Body Politics

Sociology has questioned the epistemological status of the scientific study of the body, opening up 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, shaped by relations of production, labour and class. 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, social position and degree of civilization. Foucault’s work is concerned with modern operations of power in which body and knowledge are central, including discipline, surveillance, medicalization and confession. These processes can also be understood through the lens of coloniality, since modern regimes of knowledge and bodily regulation have historically been intertwined with colonial classifications of race, civilization and difference. Colonial power did not simply govern territories and populations; it also produced hierarchies of bodies, defining some bodies as rational, civilized and fully human while marking others as primitive, deviant or inferior. Under the influence of the poststructuralist turn shaped by Foucault, feminism has confronted the body more directly than it did previously. For poststructuralist feminists, gender is not simply the cultural representation of biological sex, but rather a process through which the possibility of two distinct sexes is produced and regulated. The postmodern ‘plasticity’ of sex, crucially articulated in the work of Butler, is also taken up in studies of technology, notably Haraway’s discussion of the ‘cyborg’, where the boundaries between human, machine, nature and culture become increasingly unstable. Technology therefore becomes another crucial site in which bodies are produced, transformed and governed, from medical technologies and reproductive technologies to digital surveillance, artificial intelligence and biometric systems. At the same time, access to technologies and the capacity to transform or control one’s body remain deeply structured by class, race and colonial inequalities. From this perspective, the body is not merely a passive by-product of domination, but a contested social and political site where class relations, gender, coloniality and technological power intersect. In general, there has therefore been a shift away from considering the body simply as an object of domination towards understanding it as a focal point of conflicts over power and plasticity, knowledge and social inequality.