Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 82

Shilling (2012) also argues that the body might best be conceptualized as a “body project”; an unfinished biological and social phenomenon, which is transformed, within limits, as a result of its participation in society. The body is in a continual state of “unfinishedness;” the body is “seen” as an entity which is in the process of becoming; a project which should be worked at and accomplished as part of an individual “self-identity” (Shilling 2012: 4). Body projects become more sophisticated and more complex in a context where there is both the knowledge and technology to transform them in ways that in the past might have been regarded as the province of fiction. There is a vast array of medical technologies and procedures to choose from if we want to shape, alter, and recreate our bodies – from various forms of techniques to “assist” conception, to gene therapies, to forms of cosmetic surgery and so on.

These projects are also gendered as illustrated by Brumberg’s (1998) feminist historical analysis of adolescent girls where she finds the contemporary imperative to perfect the appearance of the body displaces the constraints imposed by the social conventions and restrictions placed on young women in the nineteenth century. There is, of course, an irony here. As we expand our freedoms, knowledge, technologies and expertise, to alter bodies we become more uncertain and insecure we become about what the body actually is and what its boundaries are. And yet it also seems that as the opportunities to work on our bodies proliferate they coalesce around a limited range of repertoires that are rooted in ideologies of individualism. This is evidenced by Gill et al.’s (2005) study of body projects and the regulation of masculinity. Based on 140 qualitative interviews with men aged between 15 and 35 from differing regions in the UK sampled to ensure representation of class, race, and sexual orientation found the authors found “an extraordinary homogeneity” ran through the men’s talk (p. 56). There was a shared set of discourses that were consistently embraced the merits of: individualism and being different; libertarianism and having an autonomous body, rejection of vanity and narcissism, the value of being well balanced and not obsessional and the importance of being a morally responsible body. Men’s body and identity talk the authors argue is structured by a “grammar of individualism” (p. 57).