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Beyond Giddens: Differentiating Bodies
Elizabeth Eckermann
Arts Faculty, Deakin University, VIC
Abstract
This paper addresses the issue of differentiation of bodies. I suggest that much feminist writing shares with the malestream sociological traditions a tendency to downplay the importance of corporeal differentiation by sex in understanding social phenomena. I argue that phenomenology, poststructuralism and postmodernism (in particular New Feminism) redress the balance providing embodied theoretical frameworks from which to launch an analysis of sexually specific corporeality.
Postmodernism is popularly portrayed as the antithesis to the founding principles of the social sciences which are rooted in the Enlightenment project of emancipatory social justice. It has been characterised as theoretically incomprehensible, linguistically alienating, politically atomising and ethically bankrupt. The feminist responses to postmodernity have been particularly vicious. When Chris Weedon made new feminism accessible to the anglophone world in 1987, a major rift developed in the feminist movement and this rift remains nearly a decade later. The traditional trichotomy of feminisms into liberal, socialist and radical (or separatist) had suddenly acquired a fourth column. Irigaray, Cixous, and Kristeva had been challenging orthodox feminism for some time but it was not until the late 1980s that this challenge was seen as a threat to feminist political practice.
Similar responses emerged to the growing field of the sociology of the body in the 1980s. Attempts to bring the body into social theorising were met with a combination of stunned disbelief and outrage at the implied reductionism, biologism and 'undoing of the social'. The hegemony of structural explanations was seriously challenged by these emerging modes of thought. Many feminists continue to resist incorporating both poststructural/postmodern and somatic perspectives into understanding social relations between the sexes. I argue that postmodern and post-structural analyses along with the sociology of the body have provided invaluable tools for understanding gendered experiences of health and illness.
I put forward the thesis that feminism, postmodernism and the sociology of the body are mutually constitutive. Theories of the body and post-structural and postmodern theories were brought on to the sociological stage to deal with the absence of consideration of women's specific experiences, especially in relation to women's health, in the classical and much of the modern tradition in sociology. Despite the defences that have been launched to defend the classical and modern traditions in sociology against claims of disembodiment (Shilling, 1993) and androgenisation (Kendall, 1989), I argue that these traditions remain largely disembodied and androgenised or masculinised.
I will deal with the silencing of women in the sociological tradition first. "Then I address the issue of embodiment and suggest ways in which the concepts of embodiment and feminisation of social understanding have been made possible through embracing postmodern analysis in sociological thought, especially the emphasis on difference. I intend to use examples from two areas, which reflect my research interests, to illustrate my arguments. These areas are self-starvation and binge-purging, and the development of new indicators of health status for women.
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