Body & Society started in 1995. The journal has been continuously exploring and problematizing critical issues which have been opening up new horizons in the field of body studies. As an interdisciplinary journal, it has engaged with a wider range of innovative approaches to the body, which includes sociology, cultural studies, psychology, philosophy, anthropology, history, science and technology studies, sensory studies and media studies. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Body & Society, managing editor Tomoko Tamari invited Professor Bryan S (...) Turner, who was one of the journal’s founders (with Mike Featherstone), to reflect on the academic and historical background of Body & Society along with his own academic trajectory over the last 40 years. (shrink)

Medicalization has been a process articulated primarily by social scientists, historians, and cultural critics. Comparatively little is written about the role of bioethics in appraising medicalization as a social process. The authors consider what medicalization means, its definition, functions, and criteria for assessment. A series of brief case sketches illustrate how bioethics can contribute to the analysis and public policy discussion of medicalization.

This article reflects on a significant dimension of the modern history of race in Europe and the world: the processes of mobility of humans as things that accompanied the scientific pursuit of the immutable racial condition of humans. It asks what it might mean to approach racial conceptions as historically embedded in, and shaped by, racial regimes of mobility, that is, the regimes encompassing the practices and apparatuses for the displacement of human bodies as “scientific things” of racial significance for (...) museum and laboratory networks. The article articulates race in Europe as entailed in a history of national, colonial, and postcolonial regimes of mobility. First, it is suggested that the history of race in science can be understood as the history of regimes of mobility of humans as things. It is then discussed how this history of mobility regimes connects with the making of collectives within and beyond Europe—national, imperial, indigenous, and postcolonial. Finally, the article investigates the contemporary expressions of racial regimes of mobility. (shrink)

For the modern-day jihadist, the digital self-portrait or, more specifically, battlefield selfie is a popular tool for identity building. Similarly to the selfies taken by non-violent practitioners of self-capture culture, the jihadist selfie represents an alternative to the Cartesian formulation of a unitary and indivisible self. Rather, it is a product of social relations and performative actions, constituted in dialogue with others through very specific socio-cultural frameworks and expectations. However, unlike its non-violent Doppelganger, the expectations of this dialogue are centred (...) around a larger political agenda which actively seeks to reformat collective memories of imperial Islamic conquests and co-opt religion as a way to impose a moral order on its violence. Importantly, the battlefield selfie allows the jihadist easily to traverse the boundaries between two seemingly opposing belief systems. Although there exists a wealth of scholarship of self-capture culture, image sharing sites and micro-celebritism, their pervasive influence and practice on battlefield is understudied. This article draws from the personal histories of key Islamic extremists who were both lionized and demonized as a result of their battlefield micro-influencer practices. Today, however, the same individuals can achieve internet fame by participating in self-capture culture – posting selfies, videos or blogging. In other words, never before has a soldier’s public communication been so personal yet collective. (shrink)

This essay attempts to contextualize the importance of Wang Yangming’s 王陽明 philosophy in terms of world philosophy in the manner of Goethe’s innovative plan for “world literature” (Weltliteratur). China has the long history of philosophizing rather than non-philosophy contrary to the glaring and inexcusable misunderstanding of Hegel the Eurocentric universalist or monist. In today’s globalizing world of multicultural pluralism, ethnocentric universalism has become outdated and outmoded. Transversality, which is at once intercultural, interspecific, interdisciplinary, and intersensorial, is a far more befitting (...) response than universality. In this context, what is focused and emphasized in Wang’s world philosophy is mainly fourfold. First, there is the unity or circularity of knowledge and action, that is, knowledge is the beginning of action, and action is the consummation of knowledge. Second, sincerity is the moral soul of Sinism as it is the enabling act of making perform all other virtues, including ren 仁. Third, in Sinism, including Wang’s philosophy, there is no Cartesian dualism in that the mind and the body are inseparable soulmates. Fourth, if ethics is prima philosophia, then geophilosophy is ultima philosophia to sustain and perpetuate all life-forms on earth (geo). (shrink)

Masturbation is a neglected topic in debates around biopower and biopolitics. This article takes Michel Foucault’s recasting of the idea of a regulatory, population-level form of biopower in terms of ‘mechanisms of security’ as its starting point for an investigation into the ways in which bodies enter into and are reshaped by biopolitical discourses on masturbation. While the notion of security faded from view in favour of Foucault’s better known focus on governmentality, this article argues that there is value in (...) recovering the concept of security in the context of a genealogy of modern bodies. Specifically, it explores the possibility that a biopolitical perspective on security operates not only above, but also below the disciplining of individual masturbating bodies. The article proceeds, initially, via an examination of contemporary studies of masturbation, arguing that they largely neglect the material dynamism of bodies. The main focus, however, is on rereading some of the key works in the historical anti-masturbation literature from a complexity perspective. It is shown that these texts engage with a ‘population’ of vital forces and affects that must be regulated if life is to remain secure, and which circulate below the level of individual bodies in relation to a complex milieu. Finally, the article claims that men’s bodies appear as crucial sites of biopolitics, and that normative forms of masculinity can be regarded as interventions into embodiment that are designed to nullify or regulate complexity. (shrink)

La matière pensante du corps n'est donc pas une intentionnalité mentale du corps à l'instar de l'intentionnalité cognitive. La pensée n'est plus à définir à partir d'une réflexion consciente par un dédoublement du sujet et de l'objet. Car la matière corporelle produit des processus réflexifs d'intensités différents selon les types d'externalité du corps. Par externalité il faut décrire les éléments non mentaux et non interne au corps qui proviennent du monde extérieur. Le corps est soumis à son extérieur comme organisme (...) tant pour la réalisation de ses fonctions que pour la régulation des informations. (shrink)

In the conclusion to the first book of the Treatise, Hume's skeptical reflections have plunged him into melancholy. He then proceeds through a complex series of stages, resulting in renewed interest in philosophy. Interpreters have struggled to explain the connection between the stages. I argue that Hume's repeated invocation of the four humors of ancient and medieval medicine explains the succession, and sheds a new light on the significance of skepticism. The humoral context not only reveals that Hume conceives of (...) skepticism primarily as a temperament, not a philosophical view or system. It also resolves a puzzle about how Hume can view skepticism as both an illness and a cure. The skeptical temperament can, depending on its degree of predominance, either contribute to or upset the balance of temperaments required for proper mental functioning. (shrink)

The intent of this thesis is to provide an account of the phenomenology of movement that collapses the distinction between mental and physical without the elimination of the mental. There are two main ways in which mental and physical converge in this account. First of all, the type of knowledge involved in learning movement skills is a type of nonpropositional knowledge that is literally embodied in the neuromuscular system of the body. Thus the mental phenomena of knowing-how and thinking how (...) to do movement skills are body-wide phenomena. Furthermore, this type of knowledge is genuinely self-referential, since the knower and known are identical. Second, the phenomenology of self-actuated movement reveals that the self is experienced as a psychophysical unity through the experience of the coherence of action and the proprioception of that action. This is due to the sense of effort provided by sensorimotor integration of the peripheral nervous system. This sense of effort is the direct awareness of physical properties of muscle lengths, tensions, and speeds of contraction, and is thus a genuine psychophysical phenomenon. It is also argued that we enjoy a high degree of epistemic security regarding experiences of this type. (shrink)