Material Bodies: Bodies as Situations

Abstract

Bodies are material and bodies matter, especially when things go wrong, but they also matter when things go right. As chapter 5 demonstrates, much of the debate about visibility, invisibility and silence involves bodies and corporeality. Bodies invoke the senses and sensation and, in explaining the status of the category woman and a politics of difference, embodiment carries specific meanings as well as generating problems and questions. The body seems to offer the boundaries of the self (Price and Shildrick, 1999), a tangible manifestation of the person (Bourdieu, 1984) and are important sites of difference among women and between women and men. Body practices are the source of success and human achievement as well as the body being the site of pain and the limit to what we are each able to do. Bodies are particular to each of us, no more so than in the experience of physical breakdown, yet bodies are also social. Gender is one of the categories universally applied, as Butler (1993) argues, at the moment a human being arrives in the world; the newborn is labelled by the equivalent of the pink or blue blanket as signifiers of sex which, she argues, starts the series of iterative, ritualised norms that create sex itself. Gender difference and the classification of humans into one of the two universally used categories have traditionally been made on grounds of visible, physical difference. However, social constructivist arguments that emphasise the discursive formation of the body through processes of inscription marginalise the materiality of the body.