Sociology of the body
branch of sociology studying the human body
Sociology of the body is a branch of sociology studying the representations and social uses of the human body in modern societies.
Early theories
According to Thomas Laqueur, prior to the eighteenth century the predominant model for a social understanding of the body was the "one sex model/one flesh model". It followed that there was one model of the body which differed between the sexes and races, for example, the vagina was simply seen as a weaker version of the penis and even thought to emit sperm.
This was changed by the Enlightenment. In the sixteenth century, Europe began to participate in the slave trade and in order to justify this a large quantity of literature was produced showing the deviant sexuality and savagery of the African (Fanon, 1976). In the eighteenth century, the ideas of egalitarianism and universal and inalienable rights were becoming the intellectual norm. However, they could not justify the subordination of women within this theory.
To explain these the biology of incommensurability was created. This essentially claimed that different sexes and races were better adjusted for different tasks and could therefore show the necessity of discrimination and subordination. For example, craniometry was used to show people of African descent to be less evolved than those of European descent (Gould, 1981).
“Sociology of the body” enters the record as branch of sociology studying the human body. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sociology, body and branch can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sociology of the body” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.