Bodies and Geographical Scale

Flashcards about bodies, scale and construction in geography.

The Body

• concrete material, nerves, muscles etc

• Physical bodies

• natural and unnatural bodies

• bodies affected by social, political, economic

• (Grosz, 1992

The body as Geography’s Other

• some focus on the body through feminism / anti-racism

• Arnold, 2004

Essentialist Thinking

• The idea that the anatomical body is a pre-discursive given and the basis for social differentiation; associated with thinkers like Irigaray and Braidotti.

• Butler, 1993

Social Constructionist Thinking

• The perspective that the material body is a site of inscription through which societies designate categories of human/non-human, race, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of difference;

• Butler, 1993

Embodied Geographies

• As a way of thinking of how the disciplining of the body shapes social experience and even enables forms of resistance to social structures.

• Butler, 1993

Race, ‘Obesity’ and ‘Healthy’ Bodies

• Racial origins of fatphobia; preference of slimness over fatness which is deeply socialised. Historical work of Sabrina Strings - fear over being fat targeted low income women of colour in the US.

• Colls et al., 2014

Race

• race seen as natural and biological

• Kobayashi and Peake, 1994

Race as a Territorial Strategy

• A territorial strategy through which some people were seen as lacking in cultural and social development and incapable of rational self-determination.

• Bruan, 2014

Sarah Baartman (1789 – 1815) case study

• Was from South Africa. Was 'discovered' by white racist scientists who were fascinated by her body.

• She was put on display as a form of racial scientific analysis.

• Aimed to use her as an example of racial differentiation. Her body dissected & put on display.

• Intense obsession with her sexuality.

• View of Africans as having a animalistic nature. The broader public was invited to compare themselves to her.

• McKittrcik, 2010

Sex/Gender

• Sex as the material basis for gender: biocultural.

• Ideas about bodily features e.g. facial hair

• ideas about what body looks like have changed

• Butler, 1993

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble

• Gender does not denote a substantive being but a relative point of convergence among culturally and historically specific sets of relations.

• Butler, 1993

Haraway – Natural and Unnatural Bodies

• Bodies as inherently ‘unnatural’.

• The unnatural-ness of bodies as a standpoint from which to trouble the naturalized status of categories like gender and sex.

• The body as a chimera – existing in networked relations with machines/non-human objects/the natural environment.

• Haraway, 1987

Cyborg

• As a political tool: as a way of transgressing boundaries and imagining life as lived in embodied closeness with machines/non-human beings who shape how we experience our bodies.

• Haraway, 1987

Scale

differentiation in which social relations are embedded within a hierarchical scaffolding of nested territorial units stretching from the global, to body - (Brenner 2005, 9)

Scale - (Smith 2000, 725)

• Platforms for specific kinds of social activity. [Scales] are platforms of absolute space in a wider sea of relational space.

Scale (Socially Constructed)

• socially constructed: produced through social discourses.

• Not as hierarchical or nested but as relational: produced through a set of social, economic and political relations that necessarily link the body, the home, the family etc. to the nation, the geopolitical, international discourse.

• Mounts, 2018