience; and the body as a condition and constituent of intention and action. In social geography too, the body has been rethought as a specific space from and through which we establish ourselves as persons or subjects (Rose 1993). The move is therefore ambitious in the way in which it seeks to accommodate an intentional actor/agent, with an emotional, sentient body, in turn shaped by social structures and made visible through the reflexivity of the embodied practitioner.

Common themes

The field of the body in sociology has grown rapidly in the last twenty years. It is no longer a topic of peripheral interest to sociologists but is now a major area of scholarship in social theory (Burkitt 1999), has its own dedicated journal (Body & Society), and provides the principal framework for addressing issues in health, gender, childhood, ethnicity and disability and many more substantive areas. While there is considerable variation in the methods one may adopt in order to approach the body sociologically, there are several features on which many sociologists agree. First, the body in sociology is more than a physical and material frame (Freund and McGuire 1999) and is largely understood as inseparable from culture and society. There may be several aspects of human embodiment that are taken for granted in everyday contemporary life, but these are the products of complex social and political processes and actions that are embedded within history and our social fabric, though they may be subject to change. Second, in modernity the body has increasingly become the target of political control, rationalization and discipline. States and agencies of the state (such as law, welfare and medicine) exert considerable control over the movement of populations in time and space (e.g., in hospitals, schools and prisons) and encourage individuals to discipline themselves in compliance with state objectives (such as improving the nation’s health). Third, the body is not only a material object on which social and political processes operate, but also forms the basis of social experience and action. On the one hand, we attribute meaning to bodies (bodily states such as the production of tears are mediated and interpreted via social categories) and use the visual appearance of the body to mark and codify differences between people. We use the body as a physical symbol of our social worlds. For instance, the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the people of France to the people of the US in 1886, embodies the social values of liberty and freedom (Warner 2000). On the other hand, bodies create meaning by acting within and upon the physical and material environment in which they exist.

The body in this book

This book starts from the assumption that, in everyday life, many of us take our own bodies and the bodies of others for granted, yet the body is absolutely crucial to the way we engage with the world and the people around us. The body is lived, experienced, but is done so in ways which are profoundly influenced by social processes and shaped by particular social contexts. We do not simply have bodies that we do things with and to, but we are bodies, our sense of who we are is inseparable from our own body. Competent social interaction and the acquisition of personhood are dependent on becoming competent embodied beings. Through social practices the human body is endowed with varied forms of social significance, and it is this significance which sociology tries to address, by asking questions such as: In which circumstances and to what degree do individuals have control over their own bodies? What interest and control does the state have over the human body? How significant is the body to the development and performance of the self in everyday life? In what ways do images of the body influence people’s experience of themselves and of others?

This book tries to answer some of these questions. Its principal aim is to introduce undergraduates to the social significance of the body in everyday life, and it will do this by beginning with situations or life events that readers are very familiar with (for instance, eating or sleeping). The starting point for the book is therefore empirical: ‘real’ issues and activities which individuals and institutions confront in everyday life rather than theoretical problems which are of interest mainly to professional sociologists. That is not to say, however, that theory is not a real problem – without it, we could not systematically make sense of the social world, and it is a critical resource in this process. Therefore, the book will also introduce readers to theoretical perspectives and conceptual frameworks that help us to understand the social significance of the human body.

In order to address the social significance of the body, the book has three objectives. First, it describes key issues concerning the body and defines what makes the body socially significant in the contemporary period, second, it outlines sociological perspectives and conceptual frameworks which address these issues and, third, it provides a sense of comparison between sociological and other social science approaches to the body. Throughout, use is made of case study material to provide the reader with examples of how to think sociologically about the body and how sociological knowledge about the human body has been generated.

The book is organized in the following way. Chapters 1 and 2 focus on the significance of the body in the development and presentation of self. Drawing largely on the perspective of social interactionism, these two chapters introduce material that focuses on felt identity, somatic perception and performativity. These chapters describe and explain how we rely upon habitual bodily conduct as the basis of communication and how we use the body as a resource for interaction with others. Such conduct occurs even though, as Mead put it, we are ‘trained by society to keep our bodies out of our minds’ (Mead 1949). Chapters 3–5 turn to social processes that construct the body in particular ways and encourage particular forms of bodily conduct. Hence, these three chapters deal with the civilizing process, the influence of consumer culture on bodily conduct and the regulation of the body. Themes discussed in these chapters include the construction, maintenance and significance of body boundaries and discourses such as healthism in contemporary conduct, as well as the role of the body in expressing responses to social change. The final chapter examines the vulnerability of the body and in particular the bearing of images on experiences of the changing body across the life course. chapter 6 presents material that explores the social significance of the body in the context of childhood, ageing and death, and the significance of intercorporeality from birth to death.

Further Reading

For a selection of views on non-Western body concepts, try:

Kasulis, T. P., Ames, R. T. and Dissanayake, W. 1993. Self as Body in Asian Theory and Practice. New York: State University of New York Press.

For Descartes’ discussion of mind–body dualism, see:

Descartes, R. 1980. Discourse 5. In Discourses on Method. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

A good discussion of mind–body dualism is:

Todes, S. 2001. The classic view of the way the human subject has his body and Descartes’ rejection of it. Body and World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 10–22.

And on sociology and the body, see:

Shilling, C. (ed.) 2007. Embodying Sociology: Retrospect, Progress and Prospects. Oxford: Blackwell.

* Items in bold appear in the glossary.

1

The Body in Everyday Life

Introduction: An embodied approach to self

Understanding the development and presentation of the social self is a central concern for the discipline of sociology, that is, ‘those aspects of the personal life of each individual which have been created through social participation, which shape the way in which we come to experience the world and which contribute to a consciousness of being a member of society’ (Lee and Newby 1989: 309). The purpose of this chapter is to outline the significance of the human body for developing a sense of self and presenting self in social interaction. The work of Erving Goffman is central here. First, the chapter examines the development of self and the importance of physical appearance and sensory experience in this development. Second, it looks at the presentation of self in everyday encounters and problems that arise in such encounters in circumstances where the body breaches social norms or expectations. Third, the chapter introduces a phenomenological perspective on embodiment.

Embodiment

There are two very broad approaches to the body in current sociology. The first views the body as a special kind of object that has increasingly become the target of control and discipline, and we will address this approach in chapters 3 and 5. The second approach views the body as a crucial dimension of self and, indeed, rejects the concept of the body as the focus of analysis in favour of embodiment. Embodiment can be used in various ways but generally places emphasis on the interaction between social and biological processes. It is used to highlight the significance of the body as a lived aspect of human experience and as central rather than, as people in the West are encouraged to feel, peripheral to experience. The Cartesian legacy, outlined in the Introduction (see p. 3), reinforces the idea, in both everyday life and sociological analysis of the everyday, that there is a division between the body as felt and the body as an object. In contrast, the concept of embodiment alerts us to the relation between the objective, exterior and institutionalized body and the sensual, subjective, animated body (Turner 1992). In the German language, this division between the subjective and objective body is referred to in a more subtle way. Körper refers to the body as an object, while Leib refers to the felt, experienced body. Hence, the concept of embodiment signals the importance of approaching the body as a synthesis of Körper and Leib.

An embodied approach largely assumes that bodily integrity is central to self-identity and views self and society as constituted through the practical work done with and through the body in interaction with others and with the physical environment. This notion of practical work is captured by two concepts: that of agency and that of action. First, agency is a concept derived from the symbolic interactionist framework associated with the Chicago School in the early part of the twentieth century, and addresses the body’s role in responding to and creating social worlds by giving meaning to the intended and unintended actions of others. Second, action is developed within a phenomenological framework to highlight the emergence of self as embodied, constituted through the practical actions of the body upon the world in which it is situated. Though visual information and perception are important to both concepts for an understanding of how the self develops and enters into relations with others, the phenomenological view rejects any ontological separation between mind and body, and therefore also places emphasis on other senses in the constitution and presentation of self.

An embodied approach largely assumes that bodily integrity is central to self-identity and views self and society as constituted through the practical work done with and through the body in interaction with others and with the physical environment.

The body and presentation of self

Agency and embodiment

A key text concerning the self, central to many undergraduate sociology courses, is Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). This book is a detailed ethnography of life on a Scottish island in the 1950s and focuses on the various ways in which the self is presented and maintained in social encounters. Goffman’s analysis of self-presentation draws on the work of two earlier colleagues at the University of Chicago, Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead. In 1902 Cooley published an influential book called Human Nature and the Social Order in which he proposed a theory for the development of self as a creative agent (Waters 1994). For Cooley, self-development emerges through interaction with others who reflect back to us an image of ourselves. Indeed, we learn who we are from others and our imagination of the way we appear to them. Correspondingly, the face and the eyes are an important focus for Cooley’s analysis of the development of the self-idea. In contrast to cultures that conceal the face (especially the female face with the veil or burqa), in Western culture the face is generally visible and physically exposed. The visual appearance of the face is important to the presentation of self because, in Western culture, the face offers vital expressive information to others about who and what we are. People look into our faces, and our eyes in particular, to discover our identities, or who we ‘really’ are. Furthermore, four of the five sensory organs are located within the head and face, providing an interface between our bodies and the environment. However, as we saw in the Introduction, though all senses contribute to our perceptions and experiences of the physical environment (and as phenomenologists insist), in Western culture sight is the privileged sense.

The looking-glass self

Visual information and the appearance of the body is important for Cooley, and what he refers to as the self-idea develops in three key phases. The self-idea emerges, first, in relation to how we imagine we appear to others, second, in relation to how we imagine others judge our appearance, and, third, through the ‘self-feeling’ produced by our imagination of these judgements. To emphasize his point, Cooley uses the mirror as a metaphor for the development of the self as a looking-glass self. Mirrors provide us with visual access to the external appearance of our bodies, but the appearance of our bodies is mediated through what we imagine others think of us. Mike Hepworth summarizes the process involved thus:

Plate 1 The ‘looking-glass self’: by about 18 months of age, humans can recognize themselves in the mirror

© Plus/iStockphoto

Looking into a mirror is an interactive process through which connections are made between the personal subjective self of the viewer and the external world of other people. Because we have no direct access to the external reality of the body, even with the existence of aids such as mirrors and the wide range of technical apparatus available to us now (cameras, video cameras and the like), the act of human perception is always mediated symbolically by meaning. When we look into a mirror we are therefore engaged in an act of the imagination whereby the self is constructed symbolically as a portrait or picture. (Hepworth 2000: 46)

Somatic perception

The second body of work influencing Goffman’s analysis of self-presentation belongs to George Herbert Mead, who in turn owes much of his approach to both Cooley and George Simmel. Mead, like Simmel, took the view that human beings are motivated by ideas and that society is constituted via the exchange of gestures and symbols. He placed considerable emphasis on the role of images and symbols in generating self through interaction with others. Though Mead acknowledged that ‘we are trained by our society to keep our bodies out of our minds’ (Mead 1949), he also argued that mind and body are ontologically interrelated, difficult to separate (Mead 1934), and constitutive of a somatic perception of the world through which we become objects to ourselves (Mead 1938). The self within a symbolic interactionist framework is not a discrete entity developed via rational thought alone, but is the product of an ongoing, never-ending social process characterized by constant interaction not only between self and others but also between different aspects of self.

For Mead, there is a two-part self that relates, first, to what he refers to as ‘instinctual’ and ‘impulsive’ habits (‘I’) or, to put this another way, to bodily expressions, feelings and conduct. The second aspect of self relates to the set of organized beliefs learned from the mirroring process described above, provided by social interaction between ‘me’ and members of the groups to which ‘I’ belong. This latter aspect of self is an objective self that expresses the gaze of others (society enters the self via ‘me’), and which ‘I’ am capable of standing back from and reflecting upon. The relation between ‘I’ and ‘me’ is experienced as a form of dialogue, as a continual conversation (as in ‘I said to myself’) not only of words and thoughts, but also through the exchange of gestures and symbols. The self is developed gradually from infancy in interaction with others through play and games, through which we learn to develop an awareness of, anticipate and take on the roles of others. If you are around children of two-and-a-half or three years old you can probably observe what Mead is referring to here. Young children play games in which they physically mimic the actions of others before they have a complete grasp of language. They literally act out roles in their games. Moreover, for Mead, the self is not fixed in time but is constantly open to change and modification because its development occurs in interactions, which may change and become more complex across the life course, and because of the ever-present conversation between ‘I’ and ‘me’. Therefore, in the work of both Cooley and Mead, the external appearance of the face and body are crucial to the development of self. Over time, through processes of interaction with others, we develop awareness of how they see us, which in turn influences how we see ourselves (Hepworth 2000).

Felt identity and the body

Goffman uses these ideas to develop his analysis of the presentation of self through social encounters. Goffman’s work takes as read Simmel’s (1908) observation that people are socially bound together through the various encounters, sensual experiences and glances that are exchanged in everyday life. Goffman is interested primarily in what makes it possible to enter into and participate in social encounters and in the presentation and maintenance of self in such encounters (Williams 1987). In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Goffman develops a framework in which he casts social life as similar to theatre. His dramaturgical model emphasizes how individuals, social groups and institutions manage information in order to present a particular impression to those with whom they interact. His approach allows him to focus on the roles and performances given by selves, the settings in which they occur and the audiences such performances address. Performances are made possible by adopting roles, which operate as organized frameworks that allow people to make sense of encounters, experiences and the information with which they are presented in everyday life. People, or actors in Goffman’s terms, seek to maximize or minimize visibility of information, depending on the impressions they seek to present, and the ‘self-feeling’ or ‘self-image’ people develop is related to both how effectively we present ourselves and whether encounters confirm or nullify our self-conception (Freund and McGuire 1999).

Self and identity are, thus, in Goffman’s perspective, actively negotiated in an ongoing way via interactional work with others, and grounded in a tacit notion of self-feeling or ‘felt identity’ (Goffman 1968). The body is central to felt identity, a project to be worked on and with (Shilling 2003). Thus, for instance, when injuries occur to the body, self-identity can be profoundly threatened. As Collinson and Hockey (2007) argue, sporting injuries require direct re negotiation of identity by enacting similar physical rituals and engaging in body work (for the runners in Collinson and Hockey’s study, this meant walking instead of running) that not only help to rehabilitate the body, but also go some way towards repairing disrupted identity.

Goffman himself did not necessarily begin his observations and analysis of the presentation of self in everyday life by observing and focusing on the body. Nonetheless, his approach has been developed to examine the presentation of self through both body work and face work (Shilling 1993; Williams and Bendelow 1998).

Methodological Note

Goffman’s method depended on detailed observation and scrutiny of the rules and rituals that make encounters possible and sustain social order. In particular, he emphasized the significance of visual and expressive information in social encounters. Such information – facial expression, gestures, physical cues or mannerisms – is provided by and through the body. Other scholars have enlarged this perspective by arguing that successful passage through public life, or competence as a social actor, is dependent on following the rules of the interaction order and developing routine control over the body (Giddens 1991).

Body work

People make information available to others in both focused and unfocused interaction via the human body. For Goffman, the setting in which focused interaction takes place is deemed a front region. Here the body provides expressive equipment such as appearance, dress and demeanour in ways that help define the situation as being of a particular sort. For instance, in a teaching situation, the setting of focused interaction might be the classroom, arranged with the aid of physical props such as chairs strategically placed, technical equipment such as an overhead projector, and so on. Yet establishing and maintaining a definition of the situation as one focused on teaching also requires the performers to play the roles of students and teacher or lecturer. In order for these roles to be convincing, they need to be performed with corporeal integrity. That is, the presented self will be convincing only if accompanied by appropriate body conduct. For example, the role of attentive student might be performed by sitting up straight, making eye contact, laptop fired up, whereas the role of the bored student might be performed by avoiding eye contact and looking around the room or out of the window.

Although Goffman did not explicitly present his work as an analysis of the body in interaction, nonetheless some of his work draws explicit attention to shared patterns and ways of using the body in Western culture. In Gender Advertisements (1979), Goffman shows how bodily gestures that are part of images designed to sell products also convey meanings about relations between men and women. In this book, accompanied by many photographs that provide an inventory of gestures, he shows how particular gestures and positions imply relations of power between men and women. For instance, Goffman suggests that images in which women are seated and men are standing convey a sense of male authority. Add a man’s hand to a woman’s shoulder, and this image becomes one that is suggestive of sexual ownership. Goffman suggests that social interaction and interpretation of bodily gestures, expressions and positions depend on shared understandings of what they mean or on what he refers to as a shared vocabulary of body idiom.

Body idiom

Body idiom denotes the physical gestures, positions and conduct that are recognizable as conventional aspects of everyday life in Western culture, especially public life, such as handshakes, smiles, ways of walking, speech patterns, forms of dress, and so on (Goffman 1963). Anthropologists refer to body idiom as ‘techniques of the body’ (Mauss [1934] 1973) and have observed that body idiom varies cross-culturally. Because body idiom in self-presentation is shared, Goffman argues, it enables people to classify information about people’s conduct (or, as psychologists might put it, body idiom is part of non-verbal communication or body language). In turn, knowledge and understanding of what bodily gestures mean influence how people present themselves in social encounters. However, Goffman uses the term body idiom not only to highlight bodily conduct as an important part of self-presentation, but also to draw attention to the way the body enters into and is used as a means of categorizing people and grading them according to their social position.

Pause and Reflect: What kinds of movements or practices would you identify as ‘body techniques’? List as many as you can.

The body, norms and stigma

Virtual and actual social identity

Coherent self-presentation is sustained by a relation between what Goffman terms virtual social identity and actual social identity. The first concept expresses normative expectations of who and what a person ought to be in a given social context or encounter. For instance, we might reasonably expect a nurse to present her- or himself as courteous, friendly and matter-of-fact. The latter concept refers to the social, cultural and physical attributes actually possessed by a person. For instance, the nurse in our example may not be smiling (which might lead us to view her or him as unfriendly). Virtual and actual social identity exist in relation to each other. Goffman argues that we tend to see ourselves as others do and share an understanding of the expectations associated with a particular role or encounter. In Goffman’s framework, our view of ourselves is, to a large extent, governed by a desire to present ourselves according to the expectations of the context in which we are situated. For Goffman, the physical appearance of the body is central to the relation between virtual and actual social identity, and his logic implies that the body I see in the mirror is mediated by what I imagine to be society’s perception of me.

This suggests, first, that self-presentation (body position, conduct, gestures, and so on) is influenced by the social expectations associated with a given role or situation, that mark us as ‘belonging’ to a particular place or status and that serve to reinforce our ‘proper place’ in the world. In addition, our corporeal visibility is marked by biological criteria, such as phenotype, that separate people into distinct groups – as gendered, racialized or nationalized – in order to dominate or exploit (Inwood and Yarborough 2010; Grabham 2009). Second, the relation of physical appearance to virtual and actual social identity suggests that self-classification is developed from a shared vocabulary of body idiom and social perceptions about appropriate body conduct. The logic of this analysis is that the meanings attached to physical appearance and bodily performances become internalized by people as self-image, which exerts degrees of influence over their sense of self-worth and moral value. However, the emphasis on social perceptions and shared body idiom inevitably raises the question of how norms evolve.

Body Image and Discourses of Ethnicity

The relation between social perception, body image and shared body idiom is complex. Colin King (2004) traces academic work on black athletes produced by white writers that he later contrasts with work produced by black writers. He explores how sport and race have been interpreted in relation to the black body in order to develop a theoretical framework called ‘racialized performance’, which describes how black athletes feel pressure to perform to white masculine standards and values. King supports his claims with several case studies from the world of English soccer in which the voices of black players demonstrate the kinds of inclusion and exclusion they experience in relation to class, race, masculinity and sexuality as a result of their contact with white men (whether in the crowd, on the playing field or in the changing room). He argues there are consistent themes in ‘white talk’ sports academic literature that have ‘pathologized’ black sportsmen, and that stem from a ‘biological obsession with the black male body’. Black sportsmen tend to be positioned in relation to their physical body, identified as having particular physical advantages, such as speed and strength, which are assumed to be derived from ‘racial attributes’. King identifies the tensions and confusions that black players experience as they attempt to conform to, and be accepted by, the dominant white masculinity of the soccer world that constrains them, and argues that the implications of ignoring the socially constructed nature of the ‘black male body’ include reifying black men as culturally problematic.

Body Image and Self-Esteem

Self-presentation is linked to body image – how a person thinks and feels about her body, size and shape, as well as how others respond to and evaluate her body’s appearance. Although the concept of body image is broad (and can be used to refer to size perception accuracy, appearance satisfaction, body satisfaction, appearance evaluation, appearance orientation, body concern, drive for thinness, body esteem, body schema and body percept), the overwhelming weight of research suggests that high self-esteem is linked to positive image (Grogan 2010). While connections between body image and self-esteem have been explored mostly in relation to young women, recent research also reveals that young men place great importance on their appearance and also report high levels of body dissatisfaction. In an Australian study in which 150 people completed a questionnaire about self-esteem, body dissatisfaction and other domains of life, although women expressed greater dissatisfaction with their bodies than men, men placed greater importance on their appearance than women, and also reported high levels of body dissatisfaction (Mellor et al. 2010). The authors suggest that because of the known association between body dissatisfaction and low self-esteem, and of the risk of developing body image disturbances and eating disorders, such findings imply that body image disturbances could be an issue for young Australian men.

Normative expectations