Toward a Sociology of the Body

This essay is designed to establish the theoretical framework and goals for The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Body and Embodiment, foremost of which is delineating what a sociology of the body must entail. Critically, a sociology of the body must recognize bodies as both cause and consequence of societal forces. It must also investigate how bodies change in response to their surroundings: not just through the centuries-long process of evolution but within a single individual’s lifetime. We also suggest not only a sociology of the body but also the body in sociology. This approach holds that consideration of bodies—including both the body of the researcher as well as that of the researched—can help to enrich sociological understandings of a wide range of social dynamics and institutions. In sociological subfields ranging from law to labor, and from medicine to migration, attending to the social body has the potential to newly illuminate the mechanisms that underlie our social institutions. This handbook’s early chapters focus primarily on method, debating and elaborating the method(s) that the authors find most useful for studying the body in society. Subsequent chapters shift focus toward the presentation of empirical findings and analysis, but with a continuing focus on detailing their methodological choices and innovations. A detailed outline exploring the twenty-seven chapters of the handbook is provided in this essay.

Bodies That Don’t Matter, but Labor That Does

Singapore and Dubai are hypermodern city-states that host large temporary migrant populations. The majority of this group is composed of low-wage workers, migrant men from India who labor under conditions of structural inequality and extreme precarity. While there is a growing literature that discusses the issues of debt bondage and unfair conditions of employment that these men face, there is far less interrogation of the everyday and embodied forms of discrimination they encounter. In taking a deeply embodied and ethnographic approach to understanding the experiences of low-wage migrant male workers in these two metropolises, this chapter demonstrates how they are subject to multiple tropes that, in totality, seek to marginalize and devalue their work and the more intangible “learning” of the city that they undertake as part of the migration trajectory. As a result, despite extended periods of sojourn, they are never fully incorporated into the urban.

Animal, Mechanical, and Me

Organ donation and transplantation is a largely successful treatment used to replace failing organs. However, donation rates have never met the demand for transplantable organs. Biomedical researchers are exploring alternative sources from nonhuman animal donors such as pigs; improved biotechnological solutions such as total artificial hearts; and 3D printed organs developed from the recipient’s own cells. These solutions are in various stages of development, and they may or may not prove viable in terms of cost, functionality, and/or compatibility with the recipient’s body. In this chapter, I ask not about the viability of these proposed solutions, but rather, about the acceptability of the various technologies to potential recipients. Simply put: were these organ transplant alternatives to become available, would patients agree to them? Analyzing answers from focus group interviews and surveys, I use the responses to show that individuals imagine these various technologies as familiar or foreign, self or other, clean or dirty, and so on. People envisage that using different materials will certainly affect their bodies but also their subjectivities. New biotechnologies are raising questions about altering subjectivity through body modification, and the answers to these questions demonstrate ambiguity.

The Artificial Pancreas in Cyborg Bodies

The new artificial pancreas system includes a body-attached blood glucose sensor that tracks glucose levels, a worn insulin infusion pump that communicates with the sensor, and features new software that integrates the two systems. The artificial pancreas is purportedly revolutionary because of its closed-loop design, which means that the machine can give insulin without direct patient intervention. It can read a blood sugar and administer insulin based on an algorithm. But, the hardware for the corporate artificial pancreas is expensive and its software code is closed-access. Yet, well-educated, tech-savvy diabetics have been fashioning their own fully automated do-it-yourself (DIY) artificial pancreases for years, relying on small-scale manufacturing, open-source software, and inventive repurposing of corporate hardware. In this chapter, we trace the corporate and DIY artificial pancreases as they grapple with issues of design and accessibility in a content where not everyone can become a diabetic cyborg. The corporate artificial pancreas offers the cyborg low levels of agency and no ownership and control over his or her own data; it also requires access to health insurance in order to procure and use the technology. The DIY artificial pancreas offers patients a more robust of agency but also requires high levels of intellectual capital to hack the devices and make the system work safely. We argue that efforts to increase agency, radically democratize biotechnology, and expand information ownership in the DIY movement are characterized by ideologies and social inequalities that also define corporate pathways.

Good-Looking Men Require Hard-Working Women: The Labor of Consumption in the Grooming Industry

This chapter considers the cultural and organizational expenditure of women’s labor that masculinizes beauty products, services, spaces, and experiences. Drawing from 9 months of ethnographic observations at two high-service men’s salons—Adonis and The Executive—and fifty interviews with the salons’ employees and clients, the author shows how women bear the burden of making beauty a socially enhancing practice for heterosexual men. Men sitting at the nexus of race, class, and sexual privilege are remade rather than compromised at Adonis and The Executive. The author moves the conversation away from questions focused solely on the clients’ experiences to the labor that makes their consumption possible. This helps to explain how privilege is maintained through everyday organizations, interpersonal interactions, and embodied practices; and how spaces and practices that appear to blur the gender binary may actually reinforce the status quo. The emotional labor especially women beauty workers do, the touching rules by which they are obliged to operate, and the educational work they do as experts to make men competent beauty consumers all pillar men’s access to women’s bodies, sexualities, and emotions.

Beyond Binary Sex and Gender Ideology

Perceived as natural and universal, the framing of sex and gender as binaries is in fact a cultural ideology. The empirical reality is that sex is a spectrum, manifesting in a wide array of sex variance, some of it formally categorized as intersex by scientists and doctors, and some not. This article gives an overview of how different societies have organized sex and gender into three, four, or more categories, and of the imposition of binary sex/gender as part of the European colonialist project. It then presents case histories examining four transgender and/or intersex individuals in the contemporary context, illustrating how individuals negotiate, exploit, or subvert binary sex/gender ideologies in conceptualizing physical sex variance and gender transition.

Sensory Experience AS Method

The researcher’s body and sensory faculties are both experientially involved in interactional field settings. Drawing on their research, the authors sketch out three sensory encounters informed by theoretical and methodological debates pertaining to subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Dealing with issues of race, gender, and heritage, the authors demonstrate how their bodies as researchers go through processes of sensory learning and calibration. Data are collectively generated along with respondents during fieldwork. In the discussion, the authors provide a lens through which corporeal and sensory experiences can be deployed as an important methodological tool in the generation and theorization of data in ethnographic research.

The Place of the Body in Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence

Scholarship presents a complex picture of women’s resistance to male violence and control. Despite its attention to nuance, intimate partner violence research should further investigate the role of the body and embodiment, that is, how our bodies shape the ways in which individuals perceive and act in the world. To gain purchase on existing research and to chart directions for future investigation, the authors conducted a scoping review and textual analysis. The work in this chapter is guided by three questions: (1) What is the current state of knowledge regarding resistance, the body, and embodiment in the context of intimate partner violence? (2) How does this literature discuss and conceptualize embodiment in the context of resistance? (3) What can we learn through a deeper analysis of embodied resistance in the context of intimate partner violence? Implications of the authors’ findings are discussed.

Feeding and Fasting Bodies

Treating women as helpless victims of social conventions or as neoliberal, postmodern subjects to understand “food femininities” obscures the fact that bodies are situated in social hierarchies. Social functions and roles tied to the female body bring about difference in eating and dieting practices. This chapter applies Bourdeusian analysis to the dieting and religious fasting practices of forty-eight women in the rapidly neoliberalizing city of Kolkata, India, to show how structurally rooted dispositions inform rules of engagement surrounding eating. Dieting and religious fasting, though simultaneously self-gratifying and strenuous, took on very different meanings depending on how they enabled women to seek recognition and meaning in their daily lives. The women who dieted projected their bodies onto the public sphere to secure the benefits that the new economic order could bestow, while familial fasts were an embodiment of the collective, material struggles less privileged women encountered on a daily basis.

Health at Every Size (HAES™) as a Reform (Social) Movement within Public Health

This article uses situational analysis to examine the history and current applications of Health at Every Size™ as a reform movement within public health, supported by fat political/social movements. Situational mapping highlights the vast and diverse worlds of public health broadly conceived, and how fat politics intersects with HAES. Drawing on personal and organizational accounts of how HAES emerged through pathways of existing fat political activism and health professional work, the author shows how HAES aligns closely with public health by centering health and is sometimes critiqued for ignoring fat acceptance. However, HAES generally uses a “both/and perspective”—both health and acceptance as key and inseparable pieces of HAES. HAES’s position as a reform movement within public health highlights tensions between a politics of reform and a politics of radical change within and between body activism movements.