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It might seem that the body is the one thing in human life that is purely natural — a biological given, fixed by anatomy and physiology, lying outside the reach of sociology. Yet over the last few decades the body has become one of the most fertile fields in social theory. Sociologists argue that the body is not simply a biological object but a social one: it is shaped by social forces, governed by social power, experienced through social meanings, and increasingly treated as a personal project to be worked on and perfected. This lesson examines the sociology of the body and its central place in the sociology of health. It develops the social-constructionist argument of lesson 2 into a full theory of embodiment, drawing on Michel Foucault's analysis of biopower and the clinical gaze, Chris Shilling's concept of the body as an unfinished "project", and Bryan Turner's foundational work establishing the body as a legitimate sociological object. As with the social-construction lesson, the examinable skill is to weigh the constructionist insistence that the body is socially shaped against the realist reminder that the body is also a biological reality.
Key Definition: The sociology of the body studies how human bodies are socially shaped, regulated, represented and experienced, rather than treating them as merely biological. Embodiment is the idea that we do not simply have bodies but are our bodies and live through them, so that social life is always lived in and through the body — and the body is therefore a proper object of sociological analysis, not just of biology.
This lesson addresses a core bullet of the AQA A-Level Sociology (7192) specification, Paper 2 (Topics in Sociology), Section A — Health:
The specification expects you to describe (AO1) the sociological approaches to the body (Foucault, Shilling, Turner, embodiment, surveillance and the disciplined body), apply (AO2) them to an Item, and evaluate (AO3) the social-constructionist view of the body against biological and realist objections. The vocabulary fixed here — biopower, the clinical gaze, the disciplined body, the body project, embodiment — connects directly to the social-construction and health-professions lessons.
For much of its history, sociology neglected the body, leaving it to biology and medicine and concentrating on minds, roles, institutions and structures. The sociologist Bryan Turner, whose The Body and Society (1984) is widely credited with founding the field, argued that this neglect was a mistake: social life is embodied, and the body sits at the intersection of nature and culture, the individual and society. Several developments pushed the body to the centre of social theory:
The common thread is that the body, far from being a natural constant, is historically and socially variable in how it is shaped, valued, governed and experienced — which is precisely why it belongs to sociology.
The single most influential theorist of the body is Michel Foucault, introduced in lesson 2. Foucault argued that the body is the central target of modern power, and he developed several concepts that are essential here.
The first is the clinical gaze (the medical gaze), from The Birth of the Clinic. Foucault argued that modern medicine, from the late eighteenth century, learned a new way of looking at the body: examining, classifying, recording and rendering it an object of expert scrutiny. This "gaze" is not neutral observation but an exercise of power/knowledge — to define what is normal and pathological, and to make the body visible and knowable to expert authority, is itself to govern it.
The second is discipline. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traced how modern societies came to govern bodies not by spectacular force but by discipline: the detailed training, ordering and surveillance of bodies in schools, factories, armies, prisons and hospitals to produce "docile bodies" — bodies that are productive, obedient and self-regulating. The key mechanism is surveillance: Foucault used the image of the Panopticon (a prison designed so inmates could always be watched but never know when) to argue that, under constant potential observation, people internalise the watching eye and discipline themselves. The disciplined body is thus produced not by external coercion alone but by self-monitoring.
The third is biopower (and biopolitics). Foucault argued that from around the eighteenth century a new form of power emerged that took life itself as its object: the management not only of individual bodies (discipline) but of whole populations — their birth rates, health, sexuality, longevity and reproduction. Biopower is the regulation of populations through public health, statistics, sanitation, medicine and the encouragement of healthy "lifestyles". This is the theoretical foundation of David Armstrong's "surveillance medicine" (lesson 2): the extension of medical observation across the entire population, so that everyone becomes perpetually "at risk", self-monitoring and subject to expert guidance about diet, weight and behaviour.
| Foucauldian concept | Meaning | Relevance to health |
|---|---|---|
| The clinical gaze | Medicine's expert way of seeing and classifying the body | Defining normal/pathological is an exercise of power/knowledge |
| Discipline / docile bodies | Training, ordering and surveilling bodies to make them productive and obedient | Hospitals, fitness regimes and self-monitoring discipline the body |
| Surveillance (the Panopticon) | Constant potential observation that is internalised as self-regulation | We monitor our own diet, weight and "lifestyle risks" |
| Biopower / biopolitics | The regulation of whole populations' health and life processes | Public health, screening, statistics, "healthy lifestyle" campaigns |
graph TD
A["Modern power takes the body as its target"] --> B["Discipline: training and ordering individual bodies"]
A --> C["Biopower: managing the health of whole populations"]
B --> D["Surveillance and the Panopticon"]
D --> E["The watching eye is internalised"]
E --> F["Self-monitoring 'docile body'"]
C --> G["Public health, screening, lifestyle campaigns"]
G --> H["Surveillance medicine: everyone perpetually 'at risk' (Armstrong)"]
The pay-off for the sociology of health is profound: on Foucault's account, the contemporary preoccupation with health, fitness, risk and "lifestyle" is not simply a matter of free individual choice but an effect of power working through the body — disciplining and governing populations by enlisting people in the surveillance of themselves.
A second major contribution comes from Chris Shilling, whose The Body and Social Theory (1993) developed the influential idea of the body as an unfinished "project". Shilling argued that in conditions of late modernity (drawing on Anthony Giddens), the body has increasingly become something we work on and construct as part of our self-identity. As traditional sources of identity (religion, fixed class and community ties) have weakened, the body becomes a key site through which we express and accomplish who we are.
The body project is the idea that the body is treated as an entity "in the process of becoming" — never finished, always open to being worked on, reshaped, improved and maintained through diet, exercise, fashion, grooming, body modification and even cosmetic surgery. We become responsible for our bodies' appearance and condition, and the body's surface becomes a visible statement of self-discipline, virtue and identity. Shilling links this to consumer culture: a vast market of fitness, diet, beauty and "wellness" products both feeds and feeds on the body project.
The body project has a sharp connection to health. The pursuit of the "healthy", fit, slim, toned body becomes a moral as well as a medical enterprise: to have a fit body signifies self-control and worth, while bodily "failure" (obesity, ageing, illness) can be read as personal and moral failure. This connects directly to Foucault — the body project is, in effect, the disciplined, self-monitoring body experienced from the inside as a free choice — and to the critique of healthism and the individualisation of health, in which responsibility for health is loaded onto the individual body while structural causes (lesson 3) recede from view.
Crucially, Shilling and others stress that the body project is unequally distributed. Working on the body takes time, money and knowledge, so the "project" is more available to the affluent; and the imperative falls unequally by gender (women's bodies are far more intensively policed by beauty norms) and by age (the ageing body is constructed as a problem to be resisted). The body project is therefore also a site of inequality and social division, which prevents it from collapsing into a celebration of free individual self-fashioning.
Bryan Turner's foundational achievement was to insist that the body is simultaneously a biological organism and a social and cultural phenomenon — and that sociology must hold both together rather than surrendering the body to biology. Turner explored how societies must solve the problem of the government and regulation of bodies (their reproduction, restraint, representation and movement through space), and he helped establish the body as a central concern of social theory rather than a marginal one.
A key concept that the field developed is embodiment — the insistence that we do not merely possess bodies as objects but are embodied beings who experience the world through the body. This phenomenological strand (associated more broadly with the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and developed in medical sociology) matters for health because illness, pain, impairment and ageing are not just measured states but lived experiences. The sociology of chronic illness (associated with researchers such as Michael Bury, who wrote of chronic illness as a "biographical disruption" that shatters a person's taken-for-granted sense of self and future) shows that illness is experienced through the embodied self — it disrupts identity, relationships and the sense of one's body as a reliable basis for action. Embodiment thus connects the sociology of the body to the lived experience of illness and disability (lesson 9), reminding us that behind every diagnostic label is an embodied person whose world has been reshaped.
| Theorist / concept | Core contribution | Key idea |
|---|---|---|
| Foucault | The body as a target of power | Biopower, the clinical gaze, discipline, surveillance |
| Shilling | The body as a project | The body as an unfinished project worked on for self-identity |
| Turner | Founding the sociology of the body | The body as both biological and social; its regulation |
| Embodiment (Bury and others) | The lived body | Illness as "biographical disruption"; we are our bodies |
The body is not a blank slate worked on equally by everyone; it bears the imprint of social position. The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that the body is a form of physical capital — that social class shapes the body itself, through the food we eat, the work we do, the sports and leisure we pursue, and the very ways we hold, move and present ourselves (what Bourdieu called the bodily hexis). On this view, a person's body displays their class background, and different classes develop different relationships to their bodies: a more instrumental relationship (the body as a means to an end) in working-class settings shaped by manual labour and constraint, and a more cultivated relationship (the body as a project of taste and self-expression) in middle- and upper-class settings with the time and resources to invest in it. Bourdieu's analysis converts the abstract idea of "the body project" into a concrete account of class inequality written onto the flesh — and it links directly to the class gradient in health (lesson 3), since bodies shaped by deprivation, hard labour and constrained choices are also bodies more exposed to ill health.
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