Abstract
The body can be understood as inherently moral, playing an important role in the creation of moral boundaries and discourse. Mary Douglas has shown how the body becomes a metaphor for a society, with ideas of dirt, disease, purity and danger serving to map moral boundaries of acceptability (Douglas 1966). While Douglas’s approach treats the body as a natural metaphor for moral order, more recent commentators have observed that the body is increasingly divorced from nature, and drawn into the realm of choice, modification and commodification. What Featherstone (1991) has called the ‘secular’ body, Shilling (1993) the ‘unfinished’ body, Fiske (1989) the ‘aestheticized body’ and Bordo (1993) the ‘plastic’ body, becomes part of the reflexive project of the self, subject to choice, aestheticizing and body-reflexive practices (Connell 1995: 59).
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© 2001 British Sociological Association
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Thomson, R., Mcgrellis, S., Holland, J., Henderson, S., Sharp, S. (2001). From ‘Peter Andre’s six pack’ to ‘I do knees’ — the Body in Young People’s Moral Discourse. In: Backett-Milburn, K., McKie, L. (eds) Constructing Gendered Bodies. Explorations in Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230294202_9
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