Routledge Handbook of Body Studies

428 Pages·2012·3.762 MB·English

by  Bryan S. Turner (ed.)

Routledge Handbook of Body Studies
In the last three decades, the human body has gained increasing prominence in contemporary political
debates, and ithas becomea centraltopic ofmodern social sciences and humanities. Moderntechnologies–
such asorgan transplants, stem-cell research, nanotechnology, cosmeticsurgeryand cryonics – have changed
how we think about the body.
In this collection of twenty-eight original essays by leading figures in the field, these issues are explored
across anumberoftheoretical anddisciplinary perspectives,including pragmatism,feminism,queertheory,
post-modernism, post-humanism, cultural sociology, philosophy and anthropology. A wide range of case
studies, which include cosmetics, diet, ageing, racial bodies, masculinity and sexuality, eating disorders,
religion and the sacred body, and disability, are used to appraise these different perspectives.
In addition, this Handbook explores various epistemological approaches to the basic question: what is a
body? It also offers a strongly themed range of chapters on empirical topics that are organized around
religion, medicine, gender, technology and consumption. It also contributes to the debate over the glo-
balizationofthebody:howhavemilitarytechnology,modernmedicine,sportandconsumptionledtothis
contemporary obsession with matters corporeal?
The Handbook’s clear, direct style will appeal to a wide undergraduate audience in the social sciences,
particularly for those studying medical sociology, gender studies, or the sociology of religion. It will serve
to consolidate the new field of body studies.
BryanS.TurneristhePresidentialProfessorofSociologyattheGraduateCenter,theCityUniversityof
New York, USA, and the Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Western Sydney,
Australia.HispublicationsincludeTheBody&Society(Sage,2008)andheeditedTheRoutledgeHandbookof
Globalization Studies (2010).
Routledge Handbook of
Body Studies
Edited by
Bryan S. Turner
Firstpublished2012
byRoutledge
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Routledgehandbookofbodystudies/editedbyBryanS.Turner.
p.cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
1.Humanbody–SocialaspectsI.Turner,BryanS.
HM636.R682012
306.4’613–dc232011033709
ISBN:978-0-415-59355-7(hbk)
ISBN:978-0-203-84209-6(ebk)
TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
Contents
Editorial Board viii
List of contributors ix
Introduction: The Turn of the Body 1
Bryan S. Turner
Body, Self and Society 19
1 Simone de Beauvoir and Binaries of the Body 21
Mary Evans
2 Pragmatism’s Embodied Philosophy: From Immediate Experience
to Somaesthetics 34
Richard Shusterman
3 Norbert Elias and the Body 49
Mike Atkinson
4 Embodied Practice: Martin Heidegger, Pierre Bourdieu and
Michel Foucault 62
Bryan S. Turner
5 My Multiple Sick Bodies: Symbolic Interactionism, Autoethnography
and Embodiment 75
Ken Plummer
6 Feminist Theory: Bodies, Science and Technology 94
Patricia Ticineto Clough
v
Contents
7 Foucault’s Body 106
Nikki Sullivan
What is a Body? 117
8 Layers or Versions? Human Bodies and the Love of Bitterness 119
Annemarie Mol
9 Phenomenology and the Body 130
Nick Crossley
10 Social Constructionism and the Body 144
Darin Weinberg
11 From Embodied Regulations to Hybrid Ontologies: Questioning
Archaeological Bodies 157
Dr Stratos Nanoglou
12 Social Brains, Embodiment and Neuro-Interactionism 171
Victoria Pitts-Taylor
Religion and the Body 183
13 Relics of Faith: Fleshly Desires, Ascetic Disciplines and Devotional Affect in the
Transnational Sathya Sai Movement 185
Tulasi Srinivas
14 The Body and the Veil 206
Sonja van Wichelen
15 Recomposing Decimated Bodies 217
Nurit Stadler
Medical Regimes and the Body 229
16 Death Signals Life: A Semiotics of the Corpse 231
Lianna Hart and Stefan Timmermans
17 Beyond the Anorexic Paradigm: Re-Thinking ‘Eating’ Disorders 244
Susan Bordo
18 Disability, Impairment and the Body 256
Christopher A. Faircloth
vi
Contents
19 The Body, Social Inequality and Health 264
Kevin White
20 Health and the Embodiment of the Life Course 275
Jenny Hockey and Allison James
Gender, Sexualities and Race 287
21 Chinese Male Bodies: A Transnational Study of Masculinity and Sexuality 289
Travis S. K. Kong
22 Male Bodies, Masculine Bodies, Men’s Bodies: The Need for a Concept of Gex 307
Jeff Hearn
23 Racialized Bodies 321
Maxine Leeds Craig
Technologies and Body Modification 333
24 Getting Work Done: Cosmetic Surgery as Constraint, as Commodity,
as Commonplace 335
Heather Laine Talley
25 Modified Bodies: Texts, Projects and Process 347
Paul Sweetman
26 Questions of Life and Death: A Genealogy 362
Tiago Moreira and Paolo Palladino
27 Rejecting the Aging Body 375
Alex Dumas
28 Conclusion: The Varieties of My Body: Pain, Ethics and Illusio 389
Arthur W. Frank
Index 396
vii
Editorial Board
Kathy Davis, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
[email protected]
Mary Evans, London School of Economics, UK
[email protected]
Victoria Pitts-Taylor, Queens College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA
[email protected]
Darin Weinberg, University of Cambridge, UK
[email protected]
viii
Contributors
MikeAtkinsonisAssociateProfessorintheFacultyofPhysicalEducationandHealthattheUniversity
ofToronto,whereheteachessport,exerciseandphysicalculturalstudiespolicyandresearchmethods.Heis
alsoDirectorofSportLegaciesResearch.ObtainingaPhDinSociologyfromtheUniversityofCalgaryin
2001, he has taught at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, McMaster University, University of
Western Ontario and Loughborough University. His central areas of teaching and research pertain to a
figurationally-informed physical cultural studies, violence and aggression, human rights policies and bio-
pedagogicalpracticesinsportandphysicalactivitycontexts,issuesinbioethicsandbodymodificationwithin
sport cultures, masculinities and research methods. He is author/co-author of seven books, including
Battleground Sport (2008, Greenwood Press); Deviance and Social Control in Sport (with Kevin Young, 2008,
HumanKinetics);TribalPlay,SubculturalJourneysThroughSport(withKevinYoung,2008,Elsevier);Tattooed:
TheSociogenesisofaBodyArt(2003,UniversityofTorontoPress);Boys’Bodies:SpeakingtheUnspoken(with
Michael Kehler, 2010, Peter Lang); Key Concepts in Sport and Exercise Research Methods (2011, Sage); and
Deconstructing Menand Masculinities (2010, Oxford University Press). InOctober of 2004, he washonoured
by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada with their Aurora Award as the
outstanding young scholar in the Canadian social sciences.
Susan Bordo holds the Otis A. Singletary Chair in Humanities at the University of Kentucky and is
the author of many critically acclaimed, highly influential books and articles including Unbearable Weight:
Feminism, Western Culture and theBody (described by the New YorkTimes as a ‘feministclassic’), The Male
Body. A New Look at Men in Public and Private and Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from
PlatotoO.J.Bordo’swritinghasbeentranslatedintomanylanguagesandassignedindisciplinesthroughout
the academy. She is currently writing a book about Anne Boleyn (The Creation of Anne Boleyn) to be
published by Houghton Mifflin.
PatriciaTicinetoCloughisProfessorofSociologyandWomen’sStudiesattheGraduateCenterand
Queens College of the City University ofNew York. She is author of Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in
theAgeofTeletechnology (2000);FeministThought:Desire,PowerandAcademicDiscourse(1994)andTheEnd(s)
of Ethnography: From Realism to Social Criticism (1998). She is the editor of The Affective Turn: Theorizing the
Social (2007) and, with Craig Willse, editor of Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death
(forthcoming, 2012). Clough’s work has drawn on theoretical traditions concerned with science, technol-
ogy, affect, unconscious processes, time-space and political economy. She is currently working on Ecstatic
Corona: Philosophy and Family Violence, an ethnographic historically researched experimental writing project
about where she grew up in Queens, New York.
ix
Contributors
Maxine Leeds Craig is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies program at the
University of California, Davis. She received herdoctorate in Sociology from the University of California,
Berkeley. Her book Ain’t I a Beauty Queen? Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race (Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2002) won the Best Book of 2002 award on the Political History of Ethnic and Racial
MinoritiesintheUnitedStatesbytheOrganizedSectiononRace,Ethnicity,andPoliticsoftheAmerican
Political Science Association. She is past chair of the American Sociological Association Section on Race,
Gender and Class and is on the editorial boards of Gender & Society, Critical Studies in Fashion and Beauty,
and the American Sociological Association’s Rose Book Series. Professor Craig has published articles on topics
related to the embodiment of race and gender. Her current research is on masculinity, race and everyday
forms of dancing.
Nick Crossley is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Inaddition to a number of
articles, he has published two books on embodiment: The Social Body (Sage, 2001) and Reflexive Embodi-
ment in Contemporary Society (Open University, 2006). His other areas of interest include social networks,
social movements and the sociology of music. His most recent book is Towards Relational Sociology
(Routledge, 2011).
Alex Dumas is an Associate Professor in the School of Human Kinetic at the University of Ottawa.
Hehas received his PhD in Kinesiology from the University ofMontreal andhas completed post-doctoral
research at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, University of Cambridge. He teaches in the area of
sociology of sport and health. His research interests focus primarily on social groups’ relation to the body,
specifically building on Pierre Bourdieu’s socio-cultural theory. He has published in various journals such
asAgeing&Society,SocialTheory&HealthandLeisureStudies.Hislatestpaperwaspublishedincollaboration
with Bryan S. Turner, ‘Aging in Post-Industrial Societies: Intergenerational Conflict and Solidarity’, in an
edited book entitled The Welfare State in Post-industrial Society (Springer). His current research deals with
bodily dispositions of men in underprivileged neighborhoods, anti-aging discourse in biomedical sciences
and women’s discursive constructions of health and obesity.
Mary Evans is currently a Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute at the London School of
Economics. She has taught Sociology and Gender Studies in Britain and the United States and was a
member of the group that initiated the academic study of gender at the University of Kent in 1980. Her
publications includes work on gender theory and studies of Jane Austen and Simone de Beauvoir. Most
recently she has published an essay on detective fiction (The Imagination of Evil) and a collection of essays,
edited with Kathy Davis, will appear as Transatlantic Conversations: Feminism as Travelling Theory. She is
about to begin work on the ways in which gender and class inequality are reproduced, provisionally titled
Re-Writing Middlemarch.
Christopher Faircloth is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at Xavier
University of Louisiana, located in New Orleans, LA. His primary research and writing interests include
thesociologyofhealthandillness,criticalgerontology,andthesociologyofthebody.Hehaspublishedin
numerous journals including Sociology of Health and Illness, Symbolic Interaction, Qualitative Health Research,
Ageing&Society,andtheJournalofAgingStudies.Inaddition,heistheeditorofAgingBodies(AltaMira Press),
and co-editor (with Dana Rosenfeld) of Medicalized Masculinites (Temple University Press), which was a
finalist for the Society of Symbolic Interactionism’s Charles Horton Cooley Award.
Arthur W. Frank is Professor of Sociology at the University of Calgary, where he has taught since
1975.Trainedasamedicalsociologist,heistheauthorofAttheWilloftheBody(1991;newedition2002),
amemoirofcriticalillnessinTheWoundedStoryteller:Body,Illness,andEthics(1995),astudyoffirst-person
x