Ways of Being

Abstract

This chapter will introduce you to some of the most influential recent writing on gender and bodies. The body has long been a topic in women’s studies, and is no less important to the study of gender. We will be looking at how some of the second-wave theories of women’s bodies are transformed, resurrected or challenged in the age of newly imagined cyborg and transgendered bodies. An interdisciplinary method to the question of the body seems best, and we hope to provide you with the outline of the major debates from the various disciplines which provide the context for questions about the body. Sociology, which is primarily concerned with institutions and social structure, the constitution of society and social change, has made significant contributions to work on the body, through feminist sociologists in the 1970s and 80s, and more recently by mainstream sociologists who are becoming interested in the paradoxes which the body poses in a world where identity is in flux. If bodies are no longer seen as natural, but rather cultural and social, then they are grist for the mill of all sociologists. Psychoanalysis is important for the debates that it initiated over the relationship between the body, desire and social law. Its contributions to an understanding of the hysterical body at the end of the nineteenth century are important, as are the ideas of narcissism and incorporation, which you have been introduced to in Chapters 2 and 4. Psychoanalytic approaches to the body consider how bodies and the psyche are intimately linked. Philosophy, which has long questioned the relationship between mind and body, is particularly important for this chapter, as feminist philosophers have been leading important debates for some time now about the masculine nature of thought in our modern era. And reading the body calls on the disciplines of cultural studies and history, in order to situate the gendered meanings of bodies in our societies.