Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 78

There is a substantial literature on the sociology of the body which spans a range of perspectives. There are, however, alternative ways in which the body is understood and analyzed, with the most obvious approaches being rooted within the physical sciences and classified as being part of a naturalistic perspective (Shilling 2012). In this chapter, however, we will focus on three main sociological approaches. First, those which draw attention to the social regulation of the body, especially the way in which social institutions regulate, control, monitor, and use bodies. Our bodies are highly politicized. Whilst we might like to think that we own and have control of our own bodies and what we do with and to them, we do not. What we can do with our bodies is constrained by legal diktats and social norms, as is evident in contemporary debates on topics such as euthanasia, organ transplantation, and abortion. Feminist scholars have illustrated ways in which medicine has for centuries controlled the bodies of women (Martin 1989; Mason 2013; Ussher 2006). Regulatory practices further constrain bodies through processes of categorization which can be difficult to resist, a readily obvious example is the imposition of static gender categories often rooted in biological essentialism (Connell 2012). A view that prompts important questions about the ontology of the body.

A second perspective within the sociology of the body focuses on the ontology of the body. A number of theorists have asked the question: What exactly is the body? Their answer is that in late modern societies we seem to have become increasingly uncertain as to what the body actually is. For most sociologists the body is to a greater or lesser extent socially constructed. However, there are a number of variants of this view, with some arguing that the body is simply a fabrication (Armstrong 1983) – an effect of its discursive context – while others maintain that bodies display certain characteristics (e.g. mannerisms, gait, shape) which are influenced by social and cultural factors. Productive conceptual frameworks however recognize the interplay between the biological body and social relations. Reflecting gender for example, and the “gender-biology nexus” Annandale and her colleagues (2018), outline a theoretical framework that takes into account the “gender-shaping of biology” and the “biologic-shaping of gender” seeing these as co-“constitutive shaping processes.” This approach is helpful not least because it moves beyond an ontological impasse but also helps us appreciated how gender inequalities in health operate (Williams and Bendelow 1998).

The third approach pays more attention to the way the body is experienced or lived. Whilst this phenomenological orientation accepts that the body is to some extent socially fashioned, it argues that sociology must take account of what the body, or rather embodied actor, actually does. In this sense it is perhaps more accurately described as a sociology of embodiment or embodied sociology rather than a sociology of the body. This approach to the study of the body has gained much currency, particularly in relation to illness (Carel 2016; Leder 1990). It has to some extent emerged as a result of creative debates within this field of study which have attempted to counter the dominant structural approach that concentrates on the social regulation of bodies. This research, which has outlined the ways in which bodies are socially regulated however, remains crucial for our understanding of the body in society.