body is understood and analyzed, with the most obvious approaches being rooted within the physical sciences and classified as being part of a naturalistic perspective (Shilling 2012). In this chapter, however, we will focus on three main sociological approaches. First, those which draw attention to the social regulation of the body, especially the way in which social institutions regulate, control, monitor, and use bodies. Our bodies are highly politicized. Whilst we might like to think that we own and have control of our own bodies and what we do with and to them, we do not. What we can do with our bodies is constrained by legal diktats and social norms, as is evident in contemporary debates on topics such as euthanasia, organ transplantation, and abortion. Feminist scholars have illustrated ways in which medicine has for centuries controlled the bodies of women (Martin 1989; Mason 2013; Ussher 2006). Regulatory practices further constrain bodies through processes of categorization which can be difficult to resist, a readily obvious example is the imposition of static gender categories often rooted in biological essentialism (Connell 2012). A view that prompts important questions about the ontology of the body.
A second perspective within the sociology of the body focuses on the ontology of the body. A number of theorists have asked the question: What exactly is the body? Their answer is that in late modern societies we seem to have become increasingly uncertain as to what the body actually is. For most sociologists the body is to a greater or lesser extent socially constructed. However, there are a number of variants of this view, with some arguing that the body is simply a fabrication (Armstrong 1983) – an effect of its discursive context – while others maintain that bodies display certain characteristics (e.g. mannerisms, gait, shape) which are influenced by social and cultural factors. Productive conceptual frameworks however recognize the interplay between the biological body and social relations. Reflecting gender for example, and the “gender-biology nexus” Annandale and her colleagues (2018), outline a theoretical framework that takes into account the “gender-shaping of biology” and the “biologic-shaping of gender” seeing these as co-“constitutive shaping processes.” This approach is helpful not least because it moves beyond an ontological impasse but also helps us appreciated how gender inequalities in health operate (Williams and Bendelow 1998).
The third approach pays more attention to the way the body is experienced or lived. Whilst this phenomenological orientation accepts that the body is to some extent socially fashioned, it argues that sociology must take account of what the body, or rather embodied actor, actually does. In this sense it is perhaps more accurately described as a sociology of embodiment or embodied sociology rather than a sociology of the body. This approach to the study of the body has gained much currency, particularly in relation to illness (Carel 2016; Leder 1990). It has to some extent emerged as a result of creative debates within this field of study which have attempted to counter the dominant structural approach that concentrates on the social regulation of bodies. This research, which has outlined the ways in which bodies are socially regulated however, remains crucial for our understanding of the body in society.
Social Regulation of Bodies
In his book Regulating Bodies, Turner (1992) suggests that late modern societies are moving toward what he refers to as a “somatic society;” that is, a social system in which the body constitutes the central field of political and cultural activity. The major concerns of society are becoming less to do with increasing production, as was the case in industrial capitalism, and more to do with the regulation of bodies. Turner (1992: 12–13) writes:
our major political preoccupations are how to regulate the spaces between bodies, to monitor the interfaces between bodies, societies and cultures … We want to close up bodies by promoting safe sex, sex education, free condoms and clean needles. We are concerned about whether the human population of the world can survive global pollution. The somatic society is thus crucially, perhaps critically structured around regulating bodies.
The concerns of the somatic society are also evidenced by the way in which contemporary political movements such as, pro- and anti-abortion campaigns, debates about fertility and infertility, and disabilities coalesce around body matters (Ettorre 2010), as do politics of environmentalism all of which highlight our embodied vulnerabilities (Bulter 2015). Bodies are regulated within society through the institutions of governance notably law, religion, and medicine. The role of religion, law, and medicine is especially evident at the birth and death of bodies. As society became more secularized it also become more medicalized, with medicine now serving a moral as well as a clinical function (Busfield 2017).
Developing an analytical framework which works at two levels – the bodies of individuals and the bodies of populations – Turner (2008) identifies four basic social tasks which are central to social order. We might refer to these as the four “r” s. First, reproduction, which refers to the creation of institutions that govern populations over time to ensure the satisfaction of physical needs, for example the control of sexuality. Second, the need for the regulation of bodies, particularly medical surveillance and the control of crime. Third, restraint, which refers to the inner self and inducements to control desire and passion in the interests of social organization. Fourth, the representation of the body, which refers to its physical presentation on the world’s stage.
Turner’s conceptualization of these four “r”s owes a great deal to the ideas of Foucault, especially his writings on normalization and surveillance. These draw attention to the ways in which bodies are monitored, assessed, and corrected within modern institutions. A central theme which runs through Foucault’s (1976, 1979) work is that the shift from pre-modern to modern forms of society involved the displacement of what he terms sovereign power, wherein power resided in the body of the monarch, by disciplinary power, wherein power is invested in the bodies of the wider population. Disciplinary power refers to the way in which bodies are regulated, trained, maintained, and understood; it is most evident in social institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals. Disciplinary power works at two levels. First, individual bodies are trained and observed. Foucault refers to this as the anatomo-politics of the human body. Second, and concurrently, populations are monitored. He refers to this process as “regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population” (Foucault 1981: 139). It is these two levels – the individual and the population – which form the basis of Turner’s arguments about regulating bodies that we have discussed above. Foucault argues that it is within social institutions that knowledge of bodies is produced. For example, the observation of bodies in prisons yielded a body of knowledge we now know as criminology, the observation of bodies in hospitals contributed to biomedical science, epidemiological surveys of communities generate knowledge of health risk factors. In fact, it was the discourse of pathological medicine in the eighteenth century which formed the basis of the bodies in Western society that we have come to be familiar with today.
The surveillance and more especially self-surveillance of bodies has dispersed exponentially since Foucault was writing, but not in ways that his thesis would anticipate. Not least because technologies have become networked through a multiplicity of digital self-monitoring and self-tracking devices that generate data on individuals everyday bodily practices such as, sleeping, walking, running, eating and breathing. These data may be of value not only to individuals keen to reflect on their own bodily practices, but also to commercial enterprises who harvest vast quantities of data from populations for analysis and marketing. The digital health sector emerges as a major aspect of the contemporary political economy of health, where profits are made from tracking data such that sociologists now speak of “digital bodies,” “quantified bodies” and “the quantified self” (Lupton 2016; Prainsack 2017). Bodies become entangled in digitized networks opening up the potential for generation of novel categorizations of somatic groupings around levels of fitness, weight, diets, sexual practices, alcohol use, and so on. These categorizations may in turn may be classed, racialized, and gendered. Digitized bio-political data is therefore generating somatic social categories suspectable to new modes of regulation.
Through these discussions, we can see that the regulation of bodies is crucial to the maintenance of social order. This observation forms the basis of Mary Douglas’s (1966,
