Corporeal realism does not entail the assertion that everybody's body is absolutely identical, but does require us to accept that similarly embodied humans share certain physical powers and socially generative capacities. Nor, as I shall emphasize shortly, does it rule out the idea that bodily potentials are mediated by society. It is simplistic and unhelpful to suggest that we have to conceptualize the body-society relationship as governed either by biological essentialism or by social constructionism (Shilling, 1993, 2003; Sayer, 2000). (查看原文)
Social constructionist analyses tend to be united, however, by a political concern with the subjugation of bodily diversity and creativity in the contemporary era.
These theories were effective in illuminating how the body was ordered and inscribed by power relations, but frequently remained silent about how the body could be a source of the social, and about the ‘lived experience’ of embodied action. They also tended to erase any ontological existence the body had apart from society, thus making it impossible to evaluate institutions in terms of their beneficial or detrimental effects on the body. In response to this lacuna, the 1990s witnessed a rise in studies about ‘the body’s own experience of its embodiment’ which viewed the opportunities and constraints of action as given by the... (查看原文)
Nevertheless, it remains the case that each theorist views the body as a source of, a location for and a means by which individuals are emotionally and physically positioned within and oriented towards society. The notions of source, location and means are thus ‘umbrella’ terms, referring to a range of closely related concepts, but their general meaning and relational status are clear: they refer respectively to the generative properties of the body, to the social receptivity of the body, and to the body’s centrality to the outcomes of interaction between (groups of) embodied individuals and the structural features of society. (查看原文)
The three dimensions of the body’s status as a medium for the constitution of society (...) should not be considered mutually exclusive options or totally separate ‘functions’ of the body, but constitute instead co-existing moments in, or dimensions of, an ongoing process that manifests itself over time. The advantage of corporeal realism is that it provides us with an analytical way of gaining access to and examining the flux of socio-natural life. It is the erasure of certain of these dimensions of the body that results in the various forms of reductionism that afflict the dominant contemporary approaches examined above and, more generally, is why neither naturalistic views of the body nor their social constructionist alternatives can provide adequate conceptions of the relationship betw... (查看原文)
Indeed, in contrast to the contemporary tendency in body studies to focus on difference at the expense of what humans share as a single species living in a single world, the convergence thesis that can be taken from their work provides us with a form of corporeal realism that recognizes what people possess in common while also focusing on how social forces can locate themselves differentially in distinctive groups within society to create social inequalities. The balance between the body serving as a source, location and means undoubtedly shifts depending on a number of variables, and it is important to be clear about whose bodies are most productive of, or constrained by, society at any point in time. Nevertheless, we cannot capture the body’s ubiquity by referring to it exclusively as a ... (查看原文)
Turner (1991a, 1996: 30) has revised his work in light of such criticisms by developing foundationalist perspectives which recognize that the body possesses ‘biological and physiological characteristics’ and distinguish between how the body is classified, what the body is, and how it is experienced. Such revision seems essential. If we do not have some idea of our body’s own needs and abilities at a particular time, we ignore thousands of years of socio-natural evolutionary history and are unable to judge whether an institution or a society is good or bad for our well-being. As Kate Soper
(1995: 138) argues, if we reject the idea of bodily pleasures and pains that are irreducible to discourse, we remove the objective grounds for challenging the authority of custom and convention, and must ... (查看原文)
The idea that humans are lived, intentional body subjects, always practically oriented towards the world, assumes that individuals gradually become integrated, coordinated, and aware of their capacities and limitations. This sense of somatic unity has several preconditions and it is important to outline them if we are to appreciate contemporary applications of Merleau-Ponty’s work within the field. These preconditions include the development of our body schema, our capacity for motility, and the sensory media through which we are able to engage with the world. (查看原文)
Leder’s vision of the latent body is also partial as it seems to model itself upon the bodies of those whose capacities display the greatest affinity with a highly rationalized society, those healthy males in their middle years not subject to the bodily processes involved in menstruation, pregnancy, ageing, illness and decay. Iris Young (1980), for example, argues that instead of being characterized by intentionality, bodily unity, and transcendence, the typical modalities of feminine movement exhibit an inhibited intentionality, a discontinuous unity, and an ambiguous transcendence (see also Laws,
1990). (查看原文)
In contrast to theories of the ordered body, the embodied individual is active in Bourdieu’s work. Nevertheless, this subject is active on the basis of a relationship between the social field and habitus which mitigates against change, makes a virtue out of necessity, and reproduces their conditions of existence. If such a theory effectively disallows for the prospect of change, however, it can once again be said to reflect real concerns that the modern world is stifling the creativity of humans and allowing the body to be productive of social phenomena only when it is serving to help reproduce the status quo. (查看原文)
People’s sensory engagement with structures is vitally important as they can exert an important impact on whether they feel at ease with, and tend to reproduce, the ‘rules’ and ‘resources’ most readily accessible to them, or experience them as unpleasant, undesirable and worthy of transformation, yet Giddens’s focus on reflexivity marginalizes emotional experiences and expressions (Shilling and Mellor, 1996). (...) There is little sense of the non-pathological dispositions and tastes one finds in Bourdieu’s work. (查看原文)
In contrast to Butler, therefore, Grosz is determined to hold on to a view of the materially sexed body. As she argues, ‘[t]he body is constrained by its biological limits’ and ‘the kind of body inscribed’ makes an essential ‘difference to the meanings and functioning of gender that emerges’ (ibid.: ix, 58, 187). Society does not exert its effects on a corporeal ‘blank page’, but etches them on specific materials which contribute to the kind of physical ‘text’ produced (ibid.: 191). (查看原文)
Structuration theory seeks to hang on to the (sometimes sexed) body as an irreducible component of social reality. When it succeeds, however, the defining features of the physical flesh soon become defined entirely in terms of society. This is the case for Bourdieu and for sections of Grosz’s study. When it fails, the body disappears into the reflexive powers of the mind. This is the case with Giddens’s later writings in which cognitive reflexivity has come to define what it is to be human. (查看原文)
The promotion of religious belief had undoubted benefits for employers, but even Marx recognized that it was not just an instrument of the ruling class but was used by certain labourers to make tolerable the conditions of their existence. Furthermore, Marx, Durkheim and Simmel allow some space for the possibility that the creative capacities of embodied subjects could not only make work tolerable but may in future result in social change. For Marx, this involved a transcendence of oppression through revolution. For Durkheim, it involved the supersession of an anomic division of labour through the effervescent capacities of embodied subjects leading to the creation of a new moral framework informing work. For Simmel, it involved a continued thirst for the overcoming of forms that stunted th... (查看原文)
In Habermasian terms, it has been argued that ‘the capacity for regulation of emotion within the lifeworld is being lost to the system. Furthermore, this involves a demoralization of the lifeworld, as emotion is passed from the normatively regulated sphere of the lifeworld into the rather more anomic and instrumentally rational functioning of the system’ (ibid.). (查看原文)
The ‘openness’, unpredictability and frailty of our bodies mean that we have to invest work and meaning into our physical selves if we are to survive and prosper as human beings, while the tasks associated with reproduction and caring have long been viewed as identity-giving activities across various cultures.
While the need to earn enough to survive remains a strong incentive for people to remain engaged with the labour market, the weakening boundary between waged labour and body work has promoted for some more productive ways in which people’s jobs and identities have merged. Tasks traditionally associated with job-related, (p. 99) cultural and reproductive forms of body work have increasingly become incorporated into the structural parameters of waged labour. (查看原文)
(...) but sport is also spoken of as a religion for an apparently secular age. If sport really can provide a quasi-religious vehicle of understanding and transcendence from the mundane realities of daily life (Bellah, 1967: 12; Hoffman, 1992), it cannot reasonably be reduced entirely to the rationalized environs of the modern world, but deserves consideration in its own right and from a variety of perspectives. (查看原文)
Analysing the possible future effects of genetic technology, Blake (1996) looks forward to a time when gender may cease to have fixed bodily or sporting boundaries. This vision of sports populated by scientifically programmed humans may not promise much for the future of human creativity and spontaneity. (查看原文)
This transformation from the traditional to the modern relationship between food and social structure was a long-term process, but the Church and the State were highly influential in effecting this change. In medieval Europe, the Catholic Church imparted the pleasures of the flesh with positive religious meaning, and had a relatively relaxed approach towards food and drink in comparison with later Protestant Reformers..2 Religious rituals had eating at their centre. In early modern Europe, however, the rise of Protestantism and the development of increasingly extensive economic markets signalled a trend away from eating communities. Calvin and later reformers elevated the individual over the worldly collectivity, and made a strong link between the pleasures of eating/drinking and sin (reje... (查看原文)
Both food and body images have become highly rationalized. The problem for the consumer is that the forms of rationalization they are predicated on are contradictory. Convenience, speed and immediate gratification govern the former, in line with the principles informing consumer culture, while effort, denial and asceticism govern the latter, in line with the emphasis on hard work in the sphere of production. (查看原文)
Vegetarianism has been interpreted by Adams (1990) as a feminist response to the supposedly patriarchally inspired slaughter and eating of animals, but it is the more radical abstinence from food that has been seen as the deepest bodily refusal of patriarchal norms surrounding food and sex. Systematic fasting was viewed above as a possible consequence of the location of patriarchal norms on the bodies of women. However, Bell (1985), Bynum (1987) and Brumberg (1988) each examine the possibility that such action might be seen as a manifestation of active opposition to male-dominated society. In the medieval era, women used food (and the refusal of food) as a means of
transcending their earthly roles, avoiding marriage and the perils of childbirth, and gaining status and a degree of power (By... (查看原文)
作者: 【英】克里斯·希林 原作名: The Body in Culture, Technology and Society isbn: 7301181701 书名: 文化、技术与社会中的身体 页数: 276 译者:李康 定价: 32.00元 出版社: 北京大学出版社 装帧: 平装 出版年: 2011-1
