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6 The Sociology of the Body
SARAH NETTLETON
In Tom Stoppard’s (1967) play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, the two central characters lament the precariousness of their lives. Rosencrantz seeks solace in life’s only certainty when he comments that “the only beginning is birth and the only end is death – if we can’t count on that what can we count on?” To this he might have added that he could reliably count on the fact that he had a body. The “fact” that we are born, have a body, and then die is of course something that does seem to be beyond question. It is something that we can hold on to, as we live in a world that appears to be ever more uncertain and ever more risky (Shilling and Mellor 2017).
But is this fact so obvious? Ironically, the more sophisticated our medical, technological, and scientific knowledge of bodies becomes, the more uncertain we are as to what the body actually is. For example, technological innovations can disrupt boundaries between the physical (or seemingly natural) and social body. With the development of assisted conception, when does birth begin? With the development of life-extending technologies, when does the life of a physical body end? With the development of prosthetic technologies, what constitutes a “pure” human? It seems the old certainties around birth, life, and death are becoming increasingly unstable. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that attempts to understand the social and ethical significance of the body have become central to sociological debates. Attempts to develop a sociological appreciation of the body important in the subdiscipline of the sociology of health and illness. Health, disease and illness are fundamentally embodied experiences that are embedded in social contexts (Nettleton 2020). How bodies are conceptualized, maintained, monitored and managed is therefore profoundly political and so contentious. The aim of this chapter is to delineate some of the key developments in the sociological theorizing of the body and to assess their significance for a number of substantive issues in medical sociology. To meet this aim, the chapter will first review the main perspectives on the sociology of the body and social theorists who have informed each of these approaches. Second, the chapter will outline the parameters of the sociology of embodiment or perhaps more appropriately an embodied sociology. Concepts which have emerged from these debates such as flexible immunity bodies, body projects, biovalue and virtual bodies will also be discussed. Finally, a number of substantive issues which are central to medical sociology will be considered to highlight the merits of incorporating the body into the analysis of matters associated with health and illness. These issues are: illness and injury, body work, and embodied health inequalities.
SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVES ON THE SOCIOLOGY OF THE BODY
There is a substantial literature on the sociology of the body which spans a range
