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A Feminist Carnal Sociology?: Embodiment in Sociology, Feminism, and

Naturalized Philosophy

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DOI: 10.1007/s11133-014-9298-4

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A Feminist Carnal Sociology?: Embodiment
in Sociology, Feminism, and Naturalized
Philosophy

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Qualitative Sociology

ISSN 0162-0436

Qual Sociol
DOI 10.1007/s11133-014-9298-4

1 23
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 Author's personal copy
Qual Sociol
DOI 10.1007/s11133-014-9298-4

A Feminist Carnal Sociology?: Embodiment in Sociology,

Feminism, and Naturalized Philosophy

Victoria Pitts-Taylor

# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Abstract Wacquant’s vision of carnal sociology and enactive ethnography draws heavily from
embodied mind theories in neurocognitive science and philosophy of mind. However, it also
resonates with feminist epistemologies, such as sociologist Dorothy Smith's view that sociology
should begin with and from the body. While both carnal sociology and the neurocognitive
traditions it draws from ignore decades of feminist contributions to embodied epistemologies, I
argue that feminist thought has much to contribute to materially grounded accounts of corporeal
knowledge. Attention to feminist thought should also help enactive ethnographers consider the
limits to the method, and the ethical and political complexities of embodied, situated knowledge.

Keywords Ebodiment . Epistemology . Neurocognitive science . Carnal sociology . Feminism .

Situated knowledge

Wacquant’s account of carnal sociology offers a vision that is profoundly, rather than super-
ficially, embodied. He gives a highly persuasive depiction of bodily practice as generative of
meaning, a view buttressed by his ethnographic work. He makes disciplinary border crossings,
toward naturalized philosophy and neurocognitive thought, to find resources for thinking
carnally. Sociologists of the body (not to mention feminists across the disciplines—I’ll get
to that) have expressed a similar call for a deeper, more fleshly grasp of embodiment, and a
more embodied sense of sociality. They have described various features of embodiment—
including the phenomenal (Crossley 1996), the elusory and affective (Radley 1995; Watson
1998; Clough 2010; Blackman 2012), and the sociomaterial and biopolitical (Fujimura 2006;
Rose 2006)—to get at aspects of sociality that cannot be addressed through discourse or
cultural inscription alone. Many sociologists, though, have been circumspect about drawing
from biological, and specifically neurobiological, paradigms (Cerulo 2010; Lizardo 2014).
Nonetheless, Wacquant’s move resonates with broadly aired concerns about the limits of social
constructionism, with its nature/culture dualisms, de-fleshed sense of the body-subject, and its
tendency towards anti- (rather than merely critical) empiricism (Latour 2004). It is also
compatible with the post-genomic thinking of biological matter as agentic, dynamic and
flexible, and (in the case of humans at least), as inextricably social. Finally, it can be seen in
the context of the neurocognitive turn that has influenced many other disciplines outside of

V. Pitts-Taylor (*)
Wesleyan University, Allbritton 218, 222 Church Street, Middletown, CT 06459, USA
e-mail: vpitts@wesleyan.edu
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sociology. In other fields—philosophy, cultural studies, literary studies and performance

studies, to name a few—neuroscience is being embraced not for its tradition of biological
reductionism and determinism, but on the contrary, for its amenability to biosocial theorizing.
The subfield that Wacquant draws from, with its roots in pragmatism and phenomenology as
well as neurocognitive science, has been embraced elsewhere as enabling a biosocial, expe-
rientially rich view of the mind and experience (Glannon 2002, 2009; Fuchs 2005, 2009;
Solomon 2007; Connolly 2010, 2011; Protevi 2013).
Yet in his account of carnal sociology, Wacquant indicts the social sciences too generally,
overlooking embodied traditions within sociology and other fields close to home, while more
generously (that is, uncritically) citing the work of naturalized philosophers and neurocognitive
scientists who inform his idea of the fleshly. This may be a rhetorical strategy for interdisci-
plinarity, to urge us to go beyond our own fields and find resources elsewhere. But it has the
unfortunate effect of erasing feminist work in the social sciences that has diagnosed precisely
the state of affairs he describes—the overly intellectualist, mentalist, disembodied approach to
mind, knowledge, subjectivity and agency—and misses their efforts to contest these tendencies.
His description of the social sciences is essentially untouched by feminist writings on the body,
emotion and affect, desire, embodied epistemology, and ethnographic methods. To be clear, I
am not claiming feminists have offered conclusive accounts of embodiment (they have not), or
that carnal sociology does not offer something new to sociology (it does). Rather, I am claiming
that even while it takes a more physically materialist turn than many feminists have allowed, the
project of carnal sociology has an unacknowledged legacy in feminist thought. More impor-
tantly, in my view, its execution should dialogue with feminist efforts to theorize the mind, self
and social as inextricable from embodiment, and to grasp the importance and difficulties of
generating knowledge through deep, observant participation.
The argument outlining the need for carnal sociology, in particular, is hard for me to conceive
separately from feminist efforts to articulate the body as the primary ground of knowledge.
Wacquant calls for challenging overly intellectualist or mentalist accounts of the subject,
contesting the hierarchical valuing of propositional thinking over feeling and emotion, and
exploring embodied and situated, practical, felt knowledge. Feminist sociologists (along with
feminists in other fields) have been making such claims since at least Dorothy Smith’s The
Everyday World as Problematic (Smith 1988). Smith, it can be said, argued strenuously for what
Wacquant calls a “bottom-up, visceral grasp of the social world.” Like the embodied mind
theorists that interest Wacquant, feminists drew from phenomenology, pragmatism and naturalism
to make a case for the inherently embodied and enactive character of perception (Rouse 2009).
Beyond this, feminists have addressed the underlying gendered (and racialized) logic at work in
the epistemic privileging of mind over body, rationality over feeling, and abstraction over practice.
They have also grappled with the aspects of embodiment Wacquant says sociologists must attend
to. For example, they have addressed the sentient body through arguing for the significance of
emotions and affect, and for the ways these are implicated in and targeted by social structures.
They have addressed the suffering body through unwavering attention to vulnerability, trauma,
victimization, and also illness, pain and dis/ability. They have consistently addressed the sedi-
mentation of experience, by trying to grasp the long-term effects of power on bodies and subjects,
in tension with hopes for the possibility of agency and transformation. They have also explicitly
theorized the concept of situated knowledge, a term now used in embodied mind theory but
conceptualized earlier by Donna Haraway (1988). Feminists have applied this concept not only to
social actors, but like Wacquant, also to scholars who observe them in the field, and to scientists
who observe them under the microscope or brain scan.
Of course, a carnal sociology is not one that takes carnality as specific to any group of
people, but rather as a universal condition of (human) experience. Therefore, readers could
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rightly object that Smith’s sociology was not a carnal sociology, but a sociology for women. It
was as women that early feminist epistemologists argued, “our direct embodied experience of
the everyday world [is] our primary ground of knowledge” (Smith 1991, 22).1 The treatment of
embodiment as specifically female was quickly shown to be enormously problematic, not in the
least because it was essentializing. Haraway’s situated knowledge was in part a response to these
limitations. In sociology, Patricia Hill Collins (1990) argued that African-American women have
historically different experiences than both white women and black men, and claimed that their
embodiments offer a distinct epistemic ground. She utilized Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of
intersectionality, which is now a preferred feminist framework to address how complex and
multiple social locations inform any actor’s perspective. Intersectionality resists essentializing
body-subjects based on sex/gender and allows for the inclusion of many possible configurations
of experience and subjectivity. The result is heteroglossic; that is, the local and situated character
of embodied knowledge results in the multiple and conflicting nature of epistemic truths.
Despite Haraway’s description of situated knowledge as materially embodied, feminist
thought has, admittedly, eschewed some aspects of the fleshly. Feminists thought has been
heavily influenced by poststructuralism, with its emphasis on discourse and representation, and
by a historical suspicion of biological materialism. Thus Wacquant’s warning against “fall[ing]
back into the textual or hermeneutic vision of the social world” describes feminism as well as it
does sociology. Nonetheless, feminists have explicitly addressed the limits of representation,
and also engaged with pragmatism, phenomenology, and theories of affect to address how
social structures can become embodied through feeling and intercorporeality. They address the
sorts of questions Wacquant identifies as carnal: How do embodied practices and skills inform
individual and collective identities? How do stigmas and vulnerabilities shape embodied
knowledges? To some degree, they even address how social structures are enfolded into the
body’s “perceptual grids, sensorimotor capacities, emotional proclivities, and indeed
desire itself.” Most helpfully, the feminist literature has grappled with many of the
methodological and ethical questions raised by Wacquant’s call for enactive ethnog-
raphy. These include the aforementioned risks of essentializing body-subjects, the
impediments to researchers’ ability to experience the world as their subjects do, the
limits of empathy and shared, visceral understanding, and the need to grasp alterity, or
irreducible differences that exist even within seemingly collective experiences. Thus
when Wacquant notes the remarkability of a petite, white, female researcher gaining
access to the world of “hulking black ex-convicts,” he rightly insists that the knowl-
edge she generates from her observant participation is selective and situated. Feminist
thought has much to say about this selectivity and situatedness, and can help to
elucidate the gendered, racialized, and classed dynamics of research practices and
knowledge claims.

1
The insight, in fact, came to Smith partly through her participation in feminist consciousness raising groups. For
Smith, “The Cartesian subject escapes the body, hence escaping the limitations of the local historical particular-
ities of time, place, and relationship. When we began with our experiences as women, however, we were always
returning to ourselves and to each other as subjects in our bodies” (1992, 89). Smith drew from Marxism and
Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology to situate embodiment in an institutional context. She argued that men
could partake in abstract rationality, the dominant logic of the public sphere, by relying on women’s labor to take
care of bodily needs, while their location in the domestic sphere meant that women had no choice but to attend to
the everyday, actual, practical constraints of living. Nancy Hartstock (1983) argued from a Marxist-feminist
perspective that men and women are differently positioned in relations of ruling through the gendered division of
labor, which gives them divergent experiences and vantage points. Iris Marion Young (1990) argued that bodily
engagement with the world enacts social differences, and thus there is no generic, ungendered phenomenological
body. Later feminist phenomenologists address the differences that not only gender, but also race and sexuality
make to perception and embodied experience more broadly (Ahmed 2006; Alcoff 2006).
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If the feminist social sciences anticipated carnal sociology, Wacquant’s argument is more
exceptionally marked by his willingness to take up the body as a biological system embedded
in its environmental context. The carnal sociology he describes, to be sure, is not only one of
flesh and blood, but also of nervous systems. The works he cites of Damasio, Lakoff and
Johnson, Varela, Chemero, and Clark each ground carnality in neural representations, senso-
rimotor systems, and other neurobiological correlates of perception, feeling and thinking.
Embodied mind theories are not monolithic—they variously address memory and emotion,
the sensorimotor system, enactive perception, and the use of cognitive prosthetics, for exam-
ple. Collectively, though, they argue that the mind is not abstract and symbolically represen-
tational, but rather material and embrained, while being irreducible to any organ or system.
The mind is dependent upon “the kinds of experience that come from having a body with
various sensorimotor capacities” (Varela et al. 1991, 172), which “are themselves embedded in
a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context’” (173). In the context of
neurocognitive science, embodied mind theories are offered partly as a counter to
neuroreductionism (as in Alva Noe’s “You are Not Your Brain” [2009]). In the context of social
theory, they are often aimed at rationalist or representationalist accounts of the subject, because
they address mechanisms of cognition below or before, or even without, symbols and abstrac-
tions (as in Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that “there is no poststructural person” [1999, 5]).
We need interdisciplinarity to better grasp embodiment, and this corpus is particularly
amenable to sociological engagement. In fact, for my discussion it is also relevant to note its
amenability with feminist approaches, which is perhaps not too surprising given what I said
above. Miriam Solomon (2007) argues that feminist and neurocognitive ideas of the embodied
mind are not only compatible, but can even be counted as part of a broad transdisciplinary
intellectual movement advocating situated cognition. The term situated here refers to the
embeddedness of “representations of the world, learning, memory, planning, action and
linguistic meaning in the body’s environment, conceptual structures, tools and social arrange-
ments” (413). Solomon argues that feminist insights (including Smith’s and Haraway’s) can
extend what gets included as situatedness, such as the relations of power that affect experi-
ences and lives. (Note that in Solomon’s account, feminism does the work of attending to
social inequality, the stuff also of sociological inquiry). But while feminist and
neurocognitively-minded efforts to address embodiment have a lot in common, Solomon
obscures a serious rub, one that I think has relevance for sociologists seeking to incorporate
this literature.
Chris Shilling (2003) has described how naturalized perspectives commonly assume a
universal model of the body, and treat outliers as abnormal, pathological, or less developed in
some way. The embodiment that appears in neurocognitive, naturalized philosophy is often
(but not always) tied to a generic, ideal model of the body, or its difference is treated as a
special case that can put normal embodiment into relief (Martin 2000; Scully 2008; Bluhm
et al. 2012; Protevi 2009, 2013; Pitts-Taylor 2013, 2014 and 2013, 2014, forthcoming). Some
of this work conceptualizes both cognitive processes and knowing agents as radically
relational, and thus as wide open for thinking about race, gender, class, dis/ability and other
differences in embodied experience. John Protevi (2013) makes such a case for Varela et al.
(1991), whose account of enactive perception sees body-minds as relationally open, creating
their own “micro-worlds,” but also marked by the traces that experience leaves in its wake.
At the same time, efforts to explain cognition in phylogenetic terms can have the effect of
obliterating such onto-epistemic multiplicity. For example, in their debate over multiple
realizability, contemporary philosophers of mind are concerned to address whether the same
cognitive outcome can result from different bodily forms. Andy Clark (2008) notes that Lakoff
and Johnson, Noe and others claim an embodied realism that depends upon physiological
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universals, and emphasizes biological constraints on thought.2 Clark’s extended functionalism,

by contrast, requires no particular kind of body. He argues instead for epistemic commonality
across different configurations of body-minds and worlds. My point in mentioning this is not
only that neurocognitive accounts of the embodied mind vary in their ideas of the body and
cognition, but also that sociologists will have something to say in these debates. To what extent
are physiology and motor schema universal? What role should morphological variances and
dis/abilities play in theorizing the flesh and blood, and nervous systems? When, and how, do
experiences make a trace, and do they do so intergenerationally? Are precognitive processes
fully distinct from higher-order cognition, and can symbolic meanings ever make their way
into them? There is a lot for sociologists to consider.
The rub I mentioned between feminist and neurocognitively-minded thought is relevant to
such inquiry. Heidi Bluhm et al. have recently claimed that feminist thought on embodiment is
“far ahead of mainstream philosophy” (2012, 8). This is, they say, because it is more social. If
embodied mind theorists are concerned to debate the bodily requirements of epistemic
universals, in feminist thought both bodies and their epistemic outcomes are treated as
heterogeneous. Feminists have argued that an embrace of epistemic multiplicity is valuable
not only as a corrective to scientific assumptions of objectivity, but also to challenge univer-
salizing claims about human experience. As Helen Longino puts it, “with the embodiment of
the subject, experience must be rethought, as it can no longer be understood as the parade of
sense data whose character is the same for all perceivers” (2010, 734).3
Carnal sociology is not susceptible to the same criticisms; in fact, its ethnographic approach
to embodiment would be a serious resource for naturalized philosophy. Sociologists beginning
from the body do not assume the uniformity of either the body or epistemic experience. The
point, rather, is to find the particularities in how minded bodies and worlds fit together, and to
attend to the differences between the embodiment one begins with, and the one generated by
acquiring the skills and competencies of others. Thus I would argue that naturalized philosophy
needs carnal sociology, or at least enactive ethnography, as much as sociologists need to think in
more fleshly terms. Yet the practice of “turning yourself into the phenomenon you are studying”
must be particularly sensitive to the limits of the embodiment to be universal or collective, and
should take into account hard-won feminist insights about these limits. As N. Katherine Hayles
has written, “Embodiment can be destroyed but it cannot be replicated” (Hayles 1993, 91).

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Victoria Pitts-Taylor is Professor and Chair of Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Professor of Sociology
at Wesleyan University. She is author of three books, including In the Flesh: the Cultural Politics of Body
Modification (Palgrave 2003), Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture (Rutgers 2007), and
the forthcoming The Brain’s Body: Neuroscience and Corporeal Politics (Duke University Press). Her books and
articles address the body and embodiment in relation to culture, medicine, science and technology.

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