Contemporary Culture and Media: The Body

The Body and Sociology

• Classic theorists didn't explore the body much, but embodiment questions dualisms like nature/culture and mind/matter.
• Sociology's focus on social reality often overlooks the body, but social reality shapes physical reality.
• Advances in areas like in vitro fertilization and genetic engineering have the potential to alter our view of the human subject matter.

The Body in Discourse

• Discourses shape our thoughts, performances, and regulation of bodies.
• A discourse expresses a set of rules which ‘govern’ or ‘position’ us (and our bodies) in different ways.

The Biological Body

• Essentialist views of the body have a long history in the West.
• Biology is often thought to determine identities, justifying social positions based on gender, race, class, ability, and species.

The Body in Culture: Body as Identity

• The body is manipulated through modification and commodification.
• It serves as a physical demonstration of individual and group identity, e.g., within youth subcultures.

Goth Subculture

• The body is central to Goth identity, involving physical manipulation like corsets, piercings, and tattoos.
• Goth style challenges norms of gender and sexual politics, emphasizing transgressive and erotic elements.

The Body in Culture: Technology

• Technology is used to go beyond bodily capabilities and change the body itself.
• Digital culture and the posthuman concept consider the body as code.

Socio-Politics of the Body: Animality

• The mind/body dualism leads to consequences like justifying vivisection and meat-eating.
• Humans often deny their animality through practices like managing body hair and linguistic distinctions.

Socio-Politics of the Body: Gender

• Denial of rights and privileges, such as education, suffrage, and political leadership, is linked to gender.
• Physical and reproductive manipulation impacts brain development and reinforces dimorphism ideals.

Socio-Politics of the Body: Nationalism

• Bodies are produced for national import, serving as cheap labor, consumers, and soldiers.
• Settler-colonialism and imperialist expansion exploit bodies for global influence.
• Specific implications exist for female-bodied persons, such as the revival of the “Mother Heroine” Medal in Russia and abortion restrictions.

Socio-Politics of the Body: Transgender Folks

• Moral panics arise over transgender individuals, often portrayed as “predators” or “imposters.”
• Intense media debates occur over fairness in sports and who counts as “real” and authentic.
• This distracts from systematic discrimination in housing, employment, and healthcare.

The Regulated Body

• States and institutions regulate bodies through various means, including taking life, inflicting pain, and restricting activities.
• External controls promote internal regulation, leading to societal obsessions with health.

The Regulated Body: Fetishization of Health

• The line between external and internal regulation is often blurred.
• Societal obsession with being ‘healthy’ results in discrimination and stigma for those who don't conform.
• Health is commodified and afforded to the privileged.

The Regulated Body: Fat Bodies

• Fat bodies, once celebrated, are now often ridiculed.
• The BMI index is a social construction, and “poor health” justifications are used for dehumanization.
• The body positivity movement advocates for the right to exist and respect for fat people.

Summary

• The body is a site of contest where changing social norms and cultural ideas are imposed and performed.
• Technology and the progress of ideas, like medicalization, embed these norms.
• This results in embodied forms of regulation that determine the acceptability and treatment of people.