Bodies, Selves and the Social Order

In contemporary sociology there has been a growing awareness that our bodies are important objects of sociological study. Sociology has questioned the epistemological status of the biomedical framework, thus opening up the space for exploring the social and political implications of bodily representations and practices. The detailed emphasis on self-management practices helps us understand embodiment as a process. Rather than conceiving the body as a given, we thus have the possibility to capture the minute, ordinary practices through which bodies are continuously constituted. The process of embodiment is indeed ceaseless, requiring constant, if often habitual, actions on the part of subjects. And partly because of this it is in some ways always enmeshed with risk, change, and contestation. In the case of people with chronic illness this becomes ever more salient. Faced with chronic illness subjects are wounded selves: often fighting with the limits of their bodies and adjusting their bodies to the requirements of everyday life, constructing narratives and practices that nevertheless help sustain a self which may be adequate to the requirements of society. Their reflexive capacity to deal with their bodies and their limits, their need to come to terms with bodily failures and incorporate them into positive narrations of subjectivity, is particularly instructive about the process through which embodied subjectivity gets stabilized.