CULTURED BODY

Is the human body a cultural object or just only a subject to natural processes?

1 2 3 4 5

‘Mind’ and ‘Self’ Body as an

Body and Mind -> gender vs sex Body as a object and an A person has
NOT as separate or ethnic vs social subject -> ‘the a ‘multiplicity
entities race construction body’ and of selves’
‘embodiment’
 the human body as a ‘natural instrument’ -> When
we engage the material world, for example when
MARCEL we drink, we employ ‘a series of assembled actions -
Techniques of MAUSS not by himself alone but by all his education, by the
the body whole society to which he belongs’

1. The body as the

‘Interaction order’ for social encounters -> a
means or
standardised mode of expression - ‘body idiom’
instrument for
carrying out all
ERVING (‘gestures emotional expressions potentially
the practical GOFFMAN impressing act’-) + ‘body gloss’ (gestures
potentially threatening act) + ‘stigma’ (disqualifies
actions through
persons from full social acceptance)
which persons
engage the world
2. Bodily actions are
historically and
the modern city and the embodied experience of
culturally variable MARSHALL the pedestrian understood as encoded in the
BERMAN ordinary enactment of body techniques
 1. Bodies are disciplined by power operating
through discourses institutionalised (in
modern society by bureaucratic
organisations – hospitals, prisons, asylums –
MICHEL but also by more diffusely located forms, e.g.
FOUCAULT discourses about sexuality
2. Power -> Knowledge -> Truth ->
Institutionalised -> Disciplining the Human
Body -> Punishment
Culture as
control for
human
bodies ‘Civilising process’: a long historical
transformation marked by significant changes in
manners, and specifically ‘proper’ and
NORBERT ELIAS ‘civilised’ behaviour (Eating civilising of the
appetite for food and drink, but Foucauldian
examination of the discourses that have arisen
around the notion of a healthy diet)
 REPRESENTATION OF EMBODIMENT

FASHION GENDER
1. Representations of Femininity
➤ The modesty paradox – women constructed as seduction, but
1. Georg Simmel -> punished for it
fashion -> ➤ The duplicity paradox – women constructed as artifice, but
differentiation and marginalised for lacking essence and authenticity
affiliation ➤ The visibility paradox – women constructed as a spectacle, but
culturally invisible.
2. James Laver ->
➤ The beauty paradox– women embody ugliness while signifying
Clothing motivated beauty.
by three basic ➤ The death paradox – women signify death as well as the defence
principles: utility, against it
hierarchy and 2. Representations of masculinity
attraction (or Hegemonic Masculinity, Soft Masculinity
seduction) 3. Representing sexuality
Visual Plesure in Cinema -> Man’s eyes as camera + woman as an
objectified figure
 1. The body’s emotions is shaped by culture
The emotional 2. The ‘feeling rules’ specific to cultures and subcultures specifying
body the kind and level of emotional expression appropriate to any
situation requiring skill in the management of emotions

1. Foucauldian: The ‘disciplining’ and training in a sport producing

The sporting ‘docile bodies’
body 2. Bourdieusian: ‘bodily capital’ convert into ‘pugilistic capital’ –
how body becomes an asset to pursue success
BODY
AS
1. Performance dance has ‘high’and ‘popular’ forms, while social
MEDIUM
Body arts dance as a resistance to cultural hegemony
OF EXPRESSION
2. Social dance -> ‘we-ness’ is assembled
and
TRANSGRESSION
1. Fit body and gym -> life style -> consumerism
Discoursing 2. The ‘look’ of the body ->, not emerge in the nineteenth century
the fit body when the idols of production) -> ‘the performing self’ for
impression management

1. Contemporary fitness discourses redefine conceptions of

masculinity and femininity
Bodybuilding 2. Television soap operas offer currently popular images of
masculinity and femininity, subject to modification and change
 Cyborgism, Fragmentation and the End of the Body

Consumer culture fragments the body into a series of body parts maintained through diet,
cosmetics, exercise, vitamins

Fashion, advertising and pornography conceptualizing the fragmentation of the human body ->
postmodernism

Cybernetic organism or ‘cyborg’ -> ‘artefact organism’ in space travel

Donna Haraway’s ‘The cyborg manifesto’ -> The hybrid status of the cyborg presenting a
relationship between humans and technologies -> new modes of gender and new forms of
politics.