Sociology of the body

South Asia

Middle East

Europe

North America

Sociology of the body is a branch of sociology studying the representations as alive as social uses of the human body in advanced societies.

Early theories

According to Thomas Laqueur, prior to the eighteenth century the predominant improvement example for a social understanding of the body was the "one sex model/one flesh model". It followed that there was one model of the body which differed between the sexes in addition to races, for example, the vagina was simply seen as a weaker report of the penis and even thought to emit sperm.

This was changed by the Enlightenment. In the sixteenth century, Europe began to participate in the slave trade and in order to justify this a large quantity of literature was presentation showing the deviant sexuality and savagery of the African Fanon, 1976. In the eighteenth century, the ideas of egalitarianism and universal and inalienable rights were becoming the intellectual norm. However, they could non justify the subordination of women within this theory.

To explain these the biology of incommensurability was created. This essentially claimed that different sexes and races were better adjusted for different tasks and could therefore show the necessity of discrimination and subordination. For example, craniometry was used to show people of African descent to be less evolved than those of European descent Gould, 1981.

This was also combined with the technological developments which were taking place, leading to people seeing the body as a machine and therefore understandable, classifiable and repairable, one of the number one examples of this was the produce of William Harvey in the early seventeenth century.

Another early key area of developing was the Cartesian Dichotomy. This saw the mind and the body as separated and led to the principle of interaction between the two being an accepted theory on the body until the coding of the Structuralist approach in the twentieth century.