Body Politics

31 Body Politics Roberta Sassatelli Sociology has questioned the epistemological status of the scientific study of the body, so opening up the space for exploring the political implications of bodily representations and practices. Although the body–power relation was marginal until the work of Foucault and feminist theorists, classical social theory also contributed to its emergence as a problem. In Marx’s writings on labour as a corporeal process and those of Weber on discipline, the body is seen as transformed into an instrument. In other social theory, however, such as Elias’s work on body rationalization, Goffman’s understanding of the symbolic functions of bodily comportment and Bourdieu’s theory of embodiment and mimesis, the body is also the paramount symbol of the subject’s self-possession and degree of civilization. Much of Foucault’s work is concerned with modern operations of power in which body and knowledge are central, including discipline, surveillance, medicalization and confession. Under the influence of the poststructuralist turn influenced by Foucault, feminism has confronted the body more directly than it did previously. For poststructuralist feminists, gender is not the cultural representation of biological sex, but rather the process that produces the possibility of two distinct sexes. The postmodern ‘plasticity’ of sex, crucially articulated in the work of Judith Butler, is also taken up in studies of technology, notably that of Donna Haraway in her discussion of ‘cyborgs’. In general there has been a trend away from considering the body as a by-product of domination, towards seeing it as the focal point of conflicts over power. A host of contemporary phenomena, ranging from AIDS to women’s rights and assisted reproduction, from gay and lesbian movements to the Human Genome Project, have fore-grounded the body–power relation. Rather than formulating encompassing body typologies (Turner 1996), sociological theory has questioned the epistemological assumptions involved in the production of natural facts, decentring the physical body of the bio-medical sciences and exploring the political The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Political Sociology, First Edition. Edited by Edwin Amenta, Kate Nash, and Alan Scott. Ó 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 348 ROBERTA SASSATELLI implications of body representations and practices. Social constructivism has spread its wings across the wide variety of bodily experience. Bodies have acquired a history (Feher et al. 1989; Porter 1991). They have become political not only because they are shaped by productive requirements or constrained by moral rules, but also because their ‘naturality’ is traced back to claims to truth reflecting power differences. Together with bodily matters occupying pivotal positions in political struggles, criticism of binaries such as culture/nature, body/mind, gender/sex, male/female, other/self has flourished (Rorty 1980; Butler 1990; Laqueur 1990). While calls for an embodied approach to social life are multiplying, corporeality itself, the way we perceive and define what it is to have and to be a body, has been problematized (Crossley 2001). Its links with different dimensions of power – be it discursive, social or strictly political – are being explored in an effort to specify how the present social order is reproduced and to what extent it can be challenged. Body politics indeed refers both to the processes through which societies regulate the human body or use (part of) it to regulate themselves, and to the struggles over the degree of individual and social control of the body, its parts and processes. In other terms, it covers the two sides of the power–body relations: the powers to control bodies on the one side, and resistance and protest against such powers on the other. Mapping body politics is an exercise in complexity reduction. The territory is, above all, unstable, not least for its recent consolidation as something to be mapped. The body politics coordinates have been explicitly charted as a result of two major theoretical earthquakes – the work of Michel Foucault and the development of feminist approaches. Still, although the body–power relation has long been ancillary to other social scientific frames, much of classical sociological thought has contributed to its emergence as a problem in its own right (Turner 1996). Discipline, Civilization and Taste The concern with the relationship between the changing needs of an emerging industrial society and its disciplinary techniques stems from the rise of sociological reflections. The standing that Karl Marx assigned to labour as a corporeal process goes well beyond the creation of economic value. Through labour human beings can either realize themselves in harmony with nature or be alienated from themselves and their bodies, as in the capitalist mode of production. With the development of manufacture, the labourer ‘performs the same simple operation’ all his life, becomes ‘detail labourer’ and converts ‘his whole body into the automatic, one-sided implement of that operation’ (Marx 1976 [1867]: 458). The modern machinery-based factory is even more oppressive, reducing to a minimum the resistance the ‘naturally elastic’ barrier of the human body. Factory discipline ‘exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost; at the same time, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity’ (1976 [1867]: 548). Capitalism thus steals corporeality its meaning: the worker ‘only feels himself freely active in his animal function – eating, drinking, procreating, or at most in his dwelling and dressing-up, etc.; in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal’ (Marx 1981 [1844]: 66). Marx proposes the idea that the boundaries between animality and humanity are socially constructed. This construction is, BODY POLITICS 349 however, the result of domination and exploitation, something to be criticized on the basis of a truly human and natural way of being in one’s own body and deploying one’s own labour. Rather like Marx, Weber considers the modern factory as an example of the rational conditioning of work performances. However, as a ‘uniform’, ‘exact’, ‘consistently rationalized’ and ‘methodically trained’ conduct, discipline is both present in every society whenever masses are to be governed steadily and acquires a special character in modern times (Weber 1978 [1922]). Modern bureaucratic discipline is both rationalized and relies on people’s aspirations, working through the subjects rather than simply upon them. Weber’s analysis is rich in power effects: ascetic discipline worked for certain groups as a means of social mobility, crystallized into refined means of bureaucratic domination and promoted reformist attitudes legitimizing social change in the name of ever-greater rationalization. Owing to ‘sober and rational Puritan discipline’ Cromwell’s ‘men of conscience’ were, for example, technically superior to their opponents the ‘Cavaliers’, undisciplined ‘men of honor’. Furthermore, like Bell’s (1985) medieval ‘holy anoretics’ who managed to transcend their female disadvantage, demonstrating spiritual superiority via methodical selfstarvation, the bourgeoisie ascetic regime legitimized their social advancement. If the ‘de-naturalization’ of the body realized through extraordinary conducts works to set the ‘chosen’ apart, protestant ‘worldly asceticism’ tempers the repressive elements of religious asceticism, contrasting with the deployment of one’s own professional vocation and demands that everyone be a virtuoso (Weber 2002 [1920]). Weber thus begins to show the extent to which certain forms of body government may work as techniques of both power and empowerment even in the age of secularization. Body government is explicitly linked to the political by Norbert Elias. Elias traces body rationalization back to the advent of the modern nation-state while retaining a dynamic framework implicating embodiment in the struggles amongst individuals and groups. Historicizing the idea that our civilization is built upon the repression of instincts (Freud 1976 [1930]; Elias 1994 [1939]) shows that changes in the shape of political control brought about by the monopolization of physical violence gave way to pacified social spaces enforcing cooperation less charged with emotions and resulting in a change of personality structure: constraints through others are converted into self-constraints. The transformation of the ruling nobility from a class of knights into a class of self-restrained, calculating courtiers is conceptualized as both an example and a catalyst for such civilizing process. The courtization of the nobility takes place together with an increased upward thrust by bourgeois strata with the necessity on the part of the former to distinguish themselves from the latter. An unconsciously operating ‘repulsion of the vulgar’ and an ‘increasing sensibility to anything corresponding to a lesser sensibility of lower-ranking classes’ permeate the conduct of life of the courtly upper class, and this ‘good taste’ also represents a prestige value for such circles (1994 [1939]: 499). Through an imitation–emancipation dynamic, the ‘code of conduct’, which the leading bourgeois groups develop when they finally take over the function of the upper class, is the product of an ‘amalgamation’ of ‘refinement’ and ‘virtue’. Elias’s theory of civilization suggests that in the historical development of the West a particular ‘civilized’ bodily conduct has become widespread. In contemporary society the ‘pattern of self-control’ has become ‘all-embracing’, having to be 350 ROBERTA SASSATELLI deployed towards every person. Above all, it has become ‘more complex’ and ‘highly differentiated’ to accommodate increased functional differentiation and the emergence of a public/private divide. Spaces for the ‘controlled de-control of emotions’ like sport and a variety of ‘pleasurable’ and ‘exciting leisure pursuits’, substituting for what is ‘lacking’ in everyday life, become more important (Elias and Dunning 1986). Such a picture contrasts with Freudian visions of repression, as well as Marcusian utopias of liberation (Marcuse 1969). Indeed we may consider that while individualization, affect control, formality and a higher shame threshold have become mankind’s ‘second nature’, the de-naturalization of the body may take the shape of practices inspired by an idealized tribal communion, informality or even excess and the grotesque (Bataille 1985; Wouters 1986). Similar practices appear, on different occasions, as forms of resistance and subversion attempting to redefine society’s power structure, or as functional to its reproduction. Many commentators have associated the former with community circuits and the latter with commercialization (Lasch 1979). Still, research on subcultural forms, amateur practices, sporting activities and so on shows that embodied pleasures mediated by consumer goods are by no means merely oppressive. For example, fitness practices as conducted in commercial premises may be organized in ways that foreclose or facilitate a reappraisal of received body ideals (Sassatelli 2010). On their part, ostensibly counter-cultural bodily conducts or drastic body modification have been indicated as politically ambivalent. Working as a desire-producing machine allowing for the experience of Dionysian communality and a de-subjectified state of ecstasy, the rave scene appears to be based on a politics of difference that is indifferent to all political values other than the new (Jordan 1995). Scarification or extreme piercing on the verge of ‘neo-primitivism’ makes clear that the body is a potential site of resistance to standardization and yet may be depoliticized as private symptom of disquiet or incorporated into the mainstream as exotic (Favazza 1996). The trajectory indicated by the classics is twofold. On the one hand, the body is transformed into an instrument for work and labour, a utility, a function. On the other, however, the body continues to operate as the paramount symbol for the subject to demonstrate his or her being self-possessed, civilized or otherwise valuable. The symbolic function of bodily demeanour has become prey for micro-sociological approaches to identity, notably in the work of Erving Goffman. As individuals’ vulnerability in face-to-face interaction becomes ceremonial and locally specific, a finer body language develops. Ever more sophisticated bodily markers indicate both ‘diffuse social statuses’ and individual ‘character’, that is, the actor’s ‘conception of himself’, his or her ‘normality’ or ‘abnormality’ (Goffman 1963a). Modern selfhood is itself only understandable in relation to the ceremonial distance that individuals keep during interaction. The ‘air bubble’ around the body helps projecting a ‘sacred’, ‘elusive’, ‘deep’ self (Goffman 1967; 1963b), something which may well constitute the taken-for-granted basis for human rights to hold still in Western affectivity (Schneider 1996). Body language, however, can only to a degree be spoken strategically. As a language it talks of the subject beyond his or her intentions, and as a body it is never silent: ‘(a)lthough an individual can stop talking he cannot stop communicating through body idiom, he must say either the right thing or the wrong thing. He cannot say nothing’ (Goffman 1963b: 35). BODY POLITICS 351 Like Elias, Goffman implies that with modernity there has been a shift in the attitudes towards natural functions that is by no means power-free. We could say with Georg Simmel (1997 [1908]: 118) that the modern general ‘aspiration to hygiene’ is accompanied by embodied social distinctions to the point that ‘the social question is not only an ethical one, but also a question of smell’. The perceptions of dirt and cleanliness have been exposed as varying between cultures and across time, being implicated in power structures (Douglas 1966). Mary Douglas, in particular, has shown that as ‘a system of natural symbols’ the individual body is a metaphor for the vulnerabilities and the anxieties of the political body making. If what is inside and outside the body provides a language for discussing what is inside and outside the social, it would be a mistake to think that the contemporary confinement of purity to the scientific domain of the ‘hygienic’ marks a break with previous moralism. Indeed, the morality of bodily codes is powerfully illustrated by the potency of AIDS epidemics as a metaphor of decadence and deviance (Sontag 1988). And the very notion of epidemics can be extended to include many aspects of embodiment, including fat, with obesity increasingly represented as an infectious disease, unevenly distributed across the globe and the social classes so as to reflect differentials in value and standing (Gilman 2009). For all its force the metaphorical approach may risk figuring practical activity and the body merely as representation. Bourdieu has tried to illuminate the circular process whereby social practices, as organized in specific fields such as sport, education etc., are incorporated into the body, only then to be renewed through body competences and inclinations (Crossley 2001). Re-elaborating on the notion of ‘techniques of the body’ as mimetic habitus assembled for the individual ‘by all his education, by the whole society to which he belongs, in the place he occupies it’ (Mauss 1973 [1936]: 76), Pierre Bourdieu (1977a) has composed his theory of practice with a concern that human experience is not to be understood in terms of cognitive and linguistic models, but in terms of embodiment and mimesis. These are, in turn, implicated in a set of classificatory systems which ‘are not so much means of knowledge as means of power, harnessed to social functions and overtly or covertly aimed at satisfying the interests of a group’ (Bourdieu 1986: 477). Although accused of ignoring dissent and social transformation, Bourdieu has helped conceptualize taste as embodied disposition that works as symbolic power naturalizing the existing system of power differences. For Bourdieu, the state of the body is itself the realization of a ‘political mythology’: lifestyle regimes reflect the cultural genesis of tastes from the specific point within the social space from which individuals originate – they are incorporated through the most elementary everyday movements inculcating the equivalence between physical and social space. Even ‘in its most natural appearance. . . volume, size, weight, etc.’ the body is a social product: ‘the unequal distribution among social classes of corporeal properties’ is both realized concretely through ‘working conditions’ and ‘consumption habits’, and perceived through ‘categories and classification systems which are not independent of such distribution’ (Bourdieu 1977b: 51). Emphasis on embodiment is fundamental in this context to understand the depth of habitus as much as subjects’ capacity or necessity to alter or negotiate it to enhance subjectivity or indeed to protect it. For example, marrying Bourdieu’s with Giddens’ (1991) theory of ‘reflexive individualization’ we may consider that certain advantaged social groups – such as the so-called cultural intermediaries – busily engage in body 352 ROBERTA SASSATELLI projects to alter their bodies and reappraise their taste so as to produce more marketable selves, something that adumbrates their collaboration in a broader process of self-commodification whereby self-actualization is realized through the embracement of market variety, novelty and abundance (Sassatelli 2007). On a different account, we may return to Elias’s and Goffman’s concern for the way bodies and selves are fundamentally, if institutionally, co-constituted. Survivors’ accounts from Nazi camps, for example, point to the centrality of changing and negotiating body habits (Shilling 2008). Survivors had by necessity to develop a habitual attention to any opportunities that arose to attend to immediately body needs, such as feeding as adequately as possible. This was associated not only with becoming a physical body, but also with a heightened sense of specific body parts (notably the stomach). Feeling the body in this way, however, was not necessarily a process of being reduced to the body; on the contrary, survivors attempted to negotiate the possibility of maintaining a sense of future and self-respect through whatever care of the body was allowed. Thus participating in the ritual of washing (although in cold, dirty water) was viewed as a symbol and an instrument of moral survival. Biopower, Surveillance and Medicalization A focus on the institutional conditions for the production of subjectivity through bodies brings us to Michel Foucault’s work. Much of Foucault’s work strives to illustrate modern operations of power in which body and knowledge are central to produce subjectivity. Despite a number of criticisms – for attributing primacy to the discursive over the non-discursive realm; for over-stretching the notion of power; for reducing the subject to the body and the body to a passive text; or for bestowing a somewhat essentialist quality of resistance to subjugated forms of embodiment – Foucault’s work has been pivotal in recognizing that the body is directly implicated in a political field. Power relations do not simply ‘repress’ it, they rather produce it, having ‘an immediate hold on it; they invest it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies and to emit signs’ (Foucault 1977: 25). Power, in turn, operates as a ‘microphysics’, as strategies and tactics working at an intermediate level between body and institutions, through everyday practices. Foucault has thus helped place emphasis on local and intimate operations of power, widening the scope of the political, something which has influenced, if not satisfied, a number of critical approaches. In Discipline and Punish Foucault (1977) continues the classical preoccupation with the modern transformation of the body into a useful and docile instrument. Organizations such as schools, hospitals, armies, factories and prisons are described as disciplinary institutions consolidating routinary systems of power working through the embodiment of self-surveillance. The mechanized organization and routinized training intimated by Marx and Weber is thoroughly analysed by Foucault’s description of discipline as coordinating people’s movements and functions through time and space. Foucault, however, considers the body, rather than the subject, as the direct object of control. All disciplinary institutions may indeed be understood as laboratories where a new form of political rationality developed. The modern notion of sovereignty is coterminous with a shift from the right of death to the power over life, BODY POLITICS 353 a ‘biopolitics’ consisting of an investment in the human body (conceived as an object to be manipulated) and of an interest for the human kind (with scientific categories such as population and species replacing juridical ones as objects of political attention). The idea that the modern nation-state consolidates itself by stimulating life to grow into prescribed forms has been widely influential. Foucault himself addressed welfare provision and the whole idea of tutelary public authority as related to an open-ended expansion of the conduct of government (Foucault 1988a). Rather than an ‘etaticization’ of society, however, Foucault suggests the inclusion of the state in a particular style of political reasoning defined as ‘governmentality’ or the presumption that life conducts can, should and must be administered by authority (Foucault 1991; see also Hindess, Chapter 4, in this volume). Indeed, through a multifarious network of governance, regulatory interventions are increasingly important in the management of human bodies and the boundaries of their normalization. This includes practices as diverse as insurance technologies (Defert 1991); diffuse, localized and internalized techniques governing consumption of allegedly dangerous products such as alcohol (Valverde 1998); medical regulation concerning the boundaries of life (euthanasia and abortion on the one hand, see Shakespeare 1998; assisted reproduction on the other, see Hendin 1997); within life (gender arrangements, including the regulation of sexchange procedures, see Holmes 2002) and across life (organ donation and transplant for example, see Lock 2002). Such normalization practices of course elicit struggle and resistance – witness the emergence of intersex activism (Chase 1998) or disability activism (Shapiro 1993) campaigning for the consolidation of a national and international jurisprudence concerning the redefinition of civil and human rights – in a continuous social and cultural dialectic. Still, emphasis on such dialectic may erase the role that physical violence still has in contemporary forms of government. While Foucault’s work allowed him to consider how specialized disciplinary discourses and institutions realized the power to govern life, Giorgio Agamben (1998) has maintained that sovereign power, or the power to take life away, has never vanished and, like disciplinary power, it has become regionalized. Considering recent developments in body politics in the global arena and international law, he suggests that rather than a shift from sovereign power to disciplinary power, we witness a ‘thanatopolitics’: the creation of special ‘state of exceptions’ where the sacredness of life is suspended and ‘emergency powers’ are legitimated. The permutation of power into discipline is thus ultimately sustained by a new form of sovereignty with the regionalized creation of lawless zones, both within and without the frontiers of the nation-states. These are justified by the need to protect the value of life, and yet any human life that gets trapped within them is liable to be killed, or left to die or be kept barely alive without incurring any crime. Whatever the definition of the political, nothing can illustrate better the insidious duplicity of biopolitics than the analogies between the eugenic measures developed in many Western countries and those developed by the Nazi dictatorship (Burleigh and Wipperman 1991). Initially fuelled by hopes to eradicate defective genes, a huge number of persons were sterilized without their consent from the beginning of the century up to the early 1960s in the United States, mostly belonging to social groups considered racially inferior, such as African Americans and Native Americans (Reilly 1991). Attention to the link between population control and racial issues has recently 354 ROBERTA SASSATELLI been renewed by the development in Western countries of an intense debate about migrations, migrants and refugees. In this context, Foucaultian approaches may provide an historically based perspective on racialized social relations, starting from the establishment of a colonial order where the European individual and political bodies are set against a savage ‘other’ (Stoler 1995). As African people were turned into commodities in the Atlantic slave trade, Western countries identified some specific bodily differences to justify their subjugation: dark skin was at the negative pole in the dichotomy of white and good versus black and evil, broad facial features stood for excessive sexual appetites, unruliness or stupidity, muscularity cried for hard labour. The body is the central site for the process of racialization whereby bodily differences are inscribed with social meaning and value. Even today, blackness is often constructed as being trapped within the web of nature while the white body has freedom of movement, and moves so as to disembody itself, locating whiteness (and masculinity) firmly within modernity and rationality (Hill 2004). Black embodiment still arguably battles against what Frantz Fanon (1967) suggested characterizes black consciousness: the perception that black embodied subjectivity is objectified in representation, rather than posited as the subject of experience. Bodies and their attributed qualities may thus still function, in the case of coloured people as of women, as hints to cast doubts on a subject’s capacity to stand as fully as possible as valuable, responsible and reliable citizens. Together with the objectifying qualities of modern political rationality, Foucault envisaged subjectifying ones: a shift in the notion of sovereignty is echoed by a shift in the notion of subjectivity, from subjects with ascribed identities to free citizens who are asked to produce themselves. Foucault’s later work does not do without the body, though. It rather shifts to the modern preoccupation with uncovering one’s ‘true’ self predicated on body–mind dualism. In The History of Sexuality he addresses the practices by which individuals were led to acknowledge themselves as ‘subjects of desire’, where desire located in the body contains ‘the truth of their being, be it natural or fallen’ (Foucault 1985: 5). The development of psychoanalysis epitomizes the fact that the ‘truth’ of individuals is no longer linked to their position in the universal order of things, but is constructed around a normalizing notion of inner responsibility requiring an endless hermeneutics of the self. While psychoanalysis is part of the ‘confessional’ machinery that it ostensibly redresses, repression is not accounted for as an historical fact. On the contrary, power takes on a productive character as testified by the ‘multiplication of discourses concerning sex’ in the fields of exercise of power which ‘exploit it as the secret’ (Foucault 1978: 17, 35). While in the Greco-Roman tradition sexual intercourse was part of a regime of life governed through a measure/ excess dialectic, with modernity it was inscribed in a therapeutic model working on the basis of the normal/pathological distinction (Foucault 1978, 1985). The web of scientific practices operating on the body produced a ‘scientia sexualis’ constructing sexuality as an empirical and natural object of enquiry and as the secret essence of the individual. Once again truth is revealed as an historically specific category: the body has no inherent truth; rather, truths on the body are constructed through various categorizing strategies. Even Foucault’s earlier works on the medicalization of insanity and the birth of medical discourse may be included in this picture if we consider that modern political rationality not only makes organic life enter the art of the possible, but also does so by BODY POLITICS 355 employing and negotiating with a number of expert discourses. In particular, a concern with medical truths implicated in a network of power relations is developed in the Birth of the Clinic (Foucault 1973). Examining medical treatises, Foucault analyses the metamorphosis which leads to the establishment of pathological anatomy: disease becomes a ‘collection of symptoms’ necessarily expressed in the human body and integral to the disease itself rather than an abstract pathological ‘essence’. This is accompanied by a medical ‘gaze that dominates’ the body by rendering its depth a visible object, with the anatomy lesson becoming itself a powerful representation of political power as in Rembrandt’s famous painting. When the notion of a pathological essence infiltrating the body is replaced by the idea of the body itself becoming ill, death is transformed into disease and degeneration, a dispersed and uneven failure of the body. This opens the space for the medicalization of death, for its treatment as dirt, and for the institutionalization of the dying (Aries 1978; Elias 1994 [1939]). This in turn is coupled with ageing being increasingly seen as disease, whereby ‘ageism’ – or a cultural bias against ageing – is realized through both institutional practices such as health care and subjectivity, with old people internalizing negative messages about their bodies and selves (Gilleard and Higgs 2000). As we shall see in the next paragraph, ageism is particularly evident in the case of women’s bodies: older women hardly find cultural endorsement in public images, with the older female body being the other of the ‘beauty myth’ through which women are invited to look at themselves. Feminism(s), Gender and Technologies Since its emergence feminist thought has conceived the body as a site of female oppression. The term body politics was a slogan for the feminist movement in the 1970s to campaign for abortion rights, to denounce violence against women and the objectification of their bodies. However, while early socialist-feminists were striving to counterbalance the gender-blindness of much classical sociology by conceptualizing the interdependence of capitalism and patriarchy and male domination over female bodies and selves, more recent works confront gendered bodies as primary sites of ordinary, minute subjection in practices of body care, maintenance and beautification, as sites of emotions facing increasing commercialization in the global arena, and sites of extensible capacities facing technological developments (in reproduction, production, communication and representation). Firstly, contemporary feminist research has considered the minute and mundane practices that associate women with the body, confining them to a life centred on its maintenance (Bordo 1993; Weitz 1998). Plastic surgery in particular has been studied as its social acceptance has grown, being perceived as a site of both female subjugation and female negotiation of empowerment utopias (Davis 1995). These feminist concerns can now be usefully matched by research addressing masculine embodiment in its own right. If the ways men inhabit their bodies have emerged as correlated to patriarchy, studies addressing traditional symbols of masculinity such as muscles, and less obvious areas of male involvement such as fashion, show that old visions of masculinity are negotiated in the face of the changing power balances between the sexes (Segal 2007). In the 1990s new gender cultures within advertising agencies themselves have contributed to the development of new visions of masculinity 356 ROBERTA SASSATELLI (Nixon 2003). For example, the ‘new lad’ and the ‘new man’ portrayed by much recent British commercial advertising are respectively characterized by an openness to pleasures previously marked as taboo for men, and by a partial loosening of the binary codes that regulate the relationships between the sexes as well as heterosexual and homosexual masculinities. All in all, alongside hegemonic masculinity and femininity, ads have thus conveyed non-traditional images of gender to the wider public, even if only to attract the attention of a distracted spectator or to bestow the thrill of the forbidden on a brand. These may be subversive, often marginal images, showing deviant masculinity and femininity, playing with sexual ambiguity, homosexuality, drag imagery and camp culture (Lewis and Rolley 1997). In this context, Susan Bordo (1999) has moved to acknowledge that the male body as represented in popular culture and advertising is also increasingly objectified, with selfhood being reduced to a surface to present. Still, feminist researchers insist that the burden of the body is heavier on women: new forms of sexism are seen as bourgeoning when young women claim their commoditized, eroticized bodies as capital to gain the favours of otherwise powerful men (Walters 2010). Secondly, contemporary feminist and gender studies have considered how the commercialization process differently invests women’s embodied capacities and emotional codes on a global scale. As Arlie Russell Hochschild (2003) has shown, especially among the upper middle and upper strata of the US and European populations, there is a trend for the commercialization of care which produces differentiated femininities: as care (for children, the old, the sick) is not rewarded as much as market success, care jobs in the home are typically carried out by female migrants, who are often portrayed as essentially more ‘caring’ than Western women. In a characteristic essentialist move they are portrayed as having bodies which are naturally ‘made to love’, while Western professional women may be portrayed as pressured for time, oriented towards their kids’ achievement and incapable of being relaxed, patient and joyful – with the result that both femininities are devalued as either marginal or questionable. Indeed, in recent years, much of the work conducted on gender not only considers its interesectionality with race or ethnicity, age and class, but also engages with the increasingly intrusive global arena whereby gendered embodiment, of masculinity as well as femininity, is negotiated also in relation to the movements of corporate capital and its restless pursuit of cheap labour (Connell 2005). Thirdly, as I will come back in the close of this paragraph, technologies have been studied as way to extend, alter and develop bodily capacities, notably impacting on what have long been perceived as the ‘natural’ limits of gendered embodiment. This area of studies has notably been furthered by theoretical developments within gender theory that extended social constructivism from bodily symbols, demeanour and rituals to ‘the body’ itself. Indeed, it is important to notice that contemporary feminism has developed a criticism of the earlier gender/sex division that inscribed sex in a dehistoricized biological difference. This has altered the way we approach body politics, making of plasticity and its limits an eminently political issue. In fact, despite scepticism about Foucault’s inattention to the condition of women, the poststructuralist turn within feminism has changed the framing of gender while retaining it as its key organizing category. Together with a politics stressing the diversity amongst women (hooks 1982), gender has become understood not as a cultural representation BODY POLITICS 357 of a biological given, but as the process that produces in the body the possibility of two distinct sexes. The biological foundation is exposed as only apparently clear: gendered bodies are unstable cultural constructions, whose purpose is to delimit and contain the ‘threatening absence of boundaries between human bodies’ (Epstein and Straub 1991). This has given way to rethinking gender/sex as a semiotics of corporeality constituting identities and self-representations. The author most associated with such a poststructuralist turn is Judith Butler. In Gender Trouble Butler (1990) proposes to deconstruct the system of signs through which feminine identity has been linked to the heterosexual matrix. Considering gender as a performative, something which ‘is always a doing, although not a doing by a subject that comes before the deed’, Butler insists that as a ‘continuous discursive practice’, gender ‘remains open to intervention and re-signification’ (1990: 25, 33). Having dismissed expressive notions of femininity, she believes that the realization of a feminist politics of the body is to be built upon the same technologies and everyday practices inscribing gender/sexuality onto the body. Subversive performances such as cross-dressing are thus contemplated as revealing the ‘imitative nature’ of gender. Despite the lack of sociological analysis, Butler’s agenda implies an emphasis on how different social contexts offer local rules consolidating gender through ritualistic repetitions. Drawing on Bourdieu’s habitus, in her later work Butler stresses that this consolidation takes the shape of a social ‘materialization of corporeality whereby “the force” of the performative is never fully separable from bodily force’ (Butler 1993: 9; 1997: 141). As Bourdieu (1998) himself writes, using amongst others Nancy Henley’s work on body politics and non-verbal communication (Henley 1977), gender cannot be reduced to a voluntaristic act, being consolidated both in matter – posture, demeanour, size etc. – and in symbols – classifications and categories – which speak of the subject. As noted by Iris Marion Young (1990a), studies in the use of space suggest that men and women use space in different ways which fix different embodied selves: on average, women walk with a shorter stride than men, hold their arms close to their bodies, avoid meeting the gaze of others in public spaces, use their arms to shield themselves and draw back from objects thrown to them rather than reach out to get them. These female ways of body-space articulation amount surely to a bodily idiom that can be ritualized in performances and hyperitualized in visual imagery, particularly advertising (Goffman 1979), but they are also deeply experienced as unconscious, un-reflected corporeality. Butler’s subversion is thereby revealed as fragile, always in danger of surreptitiously reproducing dualism. Still, her theoretical move clearly signals the aspiration to recuperate corporeality in a post-dualistic fashion. To this end the body/power relation is openly constructed in such a way that the body is the weaker, plastic term of the equation, with the result that some feminists have accused her of endorsing a postmodern paradigm of plasticity that obliterates ‘real’ differences. Butler has been crucial in consolidating the study of the politics of sex and sexuality. The normative convergence of the male/female dichotomy and heterosexuality was already implicit in Foucault’s (1980b) presentation of the memories of Herculine Barbin and, above all, it was clearly related to performativity in Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) well-known essay on Agnes. Here Garfinkel analyses how Agnes, an ‘intersexed’ person, tries to ‘secure her rights to live in the elected sex status’, learning to be a woman while presenting herself as a ‘natural’ one. Agnes’s struggle 358 ROBERTA SASSATELLI for a sex-change operation that would satisfy her male boyfriend too shows the potency of the male/female duality and discloses the performative, imitative nature of femininity without assimilating all attributes or performances. Above all, the different chances available to Agnes and to the nineteenth-century hermaphrodite Herculine show that the plasticity of the truth of the body has penetrated materiality, consolidating paths for unprecedented physical transformation. An approach to plasticity is developed in Donna Haraway’s work on ‘cyborgs’. Haraway (1991) argues for a feminist agenda addressing the cultural politics of an info-technic society that has modified the ‘nature’ of the organic. The ‘cyborg’, as a ‘hybrid of machine and organism’, is at the same time a ‘creature of reality’ – witness the diffusion of prosthetic medicine – and a ‘creature of fiction’, an ‘imaginative resource’. As such, it works as a political platform to rethink the boundaries between animality and humanity, the artificial and the organic, the physical and non-physical. In particular, the ‘cyborg’ is set as a creature of a post-gender world providing an ‘argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction’ and a new ‘ontology’ for an ‘oppositional’ and ‘utopian’ politics (Haraway 1991: 150–151). Despite its proclaimed utopian tone, Haraway’s work has offered a new perspective on how technology, traditionally identified as oppressive for women and alien to them, may become a major source of female resistance. Feminists have reappraised the potential of assisted reproduction. Approaches stressing that pre-natal medicine and assisted reproduction are forms of patriarchal domination undermining women’s rights, displaying dangerous continuities with eugenics, producing anxieties and dependency, and depoliticizing social differences (Scutt 1990) have been questioned by those who salute new reproductive technologies as postmodern forms of deconstruction allowing for new ways of being (Farquhar 1996). It is important to notice that rather than simply being blurred, the key analytical categories organizing our world and deriving from the division between technology and nature are being reconfigured and fought over. New technologies provide for new ways of conceiving the subject, ways that, like in the case of those geared towards gathering information about genetic risk (Novas and Rose 2000), draw the subject back to the body only to fragment or objectify the body into a myriad of parts or processes at the molecular level. More broadly, new technological domains are ambivalent spaces. The idea that new information technologies offer a world of masquerade in which we can represent our bodies with complete flexibility does not mean that the body is transcended altogether or that the heterosexual ideology disappears (Slater 1998). The representation of technology is itself ambivalent. In contemporary science fiction, dualistic thinking is articulated differently but it is not eluded (Holland 1995), while the popularization of genetics does not do without a rhetoric of nature and the (re)generation of value differences (Nelkin and Lindee 1995). Concluding Remarks Human bodies have been seen as clay, moulded by political and economic constraints. With an emphasis on the power effects of classificatory systems, bodies have also been BODY POLITICS 359 conceived as symbols speaking of the place their bearers occupy within the social order as well as of what counts as order and disorder. More recently, bodies have been described as texts, emphasizing not so much their metaphoric quality, but rather readership and persuasion, the power to create reality through interpretation and representation. The immateriality discerned in textuality has been amended by a notion of the body as mimesis, whereby the body is practised in everyday life, shaped by dealing with the situations, rules and classifications encountered. Despite their differences, Foucault, Bourdieu and Butler seem to incline towards such notion. Furthermore, although each emphasizes different aspects of power – respectively biopolitics as part of governmentality, taste as related to political economy and symbolic power, the incorporation of binaries and classificatory power – they all try to widen the notion of power from its confinement to the political strictly conceived. The map that I have been drawing is therefore both a topographic device and a trajectory for navigation. Within the social sciences, sociology in particular, there has been a general move away from considering the shaping of the body merely as a ghastly by-product of domination – like in Marx’s analysis of the physical effects of factory work – and towards the designation of embodiment as a crucial aspect of social struggles and structure. What body politics teaches us is that the body is a battlefield, moulded by conflicts between groups with different values and different political and economic interests. Furthermore, the body – its images, definitions, boundaries etc. – is itself the focal point for conflicts over the shape of power, for the modern power to govern life can only crystallize a variety of identities which in turn become the basis for resistance against it. This seems to require a new conception of politics, one which considers, to restate Foucault, that we have become very peculiar animals, animals in whose politics our own life as living beings is put into question. This should help us consider the ambivalence of plasticity. Body politics is coterminous with the progressive consolidation of a notion of the body as plastic, both in its meanings and its materiality. To be sure, plasticity often takes the explicitly programmatic tone of a political project. Precisely because of this we cannot be satisfied with its location as the blind spot of our reflection on the body–power relation and should address the ways in which it is implicated in formations of both domination and freedom. Further Reading Brook, B. 1999: Feminist Perspectives on the Body. Harlow: Addison Wesley Longman. Burkitt, I. 1999: Bodies of Thought. Embodiment, Identity and Modernity. London: Sage. Harvey, J. and Sparks, R. 1991: The politics of the body in the context of modernity. Quest 43: 164–189.