The Body - Chris Shilling

There are 5 key social factors that made the Body come to the forefront for academia:

1. The resurgence of second wave feminism in the 60/70s made personal issues political.  Inequalities in health provision, abortion, rape, porn, and prostitution were harmful to women's interests.  Women went beyond the authorised role of wife, mother or daughter to challenge the restrictions placed on and felt by individuals and the wider social position of specific groups.

2. The increase in alternative and ecological lifestyles.  Left wingers and anti-war campaigners condemned consumer culture, military conflict and the arms race as it reduced life to the pursuit of wealth and domination.  Governments were treating people and the natural environment as a disposable means to a narrow, destructive and consumer society end.

3. The ageing of the body in the westernised world, through increased life expectancy, will lead to more chronic ill health, more resource required to manage it and politically may lead to generational conflict.

4. Social visibility vía social media leads to the body becoming an object for display, and thus a desirable body achieves status via impression management and social roles.

5. Scrutiny of 'alien bodies' after 9/11 and the four bombs on the Underground.  Bodies are scrutinised overtly and covertly by social media, internet activity, credit card purchases and cctv.

Our bodies are a combination of genetics and biological issues, married with the impact of our social interactions.  Political actions aggravate this.   Eg the Dutch famine of 1944-5 when Germany stopped food supplies to the Netherlands, affected the health of those developing 'in utero' to the 2nd and 3rd generations.  The socially determined restriction of food to one generation can impact on patterns of morbidity and mortality for later generations.  The body has multiple physical receptors (eye, ear, touch) that create neural patterns to map our interactions with objects and people - the brain shapes these encounters, but is also shaped by these bodily experiences.

Social and biological processes work together for basic and socially vital attributes such as language and emotions.  Language requires the co-operation required for cultural and economic activity.  Emotions, for relationships with others and responses to situations such as danger, have gendered responses.  The fight or flight response of adrenalin, automatically prepares the individual for action, but the outcome is culturally varied, dependent on masculine or feminine socialisation.  Our general habits in life are shaped by social relationships and can be changed by the individual's reflections and actions.

There is a debate about having bodies (i.e. able to act) and being bodies (placing constraints on activities) - particularly in the physicality of sex difference.  Historically sex difference has assigned feed identities to men and women - which is both limited and  unequal.  In Victorian times (i.e. recent Western history) female biological facts (menstruation, pregnancy and childbirth/rearing) led to women being precluded from activities that provided men with benefits of economics, health, and social standing.  Anatomy determined destiny.

From Victorian times, sexed bodies became an important foundation for social distinctions, identity and divisions.  Women's natural role was to bear children and provide a basis for a household but precluded any significant public role.  The Enlightenment, with its one sex/one flesh model, created the problem of justifying the continued domination of men over women when progressive philosophical thought was founded on commitment to equal rights.  If men and women were essentially similar, there was no justification for denying women equal rights to men.  The solution to this dilemma was to explain the inequality on the ground of natural conditions over which society was powerless.  Thus men were embodied as superior, and women inferior.

Second wave feminists differentiated between the biologically given in the female body, and that which was culturally added (i.e. views and prejudices about women that could not be justified by reference to their bodies).  They acknowledged women were physically different but also aimed to restore some of the malleability accorded to the male and female evident in the one sex/one flesh model.  The inequalities faced by women had their root in the prejudicial, cultural views  of what it was to be female and could/should not be justified by the sexed body.  Simone de Beauvoir, in The Second Sex, suggested girls were apprenticed into a femininity that distorted the biological differences between men and women.  Boys were encouraged to participate in contact sports for self-confidence and to use their bodies for their own ends; girls were directed to passive pursuits that left them vulnerable to being objectified and dominated.  Beauvoir said it was the socially organised activities that limited the female body and physically socialised women into the restricted roles of wife and mother. "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman".