Between Meaning and Matter
by Annemarie Jutel – In this retrospective reflection, sociologist of diagnosis Annemarie Jutel reflects on the progression of her academic thought vis-à-vis Drew Leder’s theories about bodily disappearance, highlighting the embodied nature of academic scholarship. In the same way that the body of the transcendent subject is not perceived, for it disappears in favor of …
by Chandra Russo – Through ethnographic study with solidarity activists that resist the US security state, author Chandra Russo finds that embodied experience is central to cultivating new and resistant forms of knowledge. This chapter seeks to center embodied experience as a key interpretive lens for both social movement participants and scholars, considering the layered ways in which …
by Brittney Miles – Through critical examination of mis/interpretations of Black girls’ bodies in school settings, this chapter interrogates readings and performances of Black talk, Black sass, and Black volume. A symbolic interactionist approach to interpreting meanings of Black girls’ bodies allows us to contextualize the subsequent corporeal and material negotiations they make as they navigate misogynoir and controlling images. There are perpetual inconsistencies between …
by Erin F. Johnston – Based on one year of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and enactive immersion, this chapter argues that “becoming” an Integral Yoga practitioner is intimately bound up with a cognitive and perceptual reframing of the body—one marked by the cultivation of a sense of separation or “bodily detachment.” In the findings, the author highlights …
by Piper Sledge – Cisgender women who “live flat” (that is, choose not to have breast reconstruction) often experience deep aesthetic concerns after mastectomy yet typically have no place in these programs. This chapter explores their discussions of vanity, aesthetics, and appearance in relation to their perceptions of themselves, their interactions with others, and …
by Lee F. Monaghan – This chapter draws from critical weight/fat studies and other literature (e.g., medical sociology, critical studies on men) when reinterpreting male bodies and health in crisis times. Rather than endorsing an individualizing, pathologizing, depoliticizing “problem frame” wherein the majority of male bodies are deemed to be deficient (lazy, greedy, ill, risky, irresponsible), this chapter underscores the significance of …
by Sweta Rajan-Rankin and Mrinalini Greedharry – This chapter explores the ways in which racialized bodies are re-presented through a phenomenological analysis of Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s Nervous Conditions. In order to situate the body within gendered and racialized narratives, the authors consider three key assertions. First, that gender is itself a colonial construct and postcolonial accounts of Blackness have often been …
by Kathryn Linn Geurts and Sefakor Komabu-Pomeyie – This chapter problematizes some of the ways in which seselelãme is being used in Global North contexts (including as a quick fix to the mind–body problem) and then revisits how Ghanaian people themselves narrate bodily ways of knowing. Taking a psycho-socio-cultural approach, the authors align seselelãme with a modal (compared to categorical) way of understanding and being …
by Ben Spatz – This essay contests the assumed primacy of technoscientific and biochemical methods in determining what human and other bodies are made of. From a perspective grounded in critical race, cultural, and performance studies, as well as embodied artistic research, it offers an expanded molecular theory of identity that foregrounds the radical asymmetry …
by Anne Marie Champagne – Tracing the thematization of culture and the body across modern, postmodern, and neo-modern sociological thought, this chapter explores the possibility of developing a meaning-centered, strong cultural sociology of the body and embodiment, one that approaches body and embodiment as constituting a uniquely hermeneutic situation …
In this introduction to Interpreting the Body: Between Meaning and Matter, co-editors Anne Marie Champagne and Asia Friedman establish the volume’s focal metaphor of interpretation, summarizing its unique benefits and challenges for how social scientists understand and study body and embodiment. Highlighting the social, material, and disciplinary conditions that structure …