Reflection is generally considered to be important for learning from simulation-based training in professional and vocational education. The mainstream conceptualization of reflection is argued to rest on a dualistic ground separating the mind from the body. Drawing on phenomenological analyses of bodily awareness and an ethnographic case study of maritime safety training we show how and why students’ embodied experiences and subjectivity play a foundational role in reflection. We develop and illustrate the notion of bodily-awareness-in-reflection which captures a mode of (...) reflection wherein non-conceptual pre-reflective bodily experiences are integrated with conceptual thought. In this way, we aim to enrich and complement prior work on simulation-based training and embodied professional learning by providing an enactivist epistemological foundation of reflection in debriefing, highlighting awareness of the lived body as a necessary ground of reflective self-knowledge. (shrink)

Despite a growing body of research on the sociology of time and, analogously, on the sociology of sport, to date there has been relatively little sports literature that takes time as the focus of the analysis. Given the centrality of time as a feature of most sports, this would seem a curious lacuna. The primary aims of this article are to contribute new perspectives on the subjective experience of sporting injury and to analyze some of the temporal dimensions of sporting (...) “injury time” and subsequent rehabilitation. The article is based on data derived from a 2-year autoethnographic research project on 2 middle/long-distance runners, and concludes with some indicative comments regarding the need for sports physiotherapists and other health-care practitioners to take into account the subjective temporal dimension of injury and rehabilitative processes. (shrink)

This paper examines the role of the body in the social and psychological study of ageing. Drawing upon the phenomenological tradition, it argues that the body occupies a halfway house between materiality and subjectivity, unsettling those social psychological and biological frameworks by which age and ageing are traditionally understood. While offering no simple resolution of this ambiguity, the paper highlights the intrinsic nature of this dilemma. After reviewing recent research and writing concerning body awareness, body ownership and body affordance, the (...) thesis is proposed that much of what constitutes bodily ageing can be seen as a series of ‘normal abnormalities’. These result in our experience of bodily ageing pivoting uneasily between an object and a subject position. This dialectic is incapable of synthetic resolution but still, to varying degrees it preoccupies many in later life. It is rarely confronted in its full complexity, however, in ageing studies. The phenomenological tradition provides an under-utilised framework for future investigations in this field. (shrink)

In recent years, calls have been made to address the relative dearth of qualitative sociological investigation into the sensory dimensions of embodiment, including within physical cultures. This article contributes to a small, innovative and developing literature utilizing sociological phenomenology to examine sensuous embodiment. Drawing upon data from three research projects, here we explore some of the ‘sensuousities’ of ‘intense embodiment’ experiences as a distance-running-woman and a boxing-woman, respectively. Our analysis addresses the relatively unexplored haptic senses, particularly the ‘touch’ of heat. (...) Heat has been argued to constitute a specific sensory mode, a trans-boundary sense. Our findings suggest that ‘lived’ heat, in our own physical-cultural experiences, has highly proprioceptive elements and is experienced as both a form of touch and as a distinct perceptual mode, dependent upon context. Our analysis coheres around two key themes that emerged as salient: (1) warming up, and (2) thermoregulation, which in lived experience were encountered as strongly interwoven. (shrink)

Work in body studies and theories of affect challenge the mind/body dualism where human action/behavior is shown to be an embodied, lived event. More specifically, bodily practices not only inform/shape human subjectivity but convey what language—words—often cannot. BDSM is one such practice that illuminates embodied subjectivities, where the flesh proves pivotal to one’s orientation to/with the world. In this article I explore women BDSMers who, as survivors of sexual violence, engage in BDSM rape play. BDSM rape play foregrounds the flesh, (...) exemplifying quite powerfully “bodily capacity,” one where bodily disintegration that occurred with the sexual assault is disrupted through bodily recuperation. This felt experience—the body as the source of insight—carries considerable weight, and should inform our thinking when it comes to feminist explorations of sexuality and those contentious and controversial practices such as BDSM. (shrink)

In this article, following on from earlier debates in the journal regarding the ‘thorny issue’ of epochē and bracketing in sociological phenomenological research, we consider more generally the challenges of engaging in reflexivity and bracketing when undertaking ethnographic ‘insider’ research, or research in familiar settings. We ground our discussion and illustrate some of the key challenges by drawing on the experience of undertaking this research approach with a group of competitive swimmers, who were participating in a British university performance swimming (...) programme at the time of the doctoral study. The primary researcher was highly familiar with the phenomenon of competitive swimming, having been both a competitive swimmer and swimming coach. Some of the key elements of a sociological phenomenological approach to studying physical-cultural embodiment are first delineated, before addressing the considerable challenges of engaging in sustained reflexivity and bracketing, using the swimming research for illustrative purposes. We suggest some practical ways in which researchers in sport and physical cultures might approach epochē and bracketing in ethnographic ‘insider’ research. -/- KEYWORDS: Sociological phenomenology, competitive swimming, insider research, epochē/bracketing. (shrink)

In everyday life, we usually go by theone-body-one-person rule: one person has one body. This social belief builds on two assumptions: bodies are individual units and they are the same in different situations. This is also the conceptual resource for social theories that build on the notion of individuals. In this article, we turn it into a sociological topic. We develop a vocabulary for reconstructing bodily one-ness and bodily sameness as practically achieved social order, asbody boundary work: what belongs to (...) a body is a matter of local practices that define its situational contours, limits and margins. Practices of identification and personification draw on social memories and enact bodies as trans-situational entities. Persons and bodies, we argue, evolve in co-individuation. Personal corporality, then, can be conceptualized as abody of workthat encompasses these practical efforts of boundary-making. (shrink)

The 2015 Nepal earthquake and avalanche on Mount Everest generated one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters in modern times, bringing to media attention the physical-cultural world of high-altitude climbing. Contributing to the current sociological concern with embodiment, here we investigate the lived experience and social ‘production’ of endurance in this sociologically under-researched physical-cultural world. Via a phenomenological-sociological framework, we analyse endurance as cognitively, corporeally and interactionally lived and communicated, in the form of ‘endurance work’. Data emanate from in-depth interviews with (...) 18 high-altitude mountaineers, ten of whom experienced the 2015 avalanche. The article responds to Shilling’s (2016) call to address an important lacuna identified in sociological work: the need to investigate the embodied importance of cognition in the incorporation of culture. The concept of endurance work provides a powerful exemplar of this cognitive-corporeal nexus at work as a physical-culturally shaped, embodied practice and mode-of-thinking in the social world of high-altitude climbing. (shrink)

If, as Anthony Elliot argues, `the [symbolic] law of the father triumphs over the loss of the maternal body' in the making of men, how is the masculine body possible? The answer would appear to be, on condition that it becomes implacably hard, disciplined, an object of work. On the other hand, excessive interest in the body, as in the case of bodybuilding, would appear also to betoken narcissism and femininity. Drawing on the notions of the `hard man', the significance (...) of muscle, bodybuilding and the case of `Iron' Mike Tyson, this article attempts to come to grips with the complex and contradictory relations among desire, anxiety and the embodiment of masculinity. Specifically, this entails focusing on the deconstruction of discourses relating to muscle and `hardness', and on how identifications with such discourses are made and sustained. (shrink)

The analysis of video-recorded interaction consists of various professionalized ways of seeing participant behavior through multimodal, co-operative, or intercorporeal lenses. While these perspectives are often adopted simultaneously, each creates a different view of the human body and interaction. Moreover, microanalysis is often produced through local practices of sense-making that involve the researchers’ bodies. It has not been fully elaborated by previous research how adopting these different ways of seeing human behavior influences both what is seen from a video and how (...) it is seen, as well as the way the interpretation of the data ultimately unfolds in the interaction between researchers. In this article, we provide a theoretical-methodological discussion of the microanalytic research process. We explore how it differs from “seeing” affect in interaction either as a co-operative and multimodal action or as an intercorporeal experience. First, we introduce the multimodal conversation analytic, co-operative, and intercorporeal approaches to microanalysis. Second, we apply and compare these practices to a video-recorded interaction of a romantic couple. Furthermore, we examine a video-recorded episode of us, the researchers, reflecting on our analytic observations about this interaction. We suggest that adopting a multimodal and co-operative perspective constructs affect as co-produced and displayed through observable action, while an intercorporeal perspective produces affect as an embodied and experienced phenomenon. While the former enables locating affect in a specific moment and identifiable body parts, the latter facilitates recognizing the experienced side of affect. These different modes of professional vision complement one another in capturing affect in interaction while being fundamentally used in local interactions between the researchers. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and emotional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as “inter-affection” that are part of the inter-corporeality of the “Flesh” of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational life-worlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of (...) affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the popularity of phenomenologies and the tensions that arise from their use as research methodologies in nursing. Among these tensions are: the troublesome issues of adapting a fundamentally philosophical means of understanding human being(s) for use as a more pragmatic and robust research approach in a practice discipline; the various types of phenomenology and the confusions that surround these and other interpretive methodologies, particularly within different intellectual and cultural traditions; and the need for nursing to (...) find a space in which it can give voice to aspects of its practice that are silenced in less existentially oriented methodologies. Although phenomenologies are currently popular and possibly fashionable in nursing, there are important issues in relation to their use in a methodological sense that remain to be addressed. (shrink)

This article further systematizes the existential body, contributing to the ethnographic model of embodied objectivity. It situates embodiment as the foundation of knowledge, demonstrating its underdevelopment in anthropological literature. The paper explores the philosophical relationship between being-in-the-world and Merleau-Ponty’s body-proper, emphasizing the central role of embodied pre-objective signification in representational ethnographic knowing. This aspect is often insufficiently addressed, particularly in light of certain ethnographic applications of the epoché. The paper concludes that, given the oscillatory apprehension of embodiment, the use of (...) terms like “systematizing” and “inter-objectivity” adequately enhances its portrayal as a pre-objective phenomenon rather than an objective one. (shrink)

Jérôme Beauchez est sociologue, maître de conférences à l’université de Lyon/Saint-Étienne, et membre de l’équipe « Cultures publiques » du Centre Max Weber. Dans son premier livre, L’Empreinte du poing. La boxe, le gymnase et leurs hommes 1, il mène une enquête ethnographique au sein d’une salle de boxe anglaise d’une ville de l’Est de la France. Dans l’entretien qui suit, il revient sur les enjeux de l’ethnographie aujourd’hui, en situant son enquête à la convergence de la sociologie urbaine américaine (...) de Mitchell Duneier, de l’anthropologie de Clifford Geertz et de la sociologie culturelle de Jeffrey Alexander. Il prend clairement ses distances avec l’ethnographie inspirée par la sociologie de Pierre Bourdieu. C’est l’occasion de constater que si l’ethnographie n’est pas tout à fait un sport de combat, elle constitue un champ de questions théoriques passionnées, et un instrument irremplaçable pour la découverte des mondes contemporains, de leurs drames, de leurs combats et des résistances qui s’y affirment. (shrink)

This article proposes that the urgent task for feminist sociology is to recuperate those lost or residual `body matters' which lurk, unattended to, on the sidelines of the social. Feminist sociology must carefully negotiate the complex space between sociality and corporeality. The new feminist philosophies of the body tend sometimes to grate against this project by valorizing the body but de-valorizing gender. The new sociology of the body is recuperating the body within sociology, but pays insufficient attention to the ways (...) in which gendered bodies have always enjoyed varying degrees of absence or presence in the sociological imaginary - in the guise of `female corporeality' and `male embodiment'. By revisiting the classical texts of sociology, such as those of Durkheim, Weber and particularly Simmel, I explore the textual strategies whereby `the body' and `the social' were dissociated in the first place and how, simultaneously, woman is saturated with, while man is divested of, corporeality and she is divested while he is invested with sociality. The absent women in sociology were the women in the body excluded from the social. It is male bodies which animate the social - they appear for a fleeting moment, only to disappear immediately, in the space between `corporeality' and `sociality'. Thus, it is not simply a case of recuperating bodies into the social, but of excavating the gendered subtexts whereby gendered bodies were differently inscribed into and out of the social in the first place. The crucial point here is not the more familiar story of her saturation with corporeality but the less familiar one of what happened to his body - how, that is, did male sociologists effect the disappearance of their own bodies in the textual strategies of sociology? (shrink)

This paper considers the implications of big data practices for theories about the surveilled subject who, analysed from afar, is still gazed upon, although not directly watched as with previous surveillance systems. We propose this surveilled subject be viewed through a lens of proximity rather than interactivity, to highlight the normative issues arising within digitally mediated relationships. We interpret the ontological proximity between subjects, data flows and big data surveillance through Merleau-Ponty’s ideas combined with Levinas’ approach to ethical proximity and (...) Coeckelberg’s work on proximity in the digital age. This leads us to highlight how competing normativities, and normative dilemmas in these proximal spaces, manipulate the surveilled subject’s embodied practices to lead the embodied individual towards experiencing them in a local sense. We explore when and how the subject notices these big data practices and then interprets them through translating their experiences into courses of action, inaction or acquiescence. (shrink)

Recent years have seen a rise in the number of sociological, anthropological, and ethnological works on the gift metaphor in organ donation contexts, as well as in the number of philosophical and theological analyses of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in the ethical debate on organ donation. In order to capture the breadth of this field, four frameworks for thinking about bodily exchanges in medicine have been distinguished: property rights, heroic gift-giving, sacrifice, and gift-giving as aporia. Unfortunately, they (...) all run into difficulties in terms of both making sense of the relational dimensions of postmortem and live organ donations and being normatively adequate in the sense of shedding light and providing guidance on ethical concerns when body parts are donated. For this reason, this article presents a phenomenological framework of giving-through-sharing, based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. This framework makes sense of relational dimensions of postmortem and live organ donation. It also sheds light on three highly debated concerns in organ donation ethics: indebtedness on the part of recipients, the fact that some live donors do not experience donation as a matter of choice, and the potentially painful experience of donors’ relatives, who need to make decisions about postmortem organ donation at a time of bereavement. It can indirectly support what may be called a normalization of bodily exchanges in medicine. (shrink)

In the present article we aim to explore the link between Merleau-Pontyan phenomenology and what we call sensory pedagogy. The latter connects to recent sensory ethnography as presented by S. Pink (Sensory ethnography. London: Sage; 2009). We discuss how these thoughts can be put to work in toddler pedagogy. This kind of sensory pedagogy challenges teachers to understand and encounter children through their embodied mind and senses.

According a to a certain position formulated within the philosophical school of post-structuralism, attempts to reconstruct forms of consciousness are themselves textual fabrications, and should be relinquished in favour of other, more 'textual' forms of analysis. This paper argues that phenomenologists should not reject this critique outright, for it compels them to think more carefully about the appropriateness of particular terminologies for the representation and comprehension of particular life-worlds. To this end, the vocabulary of Maurice Merleau-Ponty is delineated and considered (...) as to its appropriateness for the study of sportive lifeworlds in particular, and that of soccer play more particularly. A Merleau-Pontian analysis of the latter is offered, and it is contended that whilst certain problems are attendant upon its use, it nonetheless stands as a vital resource for understanding such a form of activity. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 2, Edition 2 September 2002. (shrink)

Merleau-Ponty se vale de casos patológicos para elaborar una teoría de la percepción que ubica a la corporalidad como expresión central. El artículo indaga y problematiza la experiencia de enfermedad a partir de la propuesta fenomenológica en torno al cuerpo vivido o fe-nomenal. Repensar esta vivencia, desde las antípodas a un abordaje biomédico que la circunscribe a un cuerpo objetivo, permite considerarla a la luz de una perspectiva filosófica como instancia crítica. La experiencia de enfermedad, inaugura una disrupción en el (...) modo de ser-en-el-mundo e introduce la inhabitualidad, como dimensión que participa de una reconfiguración necesaria del esquema corporal. Este aspecto permite repensar los procesos de salud/enfermedad y discutir con concepciones de índole restitutivas, tan características a la hora de abordar los mismos.Merleau-Ponty uses pathological cases to elaborate a theory of perception that places corporality as the central expression. The article investigates and problematizes the experience of illness from the phenomenological proposal around the lived or phenomenal body. Rethinking this experience, from the antipodes to a biomedical approach that circumscribes it to an objective body, allows us to consider it in the light of a philosophical perspective as a critical instance. The experience of illness inaugurates a dis-ruption in the way of being-in-the-world and introduces the unusual, as a dimension that participates in a necessary reconfiguration of the body scheme. This aspect allows to rethink the health / disease processes and to discuss with concepts of a restorative nature, so characteristic when it comes to addressing them. (shrink)

Two ethical frameworks have dominated the discussion of organ donation for long: that of property rights and that of gift-giving. However, recent years have seen a drastic rise in the number of philosophical analyses of the meaning of giving and generosity, which has been mirrored in ethical debates on organ donation and in critical sociological, anthropological and ethnological work on the gift metaphor in this context. In order to capture the flourishing of this field, this article distinguishes between four frameworks (...) for thinking about bodily exchanges in medicine: those of property rights, heroic gift-giving, sacrifice, and gift-giving as aporia. These frameworks represent four different ways of making sense of donation of organs as well as tissue, gametes and blood, draw on different conceptions of the relations between the self and the other, and bring out different ethical issues as core ones. The article presents these frameworks, argues that all of them run into difficulties when trying to make sense of reciprocity and relational interdependence in donation, and shows how the three gift-giving frameworks (of heroism, sacrifice and aporia) hang together in a critical discussion about what is at stake in organ donation. It also presents and argues in favour of an alternative intercorporeal framework of giving-through-sharing that more thoroughly explicates the gift metaphor in the context of donation, and offers tools for making sense of relational dimensions of live and post mortem donations. (shrink)

The main purpose of the following inquiry is to emphasise the importance of a phenomenon long neglected by the majority of the human sciences, the artefact; each one of us, no matter what age, sex or culture, is in contact with artefacts every moment of our lives yet despite this they have received scant attention. The study begins by outlining a definition of the artefact, highlighting those characteristics which, in combination, ensure its centrality to social life before, through a discussion (...) of Popper's ideas, proceeding to see how material culture can be conceptualised as meaningful. In order to understand how meaning becomes attached to the artefact the notion of objectification will be analysed and, consequently, so shall the importance of both the type of activity and the physical nature of the materials involved in the artefact's production. Picking up on the theme of materiality this aspect of material culture will be shown to pose major problems to any interpretation of the artefact along semiological lines; language and material culture are evinced to possess fundamentally distinct characteristics which make comparisons between them far from straightforward. These differences will be analysed further, concentrating specifically on the role of context in the establishment of meaning. This leads on to the proposal that our understanding of artefacts can occur on three levels; three forms of knowledge are thus described of which a linguistically formulated type constitutes just one kind. The penultimate chapter tackles the ways in which artefacts affect us, how they are active elements in our relationships with them; therefore, a dialectical position is postulated in which both artefacts and agents take part. Finally, the study concludes by stressing some of its wider implications and suggests a few of the practical situations to which it can be applied. (shrink)

Jointly coordinated affective activities are fundamental for social relationships. This study investigates a naturally occurring interaction between two women who produced reciprocal emotional stances towards similar past experiences. Adopting a microanalytic approach, we describe how the participants re-enact their past experiences through different but aligning synchronized gestures. This embodied dialogue evolves into affective flooding, in which participants co-produce their body memories of pulling down window blinds to block out sunshine. We show how the participants live this moment intercorporeally and how (...) multiple timescales are tied together in gesture, which is both an incarnation of body history and a novel expression of it. Thus, collaborative gesturing is a resource for experiencing together emotions re-enacted from body memories. Contributing to our understanding of the intercorporeality of human action, we provide an empirical investigation into how emotions and multiple timescales are nested in cooperative gestures. Data are in Finnish with English translations. (shrink)

This article suggests that a parallel exists between the practice of tattooing and the injection of heroin as both activities are represented in a body of literature here called `Junk Narratives'. These texts include William Burroughs' Junky, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Jerry Stahl's Permanent Midnight and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In these books, act and meaning, as in life, are inseparable: tattoos can be interpreted, but that they are tattoos, that they have been indelibly inscribed into the flesh, is also (...) stressed. In these books tattoos are represented as, in addition to whatever specific interpretive significance can be attached to them, visible markers of the hatred junkies feel for their own bodies. It will be suggested throughout the article that the body in these texts is always a source of shame and horror. Tattoos in these books do not decorate a body, rather they visibly emphasize its pathetic corporeality: no flesh, no image. The central dynamic of these texts is toward the transcendence of the body by the injection of heroin, a use of the needle which mimics the practice of tattooing and stresses the subservient, inessential nature of the body. (shrink)

This study focuses on the physical expressions and intensity of embodiment that occur in the Ironman Triathlon. More specifically, the study investigates the transformational bodily experiences taking place during Ironman competitions. Using an ethnographic approach, a total of 29 Ironman triathletes participated in the study (15 men and 14 women). Theoretically, the article focuses on how triathletes’ bodies ‘move’ between different forms of embodiment. The results show that, in the process of disciplining the body, the athletes reconceptualized feelings of pain, (...) nausea and even disgust, making these emotionally expressive aspects of the corpus into a part of the experience and bending them towards the pleasure of reaching potential divinity. Situated in a long tradition of philosophical and sociological explorations of the transgressing and transcending body, the study interprets and understands the performing body as a site for change and utopian possibilities. Thus the study adds to existing debates on contemporary individuals’ exploration of the existential and corporeal dimensions of modernity. (shrink)

Medical technologies and assistive devices such as ventilators and power wheelchairs are designed to sustain life and/or improve functionality but they can also contribute to stigmatization and social exclusion. In this paper, drawing from a study of ten men with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, we explore the complex social processes that mediate the lives of persons who are dependent on multiple medical and assistive technologies. In doing so we consider the embodied and emplaced nature of disability and how life is lived (...) through bodies coupled with technologies and experienced as 'techno-body-subjects in situ'. Normative implications for theory and research, including bioethics research, are discussed. (shrink)

In the context of social welfare austerity and non-state actors’ interventions into social life, an urban not-for-profit organization in the United States, Back on My Feet, uses the practice of running to engage those recovering from homelessness. Promoting messages of self-sufficiency, the organization centralizes the body as a site of investment and transformation. Doing so calls to the fore the social construction of ‘the homeless body’ and ‘the running body’. Within this ethnographic inquiry, participants in recovery who ran with the (...) organization constructed moralized senses of self in relation to volunteers, organizers, and those who do not run, while in recovery. Their experiences compel consideration of how bodily constructions and practices reproduce morally underpinned, self-oriented associations with homeless and neoliberal discourses that obfuscate systemic causes of homelessness, pose challenges for well-intentioned voluntary or development organizations, and service the relief of the state from social responsibility. (shrink)

In order to address sociological concerns with embodiment and learning, in this article we explore the ‘weathering’ body in a currently under-researched physical-cultural domain. Weather experiences, too, are under-explored in sociology, and here we examine in depth the lived experience of weather and, more specifically, ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’ in one of the most extreme and corporeally challenging environments on earth: high-altitude mountains. Drawing on a theoretical framework of phenomenological sociology, and an interview-based research project with 19 international, high-altitude (...) mountaineers, we investigate weather as lived and experienced both corporeally and cognitively. We are particularly interested in conceptualizing and theorizing the ways in which embodied beings relate to the environment through different aspects of their being. The novel concepts of ‘weather work’ and ‘weather learning’, we argue, provide salient examples of the mind-body-world nexus at work, as an embodied practice and mode of thinking, strongly contoured by the physical culture of high-altitude mountaineering. (shrink)

Using qualitative data, this article makes a substantive and formal contribution to the growing academic literature on bodybuilding and the sociology of the body. Placing a question mark against existing knowledge claims, it argues theories ascribing bodybuilding to antecedent predispositions are not sufficient when accounting for the ongoing variable project of creating `the perfect body'. It is asserted that physique bodybuilding (as opposed to weight-training) in the late 1990s could be independent of the `masculinist imagery' of `the muscular body' alongside (...) feelings of gender and personal insecurity, but is increasingly dependent upon an acquired `ethnophysiological' appreciation of `excessive' muscularity. This phenomenological argument, which asserts the agency of bodies in social processes, focuses upon male participants' spatially and temporally contingent heterogeneous body-projects. (shrink)

This article examines feminist agency in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body subject. Stressing the importance of embodiment to feminist agency (without reifying an essential female body), I argue that bodies inhabit specific social, historical and discursive contexts which shape our corporeal experience and our opportunities for political contestation. Beginning with the assertion that we cannot think of agency without the body, I examine a historical instance of feminist agency in which women’s bodies were central to the (...) articulation of political dissent, namely the British suffragette movement. In particular, I focus on the suffragette career of Mary Leigh and argue that it represents a feminist agency derived from corporeal performance. Through daring acts of protest which drew attention to the comportment and capacities of their bodies, suffragettes like Leigh contested the constitution of the political domain and the nature of citizenship. (shrink)

In this paper I am concerned with the notion of empathy and its capacity for overcoming the problem of difference in social life. The concept of empathy has a long history in the Western philosophic tradition but has become discursively submerged in recent times. I am particularly interested in what philosophies of the body may contribute to our understanding of empathy. Psychoanalytic feminism provides some insights. However I identify Merleau-Ponty's conception of body-subject and the intersubjective encounter as offering a potentially (...) more fruitful account of empathy. (shrink)

Recent developments in the psychological and social sciences have seen a surge of attention to concepts of embodiment. The burgeoning field of embodied cognition, as well as the long-standing tradition of phenomenological philosophy, offer valuable insights for theorising how people come to understand the world around them. However, the implications of human embodiment have been largely neglected by one of the key frameworks for conceptualising the development of social knowledge: Social Representations Theory. This article seeks to spark a dialogue between (...) Social Representations Theory and embodiment research. It outlines the position the body occupies in the existing theoretical and empirical social representations literature, and argues that incorporating concepts gleaned from embodiment research may facilitate a more comprehensive account of the aetiology of social representations. The value of analytic attention to embodiment is illustrated with reference to a recent study of social representations of neuroscience, which suggested that embodied experience can shape the extent to which people engage with certain topics, the conditions under which they do so, and the conceptual and affective content of the ensuing representations. The article argues that expanding Social Representations Theory's methodological and conceptual toolkit, in order to illuminate the interplay between embodied experience and social communication in the development of common-sense knowledge, promises productive directions for empirical and theoretical advancement. (shrink)

This paper develops previous work on theories of embodiment by drawing on empirical data from a study into the experiences of infertile women in the UK. I suggest experiences of embodiment shape the preferences of infertile women for a female nurse as chaperone during intimate medical procedures. I explore the impact of this role on the understandings and meanings of nursing in a highly gendered field of practice. I present data from an ethnographic study of infertile women who chose to (...) attend a British infertility clinic for investigation and fertility treatment cycles. Data were collected over 2 years using participant observation and semistructured interviews with 15 women and 20 members of staff in a British fertility unit. Data analysis was completed using a modified thematic analysis following Boyle and McEvoy. I discuss women's experiences of intimacy and bodily care and how these experiences might be understood by exploring the phenomenological concept of embodiment. I argue that women benefit from having a female nurse as chaperone because of their expectations of gender, nursing and caring. Women's expectations reinforce both notions of gendered caring and the gendered role of nursing. These data challenge notions of patriarchal professionalism prevalent in nursing, which seek to move away from the gendered role of the nurse (which traditionally included a chaperone role) towards a model of professional development based on a mind–body split. I suggest that these data offer a way of understanding the female embodied subject in the field of gendered caring, which is potentially transgressive because they suggest ways in which both mind and body can be integrated through the role of the female chaperone. (shrink)

This study draws on interactionist frameworks of sensorial communication to analyse product reviews on YouTube. Existing studies of YouTube review work have focused on how vloggers manage conflicting neoliberal identity discourses such as ‘authenticity’, ‘being entertaining’ and ‘selling’. I argue that this focus has been at the expense of the communicative work involved in constructing products in reviews, and I suggest that identity issues should be conceptually expanded through a much broader focus on communicative action and conventions of practice. In (...) order to achieve a first step in this expansion, my analysis focusses on reviewers’ sensorial engagement with objects and explores the communicative processes through which they symbolically transform products into enlivened, sensorially rich phenomena. I argue that these communicative strategies are important for situating neoliberal discourses within ‘mundane’ actions of description and in broader cultural practices of reviewing. (shrink)

Dance is addressed as making significance for what Elias terms the civilizing process of early modernity through its contribution to the ennoblement of warriors and the pacification of merchants. The grounds for this are drawn from McNeill's contention that expenditure of muscular energy rhythmically in dance, as in military drill, but with different sociocultural consequences, is a fundamental human device for consolidating community feeling by facilitating cooperation by arousing a warm sense of togetherness. The significance of dance as a sociocultural (...) practice in early modernity is discussed critically through contemporary writings from the 16th and 17th centuries, with particular consideration given to the description of dance as an allegory for moral order in Elyot's manual on the education of the ruler. (shrink)

Habitus has been an attractive concept for works examining body-centric practices. This article draws on interviews and 18 months of ethnographic research with high-risk climbers primarily throughout North America. An important guide to this research has been the concept of habitus. However, this article demonstrates that there are limits to habitus being used to address the moment of action. The scope of habitus ranges widely, limiting its capacity to effectively address the experience of the individual. Rather than abandoning the concept, (...) habitus can be extended through a reconceptualization drawing on the use of echoes as a metaphor. Using echoes as an allegorical mode of understanding dispositional acquisition and activation, the embodied echo can more radically and precisely explore the habitus in motion during the intensely body-centric practice of alpine climbing. This is particularly critical when exploring the use of speed as a form of safety in the alpine environment. (shrink)