Embodied Action, Embodied Theory: Understanding the Body in Society
A special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 August 2012) | Viewed by 97198
Special Issue Editors
Interests: sociology of health; illness; health policy and health care; in particular chronic illness; disability; and alternative and complementary therapies; deviant behavior; qualitative research methods; sociology of the body
Interests: sociology of the body; motherhood; disability; policy; eugenics and reproductive knowledge production; all as forms of social control
Special Issue Information
This special issue follows the ISA World Forum on "The Body in the Social Sciences" to be held in Buenos Aries Aug 1-4, 2012 (http://www.isa-sociology.org/buenos-aires-2012/rc/rc.php?n=RC54), but is also open to submissions of papers not presented at the Forum. This special issue focuses on the interconnectedness of the body and society, thus it will include works that explore how the body is shaped by and constrained through socio-cultural processes, as well as those that focus on how bodies in action affect the societies in which they operate. As Goffman (1972) pointed out in his seminal presidential address to the American Sociological Association, "The Interaction Order," we cannot act without our bodies, meaning sociology must account for the body.
Moreover, accounting for the body and its interconnectedness with society gives rise to recurring debates concerning whether or not a true sociology of the body requires a recasting of sociological theory. Recent sociological writing on the body by such writers as Chris Shilling, Bryan Turner, Arthur Frank, Margaret Shildrick, and Mike Featherstone (to name a few) does more than merely mark out a substantive area for the body that leaves traditional sociological perspectives unchallenged. Rather, this body of work has made monumental inroads in reinserting the body into sociological research and bridging that work into a vigorous theory of the sociological body and of embodied sociology. In this work, the classic works of Goffman and Foucault have been re-examined for their embodied perspectives, the contributions of feminist scholars have been brought into a sociological framing of the body, and the implications of consumerism, aging populations, high modernity and postmodernity have been incorporated into a burgeoning sociological examination of the body. Current scholarship continues working towards linking corporeal experience to social processes, systems, and structures, permitting sociologists of the body to understand the workings of power, interactions between social actors, and the ways that social norms and roles operate in nuanced and analytically powerful ways.
This special issue invites papers that further develop these theories and sociological understandings of the body. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the connections between the lived body and the body as a set of social experiences, insights into the body as a site of social control, and examinations of the body as a vehicle for the expression and consumption of culture.
Dr. Jacqueline Low
Prof. Dr. Claudia Malacrida
Guest Editors
Keywords
- body
- social body
- embodiment
- corporeality
- lived body
- social theory and the body
- social control of the body
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