Constructing Bodies

Description

It is almost impossible to read a magazine, go online, or watch TV without encountering images or stories about various ways to shape, decorate, alter and ‘improve’ one’s body. Similarly, in recent decades, ‘the body’ has also become the focus of scholarly attention. In fact, it has now become a major area of scholarship in sociology and provides a central framework for addressing issues in gender, sexuality, health, childhood, ageing, disability among many others.

This course focuses on human embodiment and the social practices associated with bodies. There are many aspects of human embodiment which are taken for granted in everyday life, yet these are products of complex social and political process and actions located with particular socio-historic contexts. To explore the ‘social construction’ of bodies is not to deny their materiality. Rather the focus is on both the ways in which the body is shaped in culturally and historically specific terms and the lived body as a site of knowledge and experience. Through attention to specific practices, and technologies, such as cosmetic surgery, sexual enhancement and ‘extreme’ body modification, the course will disrupt oppositions between conformity and transgression, control and agency, materiality and
cultural meanings.