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chapter 1
Introduction
Theorizing the body
One of the most successful horror movies of the 1950s, the era when horror
movies really came into their own in the United States, was Invasion of the
Body Snatchers. This 1956 film explores a world in which aliens from outer
space invade earth by replacing human beings with new bodies that look
just like them, but that are devoid of real human emotion. It’s typically
interpreted today as a Cold War allegory on either the threat of McCarthyism
in the United States, or the dangers posed by the loss of individuality in the
Soviet Union. Twenty years later, another horror film, The Stepford Wives,
took the idea of body replacement one step further. Stepford, an “idyllic”
suburban community in Connecticut, only appears to be perfect; it turns
out that the husbands in the town have been killing their wives and replacing
them with robots who look exactly like them, but are perfectly submissive,
and thus (from the perspective of the men) are perfect wives. This film was
made during the rise of feminism in the United States, and is clearly a
statement about male fear during the era of women’s liberation. Over the
decades, a number of other films have also featured humans being taken
over or assimilated by other life forms. In all of these cases, the films focus
squarely on the body.
In fact, just a cursory look at the history of horror films shows that a
remarkable number of them are indeed focused on the body – bodies that
are not what they seem (The Thing), bodies that grow or shrink thanks to
exposure to toxins (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman), bodies which transform
into animals (An American Werewolf in London) or monsters (Species),
bodies which have aliens (Alien) or demons (Rosemary’s Baby) growing
inside of them, and bodies which feed on the living (The Night of the Living
introduction: theorizing the body
3
FIGURE 1.1 Sci-Fi Revoltech 001 Alien. Photo Courtesy of Toru Watanabe, via Wikimedia
Commons: http://www.flickr.com/photos/torugatoru/4974295014/in/photostream.
Dead). Even films where the villain is a “normal” serial killer, and that feature
no true monsters, focus on the body. From the slasher film of the 1970s to
the torture porn of the 2000s, much of the pleasure and terror in these films
comes from watching bodies get literally torn apart. In the 1980s, a new
genre of horror film emerged called “body horror” which focuses on the
destruction, decay, and mutations of the human body. Re-Animator, The Fly,
Body Melt, Videodrome, Splice, It’s Alive, Altered States, Teeth, and Leviathan
are just a few examples of films where the body literally is the monster.
But why the body? In these films, bodies are torn apart, transformed,
decayed, and turned inside out. It shouldn’t surprise us that the largest
audience for horror films has, since the 1950s, been teenagers, who are
dealing with, and anxious about, their own physical and sexual transformations. But many adults, too, enjoy horror films because they are the
most visceral movies of all, and make us feel in ways that other films don’t:
we tense up, we sweat, we squint, we turn away, and we jump while watching
them. The experience of watching horror films, then, is embodied, just as
the body is central to those same films. As anthropologist John Burton
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a social and cultural perspective
writes, “our bodies are the perpetual medium of all that transpires in our
existence, from birth until death” (2001: 3). This is the case with horror films,
and it’s also the case with the rest of society.
An introduction to body studies
What is the body, really? It seems like such an obvious question, and yet
the answer is much more complicated than what you may think. Sure, it is
a collection of cells, combined into organs, which themselves operate in
systems (like the cardiovascular system, nervous system, or reproductive
system) which ultimately make up the whole of the body. In humans, that
body typically takes on a form with two arms, two legs, a torso, and a head.
But is that all there is when we talk about bodies? And can we really speak
of bodies without also speaking of society and culture? In other words, is
there such a thing as a universal, decontextualized body? A tabula rasa,
simply awaiting inscription by culture?
The answer is no. Bodies are shaped in myriad ways by culture, by
society, and by the experiences that are shared within a social and cultural
context. In addition, bodies are shaped by history, and as such, they are
always changing, as are our ideas about them. Bodies are contingent:
molded by factors outside of the body, and then internalized into the
physical being itself. This is what we call a social constructionist approach
to the body. Constructionism, which is the perspective used in this textbook,
suggests that beauty, weight, sexuality, or race do not simply result from
the collection of genes one inherited from one’s parents. Instead, these
bodily features only take on the meaning that they have – That woman is
beautiful! That man is fat! – in the context of history, society, and culture.
Yes, a person may have a certain set of facial features, or weigh a certain
number of pounds or kilograms. But how we think about those facial
features or those pounds – are they attractive or unattractive? – comes from
the time and place in which we live.
In addition, these meanings occur within a set of culturally constructed
power relations that suggest that, for example, women must be attractive
in order to be valuable. But this process does not just happen after we
“enter” culture. Instead, it happens immediately; we are born in a particular
skin, with a particular type of hair, with a particular set of eyes, a nose, and
a mouth. How those features will be interpreted will then be shaped by
culture, but the features themselves will already be present.
One of the reasons why this theoretical approach is often difficult for
students to understand is that, since phenomena like beauty or obesity or
race are expressed in the body, it seems like they must be natural. In fact,
what occurs is that once something comes to take on cultural meaning, it
becomes naturalized: we think that things are the way that they are because
introduction: theorizing the body
5
FIGURE 1.2 “Threads.” Bodies can be used to represent a great many things. Photo courtesy
of David Brooks.
they have always been that way, and that they are, therefore, natural. We
don’t realize that these meanings have been created, and that they can
change, and that there’s nothing natural at all about the popular belief in
many Western cultures, for example, that straight hair is more attractive than
curly or kinky hair. Even something that seems to be so rooted in the body
as disability is partially socially constructed. There are people who have no
arms, for example, and must use their feet to cook, to dress themselves, or
to drive a car. That is a biological reality. But how we conceive of those people
– as abnormal, or even freakish – comes from culture. There’s nothing
inherently abnormal in those people’s reality.
Race is another good example. Every ten years since 1790, the United
States has asked its citizens to fill out a census, which is used for
redistricting, for social policy decisions and to meet a variety of legislative
requirements. On every census that has so far been used, there have never
been two censuses that have used the same racial categories; instead, each
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a social and cultural perspective
census uses a separate set of terms (like Quadroon, Mulatto, Chinese,
Mexican, or Hindu), demonstrating how arbitrary those terms really are. In
Chapter 6, we will further explore the notion that race is a social construction.
This differs from what might be called an essentialist view of the body.
Essentialism means that bodies are defined largely or entirely by their
biological makeup – bones, muscles, hormones, and the like – and that
much of human behavior can also be reduced to many of those biological
functions. In fact, social scientists call this reductionism: the idea that
complex human behaviors can be reduced to something as simple as, for
example, hormones.
Sure, the hormone testosterone is responsible for, among other things,
driving sexual behavior in both men and women, and men have more
testosterone in their bodies than women. But does that alone account for
the fact that men are, in many cultures, encouraged to be sexually aggressive
while women are encouraged to be sexually passive, and that rape is one of
the most common crimes committed against women in a variety of cultures
around the world? Social scientists would argue that it is reductionist to
reduce the sexually aggressive behaviors of many men to testosterone and
to ignore the role that socialization, mass media, and the glorification of
violence and sexual violence plays in these behaviors.
This book, using a constructionist perspective, will help you to deconstruct many of the bodily categories that seem so normal to you. We will
cover the mundane – health and illness – to the frightening – torture and
death – all with the aim of allowing you to understand how bodies are shaped
by culture and society, and how categories like sexuality or race are
constructed in relation to other categories and within systems of power. How
do, for example, social institutions like politics, law, health care, and mass
media shape both our perceptions of our bodies, but also how much access
we have to health care, nutritious food, or safe working conditions? And what
does it mean that some people, by virtue of their gender, race, class, or
nationality, get greater access to those things, while other people have less
access?
According to theorist Michel Thevóz, “there is no body but the painted
body” (1984: 7) because the body must always be stamped with the mark
of culture and society; without marking, the body cannot move within the
channels of social exchange. Of course we paint the body quite literally with
body paint, tattooing, makeup, and jewelry. But human bodies are never
“blank” or unmarked, even when not explicitly marked through adornment
or modification. Bodies can be fat or thin, dark or light, male or female,
young or old, sick or healthy. In these ways, too, social position and culture
is marked onto even naked bodies, in every society.
In addition, as technology changes, bodies change as well. From cosmetic
surgery to organ transplantation to alternative reproductive technologies to
introduction: theorizing the body
7
the various practices and procedures considered within the term cyber, the
body is being shaped by technology in a variety of ways today. Bodies
are also changing thanks to changing perceptions, fuelled by mass media,
of beauty, thinness, and muscularity, with new illnesses, practices, and
obsessions emerging.
Interesting issues: born this way blog
Among those who study sexual orientation, there’s no real consensus on how
sexual orientation develops or is produced. It appears to have no relationship to
parenting, since gay and lesbians are almost entirely raised by heterosexual
parents, and gay and lesbian parents, for the most part, raise heterosexual
children. And while the studies that seek to find evidence of a “gay gene” or some
indication that hormones or brain structure “cause” homosexuality are thus far
inconclusive, at least in some cultures, there appears to be anecdotal evidence
to show that sexual orientation develops very early in life and is not a “choice.”
(In Chapter 8, however, we will discuss the ways that culture plays a role in how
sexuality is expressed.) In 2011, DJ Paul V started a blog called “Born This Way”
featuring photos sent in by gay men and lesbians of themselves as children. Many
of the photos, accompanied by stories, show little boys in feminine poses and
little girls with butch traits. All of the entries include statements indicating that
the submitter knew that they were “different” from a very young age; whether
or not they knew they were gay, they simply knew that they were not like the
other kids. Paul’s stated goal in the blog is to both show that being gay is not a
choice, and also to create a space where gays and lesbians can feel safe about
sharing their stories and where they can feel pride about themselves. He writes,
“if my blog helps stop even just ONE LGBTQ person from taking their own life,
or feeling bad or ashamed or unloved, then I feel I’ve achieved my goal.” One
of the criticisms of the blog is that it conflates sexual orientation with gender
non-conformity; in other words, the men and women who send in their photos
suggest that it’s the way in which they dress or behave which challenge the norms
of their gender which “prove” that they were gay. Homosexuality and gender
non-conformity, however, do not always go hand-in-hand, and many
transgendered people, in fact, emphasize that gender identity can be ambiguous
and fluid rather than fixed and unchanging.
Embodiment
As noted in the introduction, this text will take the position that the body
is, to a major extent, socially constructed. That does not mean that bodies
are not biological organisms, which are subject to natural laws. It simply
means that we cannot understand the biological organism without first
understanding the social, cultural, and historical context in which it exists.
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a social and cultural perspective
Biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling, for example, tells us that even our biological
components – bone, blood, organs – are shaped by a complex relationship between biology and the physical and social environment in which
we live. Our health and our behavior are shaped by both biology and
history (2005). She also points out that biologists, too, the very people
whose scientific analysis of the body many of the postmodern theorists
now critique, are themselves socially constructed beings (as are we all), with
their own biases and agendas. Science, too, is at least partially socially
constructed.
This is a relatively recent theoretical development, however. For most of
the history of philosophy, the body has been relatively untouched by such
thinking. Instead, it is has always been seen as a biological object, and,
typically, has been set aside from the mind or soul, which has generally been
seen as a separate entity, subject to different laws. This was known as
mind/body dualism, and was the typical way in which the body has been
seen: as the physical being that is separate from, and inferior to, the mind.
Furthermore, women have long been associated more with the body than
have men, who have, historically, been seen as the more rational beings,
i.e. men are more closely aligned with the mind, while women are more
aligned with the body. Thanks to feminist theorizing which emerged in the
1970s, that view has been successfully challenged, but until recently the body
itself was only understood within the realm of biological inquiry.
How we live in our bodies and how we experience the world through our
bodies is a subject explored in the philosophical and psychological fields of
inquiry known as phenomenology. Philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in
a groundbreaking essay (1962), analysed the body in the context of the lived
experience of everyday life. We do not just have bodies; we are bodies.
Disability, for example, is not an external attack on the body but is
experienced subjectively and is reflected in our identity. In a series of essays
written by political scientist Iris Marion Young, for example, she writes of
how gender plays a major role in these kinds of lived experiences. In
“Throwing Like a Girl” (1977) she references studies which suggest that not
only do boys and girls throw differently, but that girls and women rarely
try hard when engaging in sports or other physical activities. This may be
because women are expected to be objects to be looked at, rather than
subjects who engage in activities. In other words, it’s not because women
are weaker than men that women cannot achieve, and often do not even try
to achieve, some of the same things as men. It is because of the gendered
norms associated with femininity – norms into which we have been
socialized. It is also worth pointing out that throwing, whether one is a
man or a woman, is a learned behavior, a fact which is nicely documented
in a video produced by Argentinean videographer Juan Etchegaray in a
short video titled simply “Men Throwing Rocks with the Other Hand”
introduction: theorizing the body
9
(http://vimeo.com/34678147, accessed March 31, 2013). In the video, men
are filmed throwing rocks with their non-dominant hand and they do so
badly, demonstrating that throwing is a skill that comes with practice –
practice that not that many women engage in.
Another example of how norms of masculinity and femininity shape not
just behavior, but public perceptions, has to do with Olympic weightlifter
Holley Mangold. Mangold, whose 346 pounds helped her to become a world
class weightlifter, experienced a huge amount of public criticism during the
summer of 2012 when she performed in the Olympic Games. Commentators
publicly criticized her appearance, and questioned whether she could weigh
that much and still be an athlete. Mangold responded, “I’m not saying
everyone is an athlete but I am saying that an athlete can come in any size.”
Certainly her achievements proved that point, but many people, focusing
on her body size, remained unconvinced, believing that only thin people can
be athletic.
Today, understanding embodiment is a task explored by sociologists,
anthropologists, cultural studies scholars, and scholars interested in sex,
gender, sexuality, health and illness, disability and race. In all of these cases,
scholars are challenging biological reductionism – the idea that our feelings
and behaviors can be reduced to our biological components – and are
promoting instead an approach that takes into account our physical beings
and how they have been shaped by culture, history, and society.
Interesting issues: apotemnophilia
Apotemnophilia is a psychological disorder in which a person has an overwhelming desire to remove a healthy limb; in some cases, it’s considered to
be a sexual fetish, while for many it has nothing to do with sex. Many people
who have this condition experience a strong drive, which often begins in
childhood, to have an arm or leg removed, and know exactly which limb must
be removed in order to achieve satisfaction, and to feel normal and whole. Of
men and women with this condition, a few convince a doctor to amputate their
limbs, but most doctors will not knowingly remove a healthy limb, although there
are a handful of underground doctors who will perform these surgeries. Many
apotemnophiliacs, however, either intentionally damage their limbs enough so
that they will have to be surgically removed because the limbs are damaged
beyond repair. A great many remove their own limbs themselves, usually a small
appendage like a finger or toe, and some convince sympathetic friends to do it
for them. Sometimes they travel to other countries, where costs are less prohibitive
and where doctors are bound by fewer laws, to have their limbs removed. In 1998,
a New York man died of gangrene after having his leg amputated by an
underground doctor in Mexico. Others don’t have their limbs removed at
all; they remain what the community calls “wannabes.” “Wannabes” will often
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a social and cultural perspective
pretend as if their limb is removed, for instance by wearing a sling or taping up
a limb, either in private or in public. “Pretenders” are those who do not wish to
remove a limb themselves yet pretend that they are disabled, either by hiding
a limb or by using a wheelchair, brace, or crutches, in order to get attention or
some other psychological satisfaction. Finally, amputee fetishists are known as
devotees, and are sexually attracted to people with amputated limbs. The
website Ampulove is a place for amputees, wannabees, and devotees to share
stories, photos, and experiences. For people with apotemnophilia, they resist the
notion that it is a disorder at all. Instead, like people who feel that having their
nose reduced or their breasts enlarged, or, in the case of transsexuals, having
their sex changed, will make their external selves more consistent with how they
feel inside, those with apotemnophilia feel that without the limb removal,
they will not be able to achieve their authentic self. This issue, which seems
so odd to most people, is really just an example of many of the issues in this
book. What is a normal body? How do we define what is normal, and who gets
to make that decision? And what part does medical practice play in the
normalization of bodies and the nature of identity?
Inscribing the social order
As we have noted, one of the major theoretical understandings of the body
has to do with the idea that the body is marked by culture and society.
Anthropologist Terence Turner coined the term “social skin” to refer to the
ways in which social categories become inscribed onto the physical body.
Through the social skin, the body becomes the symbolic stage on which the
dramas of society are enacted (1980: 112).
Anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966, 1973) was perhaps the first
anthropologist to centralize the cultural analysis of the body in her work and
thus her influence on contemporary studies of the body is significant.
Focusing primarily on traditional societies, Douglas was concerned with the
universal human anxiety about disorder, and wrote that such societies
respond to disorder through the classification of things both natural and
social. Through the creation of categories (such as pure and impure), and
their accompanying rules, people are able to contain disorder and restore
order to society. For Douglas, the body is the most natural symbol for and
medium of classification, and thus rules associated with controlling the body
and its processes emerge as a powerful means of social control. The body,
then, acts as a model for the social body such that threats to the limits of
the physical body are also threats to the social body, and must be rigidly
controlled. Systems of symbols, she writes, are based on bodily processes,
but get their meaning from social experience. She assumes a strict homology
in that people who have created a highly structured universe would also
invest great meaning and find structure in the body’s posture. In such
introduction: theorizing the body
11
societies, bodily control would be necessary because every twitch would be
loaded with meaning. Further, she finds that societies with strict social limits
would regard boundaries with extreme caution, and this, of course, includes
bodily boundaries, inside and outside, what comes out of the body (blood,
semen, etc.). There is an ongoing exchange of meanings between the two
kinds of bodily experience – physical and social – so that each reinforces
the other.
In sociology, a great deal of work on how the body operates as a symbol
and focus of control has been done as well. Sociologist Norbert Elias says
that during what he calls “the civilizing process” (1978), from the fourteenth
to the seventeenth centuries, Europeans began to internalize many of the
external forms of social control; instead shame and embarrassment took
their place, controlling their behaviors from within. For instance, Europeans
began to internalize the idea of table manners, so that no one needed to
tell them that they needed to eat with a fork, or blow their nose with a
handkerchief. Another sociologist, Erving Goffman (1959), developed a
theory called dramaturgical theory, which suggests that we are all actors on
a stage, at all times, and much of what we do is engage in impression
management, during which we must monitor and adjust our own behavior
in accordance with how we want others to perceive us. Goffman also noted
that the body is a “sign vehicle” through which we communicate information
about ourselves to others.
Three sociologists whose work has informed a great deal of work on the
body in recent years are Bryan S. Turner, John O’Neill, and Mike
Featherstone. Turner in particular has blended together the work of many
classic sociological theorists such as Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Elias, and
Goffman, with the poststructural theorists like Foucault (discussed below),
along with Nietzsche, Marx, and feminist theorists, to create a unified
sociological theory of the body which focuses on society’s need for the body
to produce, reproduce, and consume. For O’Neill, there are five bodies of
which we must concern ourselves – the global body, the social body, the
body politic, the consumer body, and the medical body – because of the
ways in which those bodies are shaped by the major social institutions of
society. Featherstone, too, draws on a Marxist critique of consumer culture
and positions the body within a post-industrial world in which bodies, and
the maintenance of those bodies, serve as a new vehicle for the expansion
of consumer culture and capitalism, and focuses in particular on body
modification in his critiques.
Philosopher Michel Foucault (1979, 1980a, 1980b) was also concerned
with the physical body and the ways in which it is regulated. The body is not
just a text to be read but a medium for social control. But for Foucault,
modern Western bodies are not subject to the same kinds of social control
that Douglas describes in tribal societies. Instead they are disciplined
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a social and cultural perspective
through various controlling mechanisms located throughout the social
body, such as medicine, psychiatry, education, law, or social policy, which
we can then call the body politic. In his essay “Body/Power” (1980a),
Foucault notes that, starting in the nineteenth century, the social body
needed more protection, and this occurs through segregating the sick,
the mentally ill, and criminals into various new institutions erected for
those purposes. According to Foucault, the physical body also demanded
surveillance; through these new institutions, unruly bodies would be
watched, disciplined, and ultimately turned into docile bodies. But power
is not just wielded by such institutions – rather, for Foucault, it is a part of
all social relations. Furthermore, the body is not simply the target of power;
it is the source of power as well, because as Foucault demonstrated, with
the multitude of regulatory agencies available throughout society, bodies
begin to discipline themselves and each other.
One of Foucault’s major contributions to the field was with regard
to sexuality. According to Foucault, sexuality is historically and socially
constructed within relations of power. For Foucault, there is no such thing
as inherent or essential sexuality. Humans created discourses about sex,
and those discourses then shape our understanding of sex. He also showed
how the Victorian era, although it seems like it was about the repression of
sex, instead was about an explosion of interest in, and discourses about,
sex. In fact, that was when we saw the rise of a variety of fetishes like foot
fetishes, as well as an explosion of interest in pornography. He also pointed
out that control over the body, and particularly over sexuality, can be
dangerous, because it also engenders an intensification of desire. He says
that the revolt of the sexual body is the reverse effect of this power play and
the response on the side of power has been to economically exploit
eroticization so that the body is no longer controlled by repression, but by
stimulation. Foucault’s work has since been considerably expanded and
complicated by the work of a great many theorists, including, most notably,
feminist and queer theorists.
Foucault’s contribution to an understanding of the body in culture has
been tremendous, as can be seen by much of the recent scholarship on the
body (Polhemus 1978; Turner 1984; Armstrong 1985; O’Neill 1985; Berger
1987; Featherstone et al. 1991). Other writers (Grosz 1990; Mascia-Lees and
Sharpe 1992), again following Foucault, demonstrate that the body is a
canvas on which patterns of significance are inscribed and counter-inscribed.
Mascia-Lees and Sharpe, for example, literalize this notion in their
discussion of how the tattoo is a visceral example of how culture writes on
the body. For them, the body serves also as allegory for culture because of
its factualness: it is borrowed to lend an aura of realness to cultural
constraints when there is a crisis in society.Anthropologists Nancy ScheperHughes and Margaret Lock, in their essay “The Mindful Body” (1987), bring
introduction: theorizing the body
13
together many of the pieces we have so far discussed. They propose three
types of bodies: the lived-in individual body, the social and representational
body, and the controlled and disciplined body politic.
Another stream of research on the body in culture has focused on the
class(ed) body. The most important thinker here is certainly Pierre Bourdieu,
and in particular his book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of
Taste (1984). Bourdieu uses a concept called “habitus,” developed by
sociologist Marcel Mauss, which refers to the ways in which the lifestyle,
values, and tastes of a social group are acquired through experience and
reflected in the form and habits of the body. Mauss wrote, “the body is man’s
first and most natural instrument” (1979: 104). Bourdieu also gives us the
notions of cultural capital, the experiences, knowledge, skills, and even ways
of speaking that a person has developed which may be differentially valued
by the culture around them, and physical capital, one’s skin color, body
shape, beauty, or grace, all of which, again, will be differentially valued by
the society in general.
Medical anthropologists Philippe Bourgois and Jeff Schonberg borrowed
from Mauss and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, but used it in a slightly
different way. They used what they call “ethnic habitus” to explore the
behaviors of homeless heroin injectors in San Francisco (2007). They found
that white and black addicts had different ways of dealing with one of the
problems of chronic heroin users – the difficulty of finding veins which could
still be used for injecting. For white users, they turned to intramuscular or
subcutaneous injections when usable veins could no longer be found, while
black users spent more time and effort locating a good vein; it was worth
the time and effort for the black users because the experience of injecting
into the vein was more satisfying than injecting intramuscularly. These
different bodily techniques result in different outcomes, and result from
different values and beliefs.
Another theorist who uses the concept of habitus is sociologist Loic
Wacquant, who wrote about African-American amateur boxers in Chicago.
What Wacquant calls the “pugilistic habitus” refers to “a virtual punching
machine, but an intelligent and creative machine capable of self-regulation
while innovating within a fixed and relatively restricted panoply of moves as
an instantaneous function of the actions of the opponent” (Wacquant 2004:
95). Wacquant himself, through the course of his fieldwork, acquires such
a habitus and even fought in a Chicago Golden Gloves tournament.
Beyond the contributions of Bourdieu, Russian philosopher Mikhail
Bakhtin’s work (1984) has also informed the work of a number of
contemporary studies which deal with the difference between lower-class
and upper-class bodies (Stallybrass and White 1986; Fiske 1989; Kipnis
1992). Bakhtin wrote his doctoral dissertation about the French Renaissance
14
a social and cultural perspective
FIGURE 1.3 Dressing a mannequin. Photo courtesy of Tom Young.
writer François Rabelais and his work Gargantua and Pantagruel, focusing
on the institution of carnival and the grotesque realism in Rabelais’ work.
What made this work so important for body studies theorists is how Bakhtin
described the use of the body, and in particular his focus on the grotesque
body. According to Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, the grotesque body is the
open, protruding, extended, secreting body, which is opposed to the classical
body, which is static, closed, and sleek. The grotesque body gives birth,
grows fat, grows old, and dies. It is this body which is associated with the
lower and working classes, while the upper classes embrace a body which
does not change, which remains young and beautiful and without flaws.
Theorizing the female body
Many recent studies on the body have taken as their target the gendered
body (Russo 1985; Martin 1987; Gallop 1988; Jaggar and Bordo 19
