3. Educating bodies

The matter of education raises broader issues about how profit or value is extracted from or added to embodied subjects. Educational institutions seek to structure and direct people’s embodied capacities for experiencing, reflecting on, and engaging with the social, physical, and symbolic environments in which they live. The results of these educational processes can also enhance or constrain people’s ability to add value to their own lives as well as to those of others. ‘Educating bodies’ considers the mechanisms involved in body pedagogics, described by Marcel Mauss as ‘techniques of the body’, comprising biological, physiological, and social processes, as well as John Dewey’s discussion of anoetic and noetic knowledge.

1. Natural bodies or social bodies?

Social factors are important for the constitution and development of our embodied being. Yet some still consider the human body to be an exclusively biological entity. ‘Natural bodies or social bodies?’ describes the emergence, from the social sciences and humanities, of the broad interdisciplinary research area of ‘body studies’. This academic field addresses a wide variety of social and cultural issues as relevant to the inescapably bodily character of human existence. It has become a viable subject due to various social and historical developments—feminist and environmental campaigns, medical and technological developments, and the rise of consumer culture—that raised the visibility of the body as a general academic issue.

Introduction

Our embodied existence can be seen as a foundation on which to build an empirically informed yet distinctive approach to the analysis of society, identity, culture, and history. The Introduction explains the focus of this VSI on a limited number of body matters that demonstrate clearly the importance of an embodied perspective of our world. The rise and parameters of this interdisciplinary area of study are explored before considering: ‘sexed bodies’, ‘governed bodies’, ‘educated bodies’, and ‘bodies as commodities’. Each of these topics involves a range of contrasting issues, but they also share in common three themes that inform and provide direction to the main arguments in this book.

5. Bodies as commodities

Bodies have been conceptualized and valued in a wide variety of ways across contrasting cultures. There has been a multiplication of methods through which the physical appearance, organs, and flesh of the living and the dead have become implicated in market transactions. ‘Bodies as commodities’ considers marketing appearance, medicalizing bodies for profit, trafficking body parts, and selling embodied subjects into forced labour and slavery, which each highlight a breakdown of the distinction between physical subjects and commodities. It also discusses the resistance of such commodification by international bodies and anti-slavery organizations working to end forced and indentured labour, and alternative practices challenging the commodification of body parts, fluids, and processes.

6. Bodies matter: dilemmas and controversies

‘Bodies matter: dilemmas and controversies’ considers three key questions—are mediated bodies immoral? How do people manage bodily change? Have our bodies become sacred? They each show how body matters reach beyond the boundaries of enfleshed persons. Embodied individuals are always situated within a wider social and material environment that they shape and are shaped by. The manner in which bodies are conceptualized, experienced, lived, and treated provides us with far more than a limited and localized topic, of interest only to physiologists and others in the biological sciences. Instead, these issues provide key means of approaching social relationships, cultural ideas, technological developments, and historical change.

4. Governing bodies

Theories of governance—how rule or regulation is accomplished across nations, institutions, and organizations—have long included a focus on strategies states pursue in seeking to control and develop the bodily capacities of their citizens. In so doing, they raise questions about how states conceptualize the bodies which they seek to govern; which aspects of people’s embodied beings they value; and the resistance they may confront when attempting to implement their policies and achieve their aims. ‘Governing bodies’ considers the thoughts of sociologist Bryan S. Turner; French philosopher Michel Foucault, who focused on the transition from medieval to modern forms of governance; and issues of security and biopolitics.

2. Sexed bodies

‘Sexed bodies’ reviews how sexed bodies have been classified historically, which provides useful insights into cultural perceptions of men and women. If social prejudices and practices can shape physical development, amplifying or creating differences between the sexes, recent developments in neuroscience suggest that the brain is also likely to be affected by these processes. Advances in endocrinology have also promoted a significantly different view of the relationship between the body and sex. It concludes with the views of the contemporary feminist, Judith Butler, who has argued that the sexed body attains its social significance and appearance of substance as a result of the performances people engage in.