Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Contemporary theory tends to neglect the human body's role in the production of material objects. This neglect is most glaring in constructionist approaches, whose post-structuralist view of the social as discursive practice necessarily downgrades the practical relations between humans and their physical environment. Arthur Frank, for example, formulates a typology - partly derived from Bryan Turner's theory of 'bodily order' - according to which the body acts in four ways: as a disciplined, dominating, mirroring and communicative body (Frank, 1991; Turner, 1984). None of these four modes of action involve the body acting practically on the wider material world, but producing only "its own desires" (Frank, 1991: 51). Other examples of this constructionist perspective include Mary Douglas's view of the body as a natural symbol (Douglas, 1996), and Judith Butler's concept of bodily materiality as an effect of power (Butler, 1993). What is common to all these examples is that the ground of materiality, including the physical body itself, virtually disappears. As Chris Shilling observes, "[i]t is as if the body itself either does not exist, or is constantly pushed to one side" (Shilling, 2003: 63). And if the body itself disappears, so do the material objects it produces.
Repository Citation
Cerni, Paula. "Unproductive Bodies: A Materialist Critique of the "Corporeal Turn"." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 7, no. 4, 2007, pp. 1–21. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol7/iss4/7